1984
Sakina Abdou, Mariam Rezaei & Kobe Van Cauwenberghe
(c) Ella Struyf
1984 is a new trio formed by @sakina_abdou_officiel (saxophone), @mariam_rezaei (turntables) and @kobevancauwenberghe (guitar). All three musicians sharing the same year of birth, they see its eponymous Orwellian fictional counterpart as quite reflective of our time, but they aim to translate it into gorgeously beautiful noisy utopian complex dreamlike experimental music ✨
Live at Summer Bummer 2025, Antwerp (c) Dawid Laskowski
1984 is currently preparing its album release "The Forward Process", featuring a collection of compositions by Van Cauwenberghe, arranged collectively in the studio with Rezaei and Abdou.
A somewhat inconspicuous passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi classic “The Dispossessed” serves as an inspiration for these compositions, where the main character, the brilliant physicist Shevek, meets a composer who translated Shevek's revolutionary theories into a musical composition:
“I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. [Several] instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony.”
Van Cauwenberghe took this literary reference as a starting point, in combination with Henry Threadgill’s unique harmonic intervallic system, to write a collection of compositions with this trio of turntables, saxophone and guitar in mind, allowing space for improvisation, co-creation and experimentation. The turntables represent the cyclical process of time, melodic and harmonic movement in the guitar and saxophone creates sequential linearity. But these roles are never set. As a hybrid trio the musicians operate between cycles and sequences, lines and circles, past - present and future all at once, non-linearity as default yet all in one simultaneous forward process.
The trio made it’s live debut at Summer Bummer festival in August 2025. Shortly after this, they went into the studio at Dropa House in Antwerp to record. The resulting studio album is expected to come out in February 2026 on the label Dropa Disc. In the meantime, check out a demo track featured on The Wire’s Below The Radar #48 !
At the Dropa House studio
supported by Flanders State of the Arts