ARTISTSFafi Abdel NourGroningen (NL)
Fafi Abdel Nour finds beauty in the margins and the bliss in between - a passionate artist and community builder, on a mission towards imagining better futures through musical connectivity and understanding between humans. Growing up as a first generation Syrian-born kid, the struggles of integrating into the Dutch society while balancing his Arabic heritage and burgeoning queerness proved to be a struggle - often finding himself in between worlds, caught amidst maintaining his inner pride and sense of self against a world that he strained to see himself in. Through the desire to find harmony within a lifetime of dissonance, Fafi found dance music in his young adulthood. While his connection to the music was powerful and provided a necessary level of personal reprieve, he soon realized there was a need for more participation from artists and DJs of color in the scene. Fafi’s queer clubnights at OOST in Groningen were born out of this resolve to create community empowerment for marginalized people to transcend beyond the oppressive dominant culture surrounding them. As a DJ, Fafi never fails to captivate dancers into a sense of timelessness & otherworldly joy. His sets distill the liberatory kinetics of house music down to its very essence, embodying an era of music unaffected by genre-constraints or rules. Dissolving boundaries between sound, movement and being, dancers can expect everything from spellbinding melodic passages, house-inflected body music and enchanted breakbeats melded into flourishes of ecstatic sensation. Oscillating between jubilance and insight with a distinctive sense of narrative and technical finesse, Fafi’s selections expand the universe of mystic, passionate and evocative strains of house - tapping into the source of music’s fundamental ability to transform lives, through a deeply personal level of expression transmuted directly from his soul through the speakers. Always encouraging us to connect with one another and celebrate the myriad of differences we share in our world, Fafi’s vibration has radiated simply by embodying his truth and encouraging others to do the same for themselves. Currently based in Amsterdam and with a slew of gigs only continuing to manifest throughout the world, his mantra remains the same no matter where the music is played - Love is the message.
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