Tell us about Loud Arabia.
It’s a lively community expression of music and a great idea for creative and sustainable reuse. We employ reused and recycled materials to create personalised percussion drums, shakers, guiros, whistles or anything you can march and make music with. We make a shaker from a can or tube, a drum from old car parts or a whistle from a cone.
What are you looking forward to doing while in Abu Dhabi?
We will mostly be focusing on the show and we can’t wait to go to Ferrari World Abu Dhabi!
Will you be suspended from the ceiling for this performance or drumming with fire?
For this one, we’ll do drumming with fire. The crowd should really enjoy it.
Do you ever perform anything tame?
Being tame or not isn’t something we really focus on, we try to experiment with anything that could be interesting.
What’s the most outlandish object you have employed as an instrument?
It would have to be a piece of paper. You can really use almost anything if you put your mind to it.
What started you on the path of using recycled materials for instruments?
So many reasons actually but mostly since the artists of this group are drummers, wherever they would be they would play with anything around them, a can, their chairs whatever they can find. Because Loud Arabia is a group from 8eArt that mostly works at conceptual events, it allows us to be as experimental as we can! And of course we were inspired by Stomp.
How do you decide what is the best use for each item?
It’s mostly according to the sounds each item could offer and the theme of the event as well. If it’s a sporting event, for example, we use objects that reflect that or, for another example, for a construction company we would use a lot of objects they would use on a construction site.
How do you put everything together so that it doesn’t just sound like noise?
The most important thing is to have a certain musical beat, and for each artist to be playing something different so that once it’s all put together it produces a melody. That is really the biggest challenge for the art director and the sound engineer, to produce the cleanest sound through a balanced mix and the way he places the microphones.
What sets you apart from acts like the Blue Man Group and Stomp?
We are somewhere in between. True, we use recycled materials and create beats out of them but we also integrate melodic instruments to our shows like a flute, a bass or a kanoun, the choice is large.
Loud Arabia performs as part of The Entertainment Box at Allure by Cipriani on June 1-2. Go to www.ciprianiyasevents.com for ticket information.
