Michel Banabila
Michel Banabila is a sound artist, composer, and producer. Banabila's career kicked off with his album VoizNoiz, which received international critical acclaim. Banabila has produced musical scores for numerous films, documentaries, theatre plays and choreographies.
Banabila is especially keen on mixing disciplines and music styles, using elements and influences from jazz, electronic music, classical and world music.
In addition to acoustic instrumentation, Banabila uses electronics, field recordings, and recordings from radio, television and film. He collaborated with many different types of artists like Anton Goudsmit, Erkan Ogur, Holger Czukay , Joshua Samson, Machinefabriek, Mete Erker, Radboud Mens, Scanner, Sandhya Sanjana, Yasar Saka , and Zenial, among others.
Banabila has recorded 35 albums, including VoizNoiz (2000), VoizNoiz 2 (2001) and Spherics (2001). BBC legend John Peel used music from the album VoizNoiz several times in the John Peel show. Furthermore, his collaboration on VoizNoiz 3 (CD - Challenge JJT77009) with trumpet player Eric Vloeimans was awarded with the Edison Jazz Award in 2003. One year later, their collaboration was nominated for the Golden Calf at the Dutch Film Festival.
Besides making albums and musical scores, Banabila works with theatre, dance and visual art on more conceptual artistic projects. He builds a database with samples; uses the city environment as a recording studio, collects fragments of spoken texts, which he composes into soundscapes and audio/visual installations and performances. Using recordings of speech in several languages Banabila experiments with the tonality of words and the "sound system" of languages. Banabila worked on various projects with video artists Geert Mul, Olga Mink, Monoscope and photographer Gerco de Ruijter.
