Faradena Afifi, Steve Beresford & Paul Khimasia Morgan

“Homely” has a different emphasis in the UK than in the US; instead of simple and ordinary, the warmth of hearth and home is foregrounded. Think the familial vibe of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, where listeners outside the UK may have first encountered Faradena Afifi, who sings and plays violin, viola, and drums. That quality permeates bee Reiki, a studio recording with her real-life partner Steve Beresford (heard on piano, keyboards, electronics, and toys) and the Bristol-based Paul Khimasia Morgan, whose electronic music is sourced using microphones placed in the body of an old neckless and stringless Eko Ranger XII guitar. Throughout the proceedings, voice, conventional instruments, and electronics constantly morph, producing vivid, engaging soundscapes. What distinguishes bee Reiki from most other recordings of electro-acoustic improvised music is its genial temperament. The music is uncompromising without being confrontative. The three improvisers demonstrate keen responsiveness; but instead of triggering furious volleys and off-putting overloads, this frequently results in one or two of them receding to the midground or temporarily laying out altogether. In doing so, Afifi, Beresford, and Morgan, give their spectra of sounds ample space, which is conducive to the flow of individual improvisations, as well as the overall flow of the album. More importantly, it promotes the listener’s proximity to the music. All but unknown to US listeners, Afifi and Morgan are improvisers worth following. Whereas Morgan is fully committed to the specificity of his instrument, Afifi is a multi-instrumentalist who also works in contemporary folk music. Continuing to be one of the most resourceful of improvisers, Beresford proves to be a sturdy linchpin between the austerity of Morgan’s aesthetic and the playful openness of Afifi’s. Together, they have a unique homely chemistry. – Bill Shoemaker, POINT OF DEPARTURE https://pointofdeparture.org/PoD87/PoD87MoreMoments2.html

The last time I saw Steve Beresford ‘live’ was many moons ago. It was at London South Bank playing with Louis Moholo-Moholo, the great South African drummer from the Blue Notes. It was nothing like this ‘bee’ improvisation. For an hour or more Moholo’s percussion articulacy crashed and battered space like a man contained in a swarm of something in exile, far more tribal than a single saved bee coming to terms with rescue. There is always a back-story. This new recording is small, precious and breaks silence gradually. I don’t know which came first, the bee Reiki narrative or the improvisation, either way one evokes the other. Faradena Afifi is the only human voice on this fifty minute plus epic, divided into eight tracks. The sounds hover out of a mix in stages, treated/untreated strings – violin/viola, Mr Beresford’s piano/electronics and Paul Khimasia Morgan’s guitar body and contact mics. There’s no purpose trying to work out who does what – this is a whole path rather than individual steps. Even when the strings strike out at pizzicato interludes they’re immersed in microtonal treatments of the Beresford/Morgan axis. Initially I played the album while reading a book. About ten minutes in, I stopped, put down the book and restarted the recording from the beginning; covered my eyes and simply sat and listened. A piece like bee Reiki deserves concentration, not because there’s anything virtuoso going on, but precisely because there isn’t. This is truly egalitarian music – the virtue is in the collective. At around twenty-five minutes Beresford introduces tangible piano, it’s short lived – only there to mark a ‘stretching out’ of the bee, an unfolding of wings… be Reiki becomes its own meditation. Concentrated improvisations are now performed regularly across the globe from a huge variety of ensembles. It’s no longer ‘breakthrough’ music. That’s not the point. There’s a detailed vocabulary of sound built on decades of global experiments. The success of this particular recording is that it wears its soundscape lightly. Musicians as far apart as David Toop, Paul Lytton, Milford Graves, Julie Tippetts, John Zorn, Maggie Nicols have all been buzzing in these hives. What they all share in common is a sense of adventure that draws the ears in. Discus 173 is both no different and quite different; it excels in turning over a new leaf already present in a vast arboretum of music. My recommendation is to stop what you’re doing, give Afifi, Beresford and Morgan an unencumbered hour of your time. It won’t be wasted. Spoiler alert: The final six minutes contains a form of resolution in song form – and doesn’t disappoint. Don’t cheat, take the whole fifty minutes first. – Steve Day, April 2024

STEVE BERESFORD is enough to make me interested in Bee Reiki (DISCUS 173), even though he has been spinning the thread of Alterations since Gestalt Et Jive and The Melody Four, as he did here with Electronics, Piano & Toys. In addition, I get to know PAUL KHIMASIA MORGAN, who runs the labels The Slightly Off Kilter and Aural Detritus in Brighton, writes reviews for The Sound Projector and improvises with amplified acoustic guitar body, with Klaus Janek or Daniel Spicer, in pairs or in Tides with Peter Marsh & ➝Paul May from Fourth Page. Here is the cooperation with Beresford, deepened in Corona times via Zoom, expanded with FARADENA AFIFI in Cambridge, the Afghan-British F-lks-ng-rin, T’ai Chi teacher and Maggie Nicols-inspired initiator of The Noisy Women. Here she can be heard with viola, violin, singsong and drums to help a knocked out bee back on its feet and wings by laying on her hands. Reiki is said to have helped many a bee to satori. Afifi plucks, fiddles, scratches, flageoletizes strings, she vocalizes and howls, Morgan booms to electronic impulses. Beresford grops with toy organs, types two-finger piano, strums erratically to the chirping of birds and rattling, quietly bubbling electronics. Afifi shows violinistic skill with a Far Eastern touch, and behind the bee fished out of the puddle and the little dream shaken down, there is probably more ulterior motive than naivety. It is obvious that euphony cannot be separated from cacophony. On ‘Waggle Dance’ and ‘Buzzing Run’ some drum and subtle cymbal beats fall into restrained piano poetry and spun or humming electro and toy noise. Until Afifi unfolds to roaring waves and small piano splinters on ‘Flksngr’ as a very touching folk singer and violinist. – Rigobert Dittmann, BAD ALCHEMY

Violinist / drummer Faradena Afifi and guitarist / electronicist Paul Khimasia Morgan team up with the great pianist Steve Beresford on this set of playful yet edgy improv on which voices, strings, keys and electronics combine to paint a sound picture of unexpected combinations and shifts of direction. Refreshingly unpredictable – Kevin Whitlock, JAZZWISE

The recording had its genesis in attempts by Beresford (who needs no introduction as a stalwart of the UK improv scene) and Morgan to duet over Zoom. Always doomed to problems, this process created ways in which lags and distortions could become facets of the music. This gives an idea of the ways in which the electronic effects on these pieces, often quite subtle but nevertheless an essential element, come to make the music wobble around its tonal and rhythmic centres. Calling Afifi into the mix, the newly formed trio recorded this set in a single day. As always with Afifi, there is a strong commitment to the traditions of her Afghan roots and an equally strong commitment to traditions of unsettling experimentation and dismantling of traditions. It is often difficult to put into words how she manages to sound so strongly in both traditions (and uniquely herself). This ability to be immersed in traditions while finding ways to disrupt them through collaborating with people and music from outside these might be one of the motivations behind her Noisy Women project. The mix of traditions is not only apparent in her vocal gymnastics, but also equally compelling in the violin and viola playing. Across these I could hear the playing of bowed instruments from various folk traditions as well free jazz, particularly the ways in which the blending and bending of notes become more important than their clarity or the ways in which the breaks introduced in playing echo those of players taking breaths. It is worth repeating the titles of the tunes on this set to get an idea of the story that they collectively unfold: ‘Sad, bedraggled bee lies in a puddle; Move the bee into sunlight; I wonder if Reiki might help?; The bee wiggles its white, furry bottom; Limbs stretch, wings vibrate, flying into sunshine; Waggle dance; Buzzing run’. The set closes with a piece called ‘Flksingr’, and this gives the preceding collection of tunes its modus operandi: Afifi is a folk-singer but in a collection of styles that span the globe (and space and time, given the ways in which the effects that mix her voice sound so much like science fiction). There is also a sense in which the lyrics of this closing piece bring the metaphor of the cycle of tunes between the bee struggling in a puddle and the human condition (or perhaps Afifi’s specific experiences as a busker in Cambridge). – Chris Baber, JAZZ VIEWS https://jazzviews.net/faradena-afifi-steve-beresford-paul-khimasia-morgan-bee-reiki/

Reiki is a form of spiritual healing energy that originated in Japan in the nineteenth century; reiki ‘s adherents claim that it can be used to treat various medical conditions and diseases. And how do bees tie in with reiki? The eight track titles of the improvisational music at hand might offer some ideas: “Sad, bedraggled bee lies in a puddle,” “Move the bee into sunlight,” “I wonder if Reiki might help?” “The bee wiggles its white, furry bottom,” “Limbs stretch, wings vibrate, flying into sunshine,” “Woggle Dance,” and so on. These are gentle improvisations, where every player contributes to the whole but doesn’t demand that they be heard, and thus ideas flow freely and find their place in the overall fabric of the concept. The three musicians who create Bee Reiki include Paul Khimasia Morgan, who plays the body of an acoustic guitar (no neck, no strings) with some electronic gadgetry attached to it — obviously many of the percussive sounds are of his making, but some of the electronics as well; Steve Beresford plays piano, electronics, and (as he is well known for) toys, which could include many of the sounds one hears that are not specifically credited, like ukulele and cymbals; Faradena Afifi completes the trio playing violin, viola, and wordless vocals, all three of which complement the sounds of the other two players, which without her presence might come off as too minimalist and skeletal. All put together it works splendidly and offers an interesting tapestry of curious sounds. Especially interesting is when the electronics further process Faradena’s voice into lower registers creating a dark growling sound. Bee Reiki is probably not for everyone, but if a gentle strangeness and dreamy sonic whimsy appeal to the senses, one might do well to check this one out. – Peter Thelen, EXPOSÉ http://expose.org/index.php/articles/display/faradena-afifi-steve-beresford-paul-khimasia-morgan-bee-reiki-3.html

On ‘Bee Reiki’, violinist and vocalist Faradena Afifi (The Noisy Women Present), keyboardist Steve Beresford (Derek Bailey, Evan Parker) and guitarist Paul Khimasia (Jason Kahn, The Seen) bring together the worlds of bees and reiki. Soft and thin vocals coupled with the (distorted) sounds of the instruments used predominate. A lot of detailed (laptop) effects, minuscule distortions and glitches all kinds of things create an alienation effect. A special link between nature, improvisation and traditional oriental folk music and movement arts such as tai chi and qi gong (chi kung). All recorded in one day with no prior preparations. Also for fans of Anna Homler. – Georges Tonla Briquet, JAZZ HALO https://www.jazzhalo.be/reviews/cdlpk7-reviews/various/discus-special/

AS SHE was about to to enter an east London studio in November 2022 to create the album which eventually became bee Reiki, violinist and vocalist Faradena Afifi had an unusual meeting.

“A white-tailed bumblebee was the first being I encountered before going into the studio to record with Steve Beresford and Paul Kimasia Morgan. I was warming up outside, doing some T’ai Chi and I noticed the poor bee lying in a puddle. I ended up doing a reiki treatment and witnessing her flying off to the blue sky. It put me in a very good mood and my joy influenced everybody there. The bee became a folk song and I turned into its mood — definitely not something I would come up with on my own.”

Born in Greenwich in 1975, her mother teaches singing and her father was a doctor from Kabul, Afghanistan, “who liked to sing Afghan songs and songs from the charts. I was playing piano since I could crawl and I would also play cardboard boxes, rubber bands and cutlery, and sing sometimes in my sleep. When my dad worked at Glasgow Royal Infirmary when I was a baby, I’d go to the airport and spend hours listening to and watching the planes.”

She told me that as a schoolgirl she loved listening to “classical baroque music – Bach, Buxtehude, Vivaldi and 20th-century composers like Berg, Bartok and Ligeti. Also Afghan and Indian folk music and whatever pop music was being played on the school bus.

“I developed a liking for birdsong as my grandfather knew all the birds and he passed that on to me. I also loved to listen to the rain, thunderstorms, the wind through the trees and reed beds, and the sounds of building sites (especially cement mixers), trains, markets and traffic. I loved going to nature reserves and other green spaces as a child.”
This natural, utilitarian and metropolitan music of the world, nature-made and human-made, was supplemented by her playing of piano, violin and viola in a youth orchestra, although “my reading of music was and still is severely limited because of dyslexia, and I prefer to learn by ear.”

By her late 20s she was taken by jazz. “I went to a Cecil Taylor concert and thought it was brilliant, never having heard that kind of free music before. I went to gigs at Cafe Oto and by the London Improvisation Workshop run by Eddie Prevost, and other workshops by Maggie Nicols and Keith Tippett, and Community Music sessions using John Stevens’s free techniques.”

During lockdown she played online gigs with Maggie Nicols, the Glasgow Improvisers’ Orchestra and Caroline Kraabel. Then on Zoom she met septuagenerian pianist, electronics wizard and toy instrument virtuoso Beresford and Morgan, playing amplified acoustic guitar body. They promised each other they would record together as a trio after lockdown. The result was the bee Reiki album. I asked her, what is reiki?

“It is one of the moving forces of energy healing that has been around for millennia. It comes from Japan. I do a combination of T’ai Chi, massage, reiki and music with recorded birdsong, listening to and discovering natural rhythms, connecting myself with others. The healing energy is already there.”

What about the creative energy of the trio?

“We connected with one another, listened deeply, gave each other plenty of space and enjoyed each other’s humanity and humour. Steve has a real sense of playfulness and spontaneity, like watching an enthusiastic toddler explore possibilities with a spoon and bowl. Paul is considered yet unexpected, at points I couldn’t tell who was playing what. It was like a three-person dawn chorus.”

Certainly, they make powerful and tender sounds as a trio that reflect the timbres of city, countryside and cosmos. “Even in the busiest street you can hear wind, the oak trees and there is usually a pigeon, fox, robin, blackbird. sparrow, gull or jackdaw flying around.

“For me, music is a form of freedom and empowerment. It has been banned from being played in Afghanistan and no women or girls have access to education. So by playing music I am countering that. I am playing for the people who can’t.”

As a listener, you remember all this through her album, and you remember at its jazz heart is a trapped bee — released and flying, its sister or brother beautifully photographed on the sleeve, free again to help sustain and sweeten the world. – Chris Searle, MORNING STAR https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/afghanistan-no-women-or-girls-have-access-education-playing-music-i-am-playing-people-who

On ‘bee Reiki’, violinist and vocalist Faradena Afifi (The Noisy Women Present), keyboardist Steve Beresford (Derek Bailey, Evan Parker) and guitarist Paul Khimasia (Jason Kahn, The Seen) bring together the worlds of bees and reiki. Soft and thin vocals coupled with the (distorted) sounds of the instruments used predominate. A lot of detailed (laptop) effects, minuscule distortions and glitches all kinds of things create an alienation effect. A special link between nature, improvisation and traditional oriental folk music and movement arts such as tai chi and qi gong (chi kung). All recorded in one day with no prior preparations. Also for fans of Anna Homler. – Georges Tonla Briquet, JAZZ HALO https://www.jazzhalo.be/reviews/cdlpk7-reviews/various/discus-special/

Voici bien un album collaboratif d’improvisateurs qui échappe au radar et à une quelconque idée toute faite. À la fois chanteuse, violoniste et percussionniste, Faradena est une artiste à la fois afghane et britannique et influencée par sa pratique du T’ai Chi, les chants d’oiseau, Maggie Nicols, la danse, les arts visuels et les musiques populaires des quatre coins du monde. Paul Khimasia Morgan est un professionnel de la prise de son, musicien improvisateur et artiste visuel ayant collaboré avec Bianca Regina, Richard Sanderson, Jason Kahn, Christian Alvear, … et bien sûr Faradena Afifi et le pianiste Steve Beresford qu’on ne présente plus, étant un familier de Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Louis Moholo, Han Bennink, John Butcher, John Russell, David Toop et membre des légendaires Alterations. La musique de Bee Reiki a d’ailleurs un air de famille avec celle de ce groupe, Alterations. Il y est question d’abeilles dans plusieurs titres où cet insecte bienfaisant est nommément cité ou simplement suggéré. On entend ici et là des zézaiements, des pépiements, des bourdonnements fugaces, un fredonnement, des bruissements de la nature , le timbre du violon qui oscille et miaule, la voix de Faradena Afifi, de discrètes interventions au piano de Beresford avec les cordes et les mécanismes , des vibrations fugaces, frottements minimalistes, tâtonnements sur une batterie toute en sensibilité. Une quelconque virtuosité est écartée au profit d’une intrigante poésie sonique. Chaque geste compte même leur insignifiance apparente est savamment maîtrisée. Rien n’est laissé au hasard. Une dimension heuristique, anarchiste et poétique se répand dans notre écoute et réunit les trois artistes dans une œuvre instantanée imprévisible et indescriptible. Il faut se déplacer à Londres pour croiser de tels artistes et découvrir leur rafraîchissante utopie. – ORYNX https://orynx-improvandsounds.blogspot.com/

…… very interesting stuff IMO, and I thought the Reiki Bee collab thing was fun in a kind of profound way. Neurodiversity and emotional intelligence in a 50-50 balance! Not that the two are mutually exclusive, of course; but I really liked the little hints of surreptitiously emotional narrative in the improv. – Dr Chris Kennett

Bees Reiki? Here, apparently, a bee is successfully treated by means of Reiki and universal life energy is breathed into it again. And that was then set to music by the trio that could be heard. The most famous participant (to the reviewer) is Steve Beresford. He has been making music for over 50 years now, mostly improvised-avant-garde music. Sometimes, however, he also ventured into rock or jazzy-punk-avant-progressive realms, e.g. with the 49 Americans, the trio The Melody Four or the formation Gestalt Et Jive. On “Bee Reiki”, however, it rocks rather less. “Bee Reiki” offers an amazingly homogeneous, well-coordinated, rather calmly flowing and only rarely louder trio improvisation, which sometimes wafts very electronically, otherwise scurries sparingly and slightly slanted. Solo string sounds and electronics often swayed homogeneously, accompanied by piano halls, percussive clattering and birdsong. In the concluding “Flksngr” there is almost a folky song to be heard. Or, Faradena Afifi performs something like this, accompanied by piano, violin and electronics halls. All in all, an amazingly wide range of timbres is offered here. If you are not completely averse to improvisations of the ‘squeaky door’ brand and want to listen to three established sound tinkerers in conversation (and like the albums of Zauss, for example), you should get along well with “Bee Reiki”. It doesn’t get too wild and weird and you can listen to the album surprisingly well. And the bee seems to be doing well again. – Achim Breiling BABYBLAUE SEITEN https://www.babyblaue-seiten.de/album_22004.html#oben

Violist and vocalist Faradena Afifi and composer/pianist Steve Beresford first came to attention with a short CD Flash of Blue: rooted in folk-inflected compositions and arrangements with a haunting one of ‘Scarborough Fair’, it proved far more. As beguiling compositions like ‘Kingfisher’ (hence Flash of Blue) ‘Dusk’ and ’Night’ proved, Afifi and Beresford – when collaborating – are musicians pitched in that ground between folk and modernism. Michael Finnissy comes to mind, but here, with Afifi’s own compositional voice more folk-inflected, Flash of Blue remained on the edge of experimental folk.

Bee Reiki steps over: though not to Finnissy’s new complexity, or not quite. Now the ‘Bee Reiki Trio’ of Beresford (piano, electronics and toys), Paul Khimasia Morgan (guitar body and electronics ) and Afifi’s (viola, violin, drumkit and voice) make their full-length debut CD on Discus Records: recorded in a single day in November 2022 in his East London studio by Syd Kemp. The effect is almost unrecognizable from Flash of Blue: but for Afifi’s voice and viola.

This is hallucinatory music. It gathers in intensity yet continually unfolds, heavier with the weight of where it’s been. A 54-minute sequence of eight apparently improvisatory sections ending in a vocal paean, it shimmers with release from some long immersion.

It’s easy to suggest with the opening’s audible door-shutting (a kind of hello), the ambient sound-worlds created by say Bang On a Can All-Stars back in the 1990s. Or John Zorn. This kind of sonance, allowing extraneous sounds to stray into the mix, gives it an openness you can hear on those sampler moments beloved of Radio 3’s New Music Show. There’s more art here though, and repeated listening only confirms this.

There’s a narrative in those eight titles too, but it’s distracting to break up the relation of sound and music. A twangling of tune-up, and Afifi’s first vocalese shoots straight out of ambience into a haunting. And then the electronics of (I think) Beresford and Afifi’s treated voice. Which soon mutates into a rhythmic chant, her long line swapped for a series of shorter then melismatically stretched vocals over electronic keyboard. If you know Meredith Monk’s solo vocals, Afifi’s is kin to it: the wry flash of wit that jolts to elegy. And Bee Reiki is something Monk would love to have written.

If there’s analogies here, it’s because you might know some. New sounds need aural signposts. And this writer’s immersed more in contemporary classical than world music: it’s just one way in. So occasionally it’s like something out of Giles Swayne’s Cry – a 1978 piece using African and other musics to invoke creation of the world in a British a Cappella-line-up. But not 28 singers and electronics, just one remarkable singer. Anyway Afifi soon swaps out for her viola: even here the sonic impact is unsettling: long notes give way to plucked distracted then rhythmic banjo-effects. At this point I can’t tell if Affi’s taken up her fiddle.

A renowned new-music pianist, Beresford, who’s collaborated with musicians like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn on keyboard, is also a formidable author on contemporary music. Best known for improv and jazz, he’s composed for films and TV, and being a York University graduate (and former Westminster University lecturer) steeped in the new.

He acts here as a living cantus firmus, rising to audibility with piano chords half-way through (Track 4: 25 minutes in, around a bee flexing its wings!), and suggests much of the pulse. The ranging voices in Afifi – viola and voice – and Morgan’s guitar/contact mic swarm around it. They create a literal buzz-cloud of micro-tonals, shift registers and instruments slightly through the eight tracks. Morgan intrigues since he’s to an extent self-effacing (so difficult to write about) but it’s his sonic bounds the reach of Bee Reiki is pitched in.

And… it’s about a bee. It’s worth quoting but don’t be put off by the cuteness: “The trio initially met on Zoom as a result of Lockdown and from those beginnings decided they wanted to record an album together. On the day of recording and before going into the studio, Faradena was outside doing her T’ai Chi warm up and noticed a large white-tailed bumblebee lying in a puddle. After moving the bee out of the water, she did some Reiki on it to amazing results…the bee flew off in joyful spirals into the blue sky!” See what I mean about Monk.

This intersectional approach – different musics, ambient envelopes – has been around for over 30 years. The difference here is the line-up of musical skills spanning classical and world music. To take Afifi first, as the most identifiable: it’s the haunting way Afifi approaches singing and instrumentation. The influence of Monk’s extended vocal techniques is pervasive in contemporary music: though Afifi and Monk seem kindred, sisters under the singing. Monk’s Jewish heritage edged with ritual has a parallel.

Afifi’s Afghani-British: she too approaches singing with a sense of dual heritage. There’s little bar samples coming out of one heritage since say Veronica Doubleday’s Three Women of Herat, and musicians who’ve made it out: those not being hounded by UK authorities. I make no apology for dragging politics in since Afifi’s site references Afghan women’s plight and our shame.

So Afifi’s voice invokes at a distance another world, far removed from her folk-inflected singing of only a year or so earlier. This (mainly) vocalese lends the music something sacramental, traditional, timeless and futuristic too. Several times Afifi’s multiple-tracked.

Afifi’s viola-playing strongly recalls the way Garth Knox in his Seven Violas (at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2001) evoked a world of violas by literally playing seven of them, hanging them up as he passed, striking one suspended as it twirled whilst promenading with another tucked under his chin played a second later: occasionally the simultaneous sounds of three violas shuddered through the hall, struck with two bows in half a second.

The world of the violas when essayed this way seems sonically the most open of all the stringed instruments. With Afifi liminal scutterings at the edge of the bridge (ponticello) also recall the best-known contemporary Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. Since Sciarrino, there’s been a tradition of string ensembles playing at the sonic edge, often ponticello. These are familiar affects. The mix here shows Afifi essaying such effects (close-up, distant) in a new way.

These sounds too invoke everything from the oud to the viol and bass viol. Afifi plays the violin too, as a fiddle, and drumkit, which lays down a loose lariat of bass-lines too disruptive and fragmented to count as pulse.

That’s left to Beresford – as far as anyone can make out – who corrals Afifi on the one hand, and Morgan with guitar and mic sonics on the other. Morgan seems here a player who lays down a magic carpet for others. His guitar and mic-ing serrate and snatch at Afifi’s contribution, sharpening it. But it seems his instrumentation blends with the electronics to a degree that it’s like fine fairy dust in the atmosphere.

At one point whilst he does this and Afifi vocalises in a wayward coloratura that edges on the humorous, Beresford sneaks in with a sampler noise like an organ: to be precise those spectral reaches of 20th century French organ: Langlais, Messiaen and particularly Alain, that kind of sound. It’s momentary and the whole drops off the cliff and we get – birdsong. Not Messiaen’s notated filter, but the real sample. – Simon Jenner, VIEW FROM THE GODS https://viewfromthegods.co.uk/2025/01/20/faradena-afifi-steve-beresford-paul-khimasia-morgan-bee-reiki/

Contemporary improvised music from the UK recorded in 2022. Faradena Afifi is a new name to me, but it’s an understatement to say she’s a breath of fresh air in the culture of free improvisation. With her background, her interests and activities, she’s opening up a lot of spaces; she describes herself as neuro-divergent, comes from mixed Afghan-British heritage, and applies her T’ai Chi and music skills in a healing context, operating in that specialist area that can help people with learning difficulties or with brain injuries. In this practice, she overlaps with Dave Knott of Seattle, another life-long improviser who attests to the healing properties of music. Faradena Afifi was also founder of The Noisy Women Present, a platform which not only redresses gender balance inequalities in the genre of improvised music, but aims to provide a space for diversity and inclusivity.

All of these benign qualities, along with her faith in the power of nature and birdsong, are in evidence in her contributions (viola, violin and voice) to these eight improvisations, where the spirit of Maggie Nicols, one of her personal mentors, acts as an audible guide. Afifi’s work shines here, given a respectful and delicate framework by the contributions of Steve Beresford – a founding father of the London Musicians Collective – on piano, electronics, and toys, plus of course the low-key guitar-body and electronics minimalism of Paul Khimasia Morgan. Bee Reiki apparently started out as Zoom meetings, when Beresford and Morgan met up online during lockdown; they went from talking about the pandemic and discussing the grim prospects for live improvised music, and moved on to attempting to create improvised duos online. The technology let them down for all sorts of reasons, introducing glitches and drop-outs galore. It perhaps might have been interesting if they’d attempted to restage these unwanted technological errors on this session, but instead it went in another direction. You’ll be glad it did. – Ed Pinsent, SOUND PROJECTOR https://www.thesoundprojector.com/2025/09/08/airborne/