Hassan K.

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Straying away from a folklore dominated by the binary kicks of contemporary Oriental electro, KEYVANE ALINAGHI becomes HASSAN K and transcends the fluctuant borders of Persian music.

As much a fiddler as an adamant defender of a free and open-source culture, polymath DIY artist… For more than 10 years, this solo artist has been boundlessly blending Persian rituals with new technologies, the West with the East, surf music with belly dancing, swing with cyber-metal, film scores with harsh noise…The multi-instrumentalist musician is a traditionalist who does not play around with folklore, but rather searches for the essence of a millennial culture, in order to offer it a second breath without ever deteriorating it.

Composed without any sample, note by note, click by click, just as would a Benedictine monk (Ishraq?), each album is an initiatory passage, a theosophical stage which narratively echoes the Iranian spiritual chivalry.

To finalize this journey, the musician must constantly assess the live restitution of an electronic piece which was thought within a studio. Hassan K crafts his tools, bends or upgrades traditional eastern instruments (electric sitar, sensors, robotized santoor) in order not to indefinitely linger within virtuality and to lead spectators towards a trance-like, intensively energetic live.
Besides his job as a teacher, Keyvane Alinaghi has performed as Hassan K more than 300 times all around Europe, the US, Japan, Northern Africa, Turkey, Indonesia. He has represented France at the EURONOIZE (Eurovision of alternative music in London), has participated in the major film-score festival TIMEZONE in Bari (initiated by OLANLUIGI TREVISI and ENNIO MORRICONE), has given conferences on electro-acoustic music and has run workshops on sound design and digital luthiery.

Keyvane is a French-Iranian artist, living and working in Lille. Following a cursus in multimedia development, he has very quickly drifted towards computer image creation. As much an electro-acoustic music composer (within the framework of the master classes offered by the research and musical production studio ART ZOYD) as a graphic designer, his desire to mix sonic and graphic media within interactive spaces came to fruition in 2006 when he joined the “Creation and digital engineering- Interactive stage design” Master’s degree at the University of Valenciennes. He has there developed interactive installations which processed sound and image in real time, and has created ergonomic control interfaces for his live performances.

After a postgraduate research degree at the Ecole National des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he took part in 2009 and as a study engineer, in the project “Practicable” fostered by the French National Research Agency. Following several years of development as an artist and consultant, he now teaches creative code at the Ecole Supérieur d’Art de Cambrai and internationally broadcasts his pieces and performances on a regular basis.