Lise Barkas

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What's it about

Lise Barkas is an Alsatian bagpiper and hurdy-gurdy player (Strasbourg, France) who brings to Madrid for the first time her forceful and even challenging discourse. Barkas works with the drone, as the hurdy-gurdy is referred to when talking about the medieval instrument, or drone, when speaking of the new expanded languages in just intonation. She has studied her music and the dances associated with it in the tradition of central France, and studied with a teacher who, as she herself says, was part of the revival of this instrument in the seventies of the last century. However, Barkas is not alien to noise festivals, nor to dance floors. Lise Barkas's music could well be understood within this tradition of strident simplicity, which has little to envy in its radicality to the approaches of other hurdy-gurdy champions such as the Japanese Keiji Haino. Not by chance, Lise first heard this instrument in the music of the legendary Coil, a group that made completely psychedelic use of the hurdy-gurdy on albums such as The Remote Viewer (Threshold, 2002). *** LIMO returns as a concert series with several dates throughout 2026, where rooted music that does not set aside experimentation as a form of knowledge transmission can be heard. LIMO returns with ecstatic musics based on drones, that is, sustained low tones or drones; but also unrooted interpretations of what the song is in different Latin American latitudes; and of course, even more radical displacements of tradition, such as contemporary mutations of local genres from Pakistan and Indonesia, through reinvented instruments. *** "LIMO. Músicas corrientes", curated by Ultranesia, is a cycle about rooted music that does not set aside experimentation as a form of knowledge transmission.

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