Zanana

"Don't Go Back to Sleep"
Text by Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!

Born in what is now Afghanistan in 1207, Jalal al-Din al-Rumi is credited as being the greatest of the Islamic mystic poets. The premises of Islamic mysticism (Sufi) is the attempt to experience the divine presence in the world through meditative practices. Rumi's disciples founded an order of mystics known as Whirling Dervishes, in which ritual prayer is performed by spinning to musical accompaniment.

“Testify”
From the Oxford English Dictionary: to bear witness to, or give proof of; to assert or affirm the truth of ; to attest.

“Resurfacings”
Growing in all directions, like the sound of the conch.

Zanana (Kristin Norderval, voice and Monique Buzzarté, trombone) performs improvised music blending acoustic sounds, electronics, and live processing. We compose and perform collaboratively, using improvisation as the foundation of our compositional process. Some works are free improvisations, some are structured improvisations, and some are composed with aleatoric elements. Our intent is to create sonic transformations of our acoustic playing, incorporating unusual ambient, industrial, and site-specific sounds. Our duo takes its name from a variant spelling of “zenana,” the portion of a house in southwestern Asian countries exclusively dedicated to women, and is pronounced “za-NAH-na”.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.