Interview with Ahmed Essyad

The Body of Sound: Ahmed Essyad’s Electroacoustic music Interview by Gilles Aubry Ahmed Essyad is a composer born in 1938 in Salé, Morocco. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatory in Morocco, he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a pupil and then assistant to Max Deutsch. Interested in ethnomusicology, he focuses his research on orality and notation, as well as on musical time and pulsation. His music is a blend of Berber oral tradition, serial writing, Gregorian and modal influences. Between 1972 and 1974, he composed a series of electroacoustic pieces in the Centre Américain studio in Paris. Subterranean Changes is a Parastatal sound series focusing on genealogies of experimental music and sonic engagement beyond western modernism. The goal is to enable new conversations on race and technology through shared listening sessions and critical sound practice. Sound, noise, and the inaudible provide the stuff for a reshaping of the intersections between time, place and being.