Créé en 1991, le Centre des Musiques Traditionnelles Rhône-Alpes est une association qui œuvre à la valorisation des traditions musicales et des patrimoines culturels immatériels de la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

Yasmine Hamdan first made waves in the music scene with the pioneering Beirut indie electronic duo Soapkills, which she co-founded with Zeid Hamdan in the late 1990s. 

Having moved to Paris in 2005, Yasmine collaborated with Madonna producer Mirwais for the Y.A.S. project, releasing the sleeky clubby Arabology album on Universal in 2009. Since then, she has earned international acclaim as a solo singer-songwriter and producer, elegantly entwining far-ranging elements, from pan-Arabic roots and pop and poetic lyrics, to electronica, soul and guitar melodies. Yasmine has collaborated with filmmakers such as Elia Suleiman, Jim Jarmusch, and has toured globally in support of her albums Ya Nass (2013) and Al Jamilat (2017). 

Her upcoming third album is scheduled for worldwide release in September 2025 on Crammed Discs/ [PIAS].

Photo : Ylias Nao

The Comet Is Coming has possessed an air of inevitability almost from the word “Go”! Much like the trail-blazing name they originally lifted from a BBC Radio Workshop record, the trio has participated in a kind of Big Bang. Its immediately relentless sound demands a sense of being present in the moment yet lost within it, much like how visceral punk rock, interstellar jazz blasts, deepest dance-floor trances and real-time technological breakthroughs do. Octavia Butler once wrote that, “There is nothing newunder the sun, but there are new suns.” And on their third album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, synthesist/studio-magician Danalogue, drummer-producer/intuitionist Betamax, and saxophonist/spiritual riffologist Shabaka bring her verses to life. They burn brightly, directly and confidently, soundtracking our epoch of change in ways their contemporaries simply aren’t trying to. Like great artists throughout the recorded century, they possess, in Shabaka’s words, “a sensitivity to the zeitgeist,” channeling their sound into both a mirror to our times and a potential healing process for it. If that seems like asking a lot, The Comet Is Coming is uniquely qualified. Because even by their own telling, that other-worldly power was almost instantaneous.

On Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, they turn it back onto the listener. Wish us all luck!

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