4 to 7 December next month sees the return of PAF Olomouc, the flagship event of curatorial platform PAF, which takes place in the city of Olomouc in the Czech Republic.
The theme for this year’s event, the 23rd edition of the festival of film and contemporary art, follows the theme of ‘Diaries’. In an overview which you can read in full here, the festival said: “Diaries can take the form of stories or notes, they can be a purposefully invested work in self-reflection, an unintended consequence of time spent on social networks, or any other form of periodic writing. But all these forms of recording raise the question – are diaries meant to be read?”
The event features a combination of talks, presentations, exhibitions and live music at venues across the city. The lineup includes the likes of Coby Sey, George Finlay Ramsay, Olan Monk, Zein Majali, Jeanie Cristal and more.
The festival also hosts the competition Other Visions CZ, which maps the Czech production of contemporary art of the moving image. Ten works picked from an open call by curators Marie & Peter Šprincl will be screened and installed in a gallery, competing for both an Audience Award and the Main Award of an international jury.
Among tQ’s most-anticipated performances will be a collaboration between Qow – aka Cairo-based artist Omar El Sadek, and London’s Theo Alexander, who have been working together since a month-long residency at MeetFactory in Prague last year. Both came to the project with impressive individual bodies of work; El Sadek has performed across Europe since the release of debut album Dawafer via Genot Centre in 2021 and has produced live AV for Zuli, Abadir and more. Alexander has released three albums via Canadian label Arts & Crafts, and premiered numerous ensemble compositions across Britain and Europe.
Their PAF show, which has developed from that initial Prague residency and will continue to evolve afterwards, sees the pair bridging their respective practises by embracing tape recordings, voice note instrumentals, double bass and spoken word. To dig deeper into the specifics of the project, tQ caught up with the artists via email.
How did you first meet? Were you aware of each other’s work beforehand?
Omar El Sadek, aka Qow: Theo was actually my art history teacher while doing my bachelor’s. I don’t remember exactly how I found his music but I was most probably just stalking and I came across his piano piece, ‘Points Of Decay’, which I fell in love with so much, I still listen to it often.
I went to him the next day and we talked a bit after class and he explained his process of using tapes and recorded loops etc. Later on, he told me about an event series called Buket which was organised by the Genot Centre label at Petrohradská Kolektiv in Prague. I really found myself within this scene and the next day, I contacted Ondrej and Wim [Genot Centre founders] to share the four tracks I had finished, which later led to releasing my debut album Dawafer.
What was it about the Genot Centre scene that made Omar feel so at home?
Theo Alexander: I don’t want to speak too much for Omar, but sleep is really important to our working process. Genot Centre had a night where everyone slept over for an all-night lineup of acts, and I think this struck a chord with both of us, for whom sleep is absolutely vital.
OES: Silent nights totally! And for me also was the extra bit of care they added to every event or release they made. There would always be something, whether it’s event location and decoration or some unnecessary addition that makes a big difference to the overall feel. I liked it a lot. RIP Genot.
Tell me about your month-long residency in Prague last year? What exactly did it entail, and how did things develop between you once it finished?
TA: Originally, Omar was asked to do the residency on his own, but he invited me as we had never worked together before and this was a good opportunity to start. It was quite an ideal scenario – fully funded with a studio space we could access whenever we wanted, and a great performance space for the final outcome. I reckon we would have ended up collaborating together eventually, but it just goes to show how much material circumstances can make all the difference to speed up the creative process.
At first, we shared ideas for how the performance should work and agreed that we both wanted to have cassette tapes as a central element – something Omar had been interested in for some time and that I had only used in the context of my solo projects. It was kind of astonishing how quickly we worked, the project took on a life of its own very quickly, and with the help of our lighting designer, Tasya, we had a very wholesome piece by the end. The venue was MeetFactory, a former glassworks at the butt-end of Smichov in Prague.
By the end, we had enough material to continue working on in the studio and we have since developed it into a full length album we hope to release in 2025 – it shares a title with our PAF show, So Afraid to Show I Care. It felt a little bit like the residency project didn’t end – we kept finding ways to grow it which gave way to completely new pieces.
What do you think are the similarities and differences between your respective practices?
TA: It wasn’t hard for us to find ways to bridge our practices – which was a slight concern as my background is in traditional notation. However, we are both improvisers, and our shared but previously unspoken love for R&B a capellas moved things along very quickly. We both turned out to be quite hungry collaborators and found a host of others to feature on our pieces from both sides of our network. Whilst we both work with ultimately different means, I’d say that together we are a bit like gleaners or foragers in our outlook. As ‘collectors’, we share a lot in common.
OES: It was great to find this kind of never-ending process of recording stuff, sampling it then playing it live, then sampling the performance recording into another outcome and so on.. I think it firstly started when I was playing around with chopped vocal samples, then Theo transcribed it. We gave it to a double bass player, Klara Pudlakova, and we over-layered that first vocal sample with double bass bits and it became sort of a natural workflow we have now.
I think we both enjoy charging our music with hidden jokes but maybe I tend to conceptualise it a bit more than Theo; he’s musically fulfilled.
Are you comfortable revealing any of those ‘hidden jokes’ within your work?
TA/OES: I don’t think they’d be hidden anymore if we did.
Tell me more about your shared interest in cassette tapes. What is it about that element that intrigues you both?
TA: Cassette tapes and machines misbehave all the time. Because they often do not do exactly what you want them to do, they force you to work differently. When we decided to make them central to our live set, we had to reimagine our roles in our own music. We weren’t necessarily performers anymore in the sense of people creating music live on the spot, we were more like regulators who controlled and managed a larger musical machine.
OES: I used to like cassette tapes more than the tape machines, then when we started working and recording on several tape machines and four-track recorders during this project, I disliked the machines even more.
But I still really like how they keep on adding surprises and I’m totally open to it. Especially when recording, there’s always imperfections that add more dynamics to the overall quality of sound and takes off that electronic clear shiny edge sometimes. I’m just sometimes too impatient for this medium, so it’s great that Theo is more experienced with them.
A simple question, but what might audiences expect from the show at PAF? Have things evolved at all since you debuted the show at MeetFactory last year?
TA/OES: Fluidity, doors, broken saxophones, post-sacred-but-not-secular organwork, and some echoes of our premiere last year.
Theo Alexander and Qow perform together as part of this year’s PAF Olomouc, which takes place from 4 to 7 December in the Czech Republic. For the full lineup, ticket information and further details, click here.
