Upcoming Events
Wharf Chambers is home to a diverse range of events. From gigs and club nights to fundraisers and socials, we’ve been host to craft markets, film screenings, creative workshops and so much more!
Interested in putting on an event?
Please contact bookings@wharfchambers.org
- This event has passed.
KRAAK UK SHOWCASE
August 28 @ 7:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Belgian experimental label KRAAK hits the left-sided road with three musical cohorts from its recent roster: Younes Zarhoni’s and his transfixing polyphonic chants, Maria Bertel & Nina Garcia’s blaring guitar-meets-trombone distentions, and Firmaet Forvoksen’s brooding outsidercore improvisations. A traveling caravan of wildly different – and sometimes dissonant – acts, for a glimpse into a multifarious, ever-surprising discography almost 30 years strong.
Maria Bertel & Nina Garcia
Longtime sound explorers Nina Garcia and Maria Bertel collide in a fever dream come true. Nina’s guitar-based excursions as Mariachi push the limits of audible experience to the brink, using movement and modulation to sculpt inventive noise formations; Maria, both in her solo activities and in collaborations with multiple figures in the larger improv world (Johns Lunds, the aforementioned Jooklos, the many talents of the Selvhenter ensemble), uses the trombone to blare out distorted drones for an explosive sensory overload. As a duo, textures and rhythms come alive through burning amp bulbs, guitar and trombone reacting and refracting, a powerful complementarity slicing through roaring blasts. Their album KNÆKKET SMIL came out this February, a co-release by No Lagos Musique, Otomatik Muziek and KRAAK.
Maria Bertel & Nina Garcia live at Onze Ambassade Fest 2022
Knækket Smil review on Salt Peanuts
Firmaet Forvoksen
The Norwegian duo of longtime friends Gaute Granli (one half of Rump State whose most recent solo output was released on Feeding Tube) and Thore Warland (of Staer/Golden Oriole and innumerable other musical constellations) has existed in multiple informal iterations before finally manifesting as Firmaet Forvoksen. Their 2022 debut album Undone Shal is an unfurling tapestry of erratic guitar pickings, muffled percussive conjurings, barging synths, and moans that are part lamentation, part incantation. In their current live setup, altered percussions, wayward synths and evoke a liminal space of certain psychedelia, taking the listener to areas which are unsettling, luminous and unshakably affecting.
Firmaet Forvoksen live at Beursschouwburg (Oct 22)
Undone Shal review on The Sound Projector
Younes Zarhoni
Antwerp native Younes Zarhoni has been consistently performing and making music for just about a decade now. His latest foray into transfixion-by-music is a study in quadraphonic vocals that is sculptural in scope and monastic in vibe. Austere incantations in Arabic are layered polyphonically, punctuated by silences that lean into the roaming rumination of these canticles. The result is blissful mindmelt, sonic immersions of a most contemplative order for closed eyes and wide open ears. His self-titled debut on KRAAK, out August 20, is a sparse, reflective condensation of this practice, with Zarhoni’s vocals weaving solemn melodic tapestries, the poetic mysticism of these verses punctuating empty space and settling like desert dust.
Instagram / Soundcloud / Website
Younes Zarhoni s/t on Bandcamp (to be published 15/07)
Interview from KRAAK Fest 2023
KRAAK DJs
GG Rondon (Cachilapa) and Dylan Belgrado (Tuutuuttuut) are the current KRAAK capers doing most of the driving and entertaining, but they’ve also been known to step behind the decks and duke it out with their clashing tune proclivities. Canon meets camp and distention meets dissonance, whatever any of that means – they don’t know it themselves!