- country:Germany
- style(s):Balkan, Electronic
- artist posted by:DJ Ipek Soundmanagement
Links
„Your Electronic Flight Attendant Service“
Led by female DJs Ann.Mate and Ipek, the Akasha Crew offers a passionate, joyful show that comes from the soul and has been worked upon in countless sweaty sessions. Charmingly, the Akasha Crew takes the crowd and its senses on their flight through the night, serving Asian, Balkan and Middle Eastern sounds, mixed with electronic tunes. In the diverse cosmos of ethno-music, their emphasis is clearly on kicking beats and dramatic baselines.
Combining contradictory styles and unusual sounds, the Crew seduces its audience and subtly subverts its conventional listening patterns.
What is Oriental Music? What is Balkan Music? What is Asian Music?
The answer to these questions is to be found musically between Electro, Drum n’Bass, House and Dancehall. Last but not least, it’s about shaking your ass to the beat....
The Akasha Crew performance unites dance club with live percussion. Visually, the show offers gender-bending Turkish delight belly-dancing drag shows, Russki-musicals, Bollywood-Kitsch, up to Turkish science-fiction gangster movies from the 1950s.
Before uniting as Akasha Crew early this year, its members performed countless gigs in Berlin and at various cities and festivals around the world, such as Sonar Festival/Spain, City of Women/Slovenia, In Transit/Berlin, CSD/Berlin, Gaystockholm/Sweden, Queerzagreb/Croatia, Festival au Desert/Mali, Popdeurope/Berlin, Sfinks/Antwerp, Reorient/Stockholm, Queersicht/Switzerland, Ladyfest/Hamburg, Ojos de Brujo-Tour/Spain. They appeared in New York, Salvador de Bahia, Ukraine, England, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and excited people around the globe via Internet radio – Reboot.FM and BBC-The World.
Ann.Mate- Berlin/Berlin
Started mixing her first vinyls five years ago in a Berlin after-hour club at six in the morning, after having pestered the DJ for hours on how to do it. Nowadays, her mix is about groovy basslines, colored by a touch of Spanish rhythms and Balkan soul. Her styles moves between breakbeats and electro, ambient and downbeat.
Once a classical singer with stagefright, she lost any traces of it after discovering how to take crowds on a journey for a night, standing behind two turntables with beats, vocals and baselines, capturing their senses, making them groove, dance and dream. Born in East-Berlin, raised in Russian schools, she climbed the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Walking through West-Berlin, she went into a Turkish Kebab-Store to buy cigarettes – and heard, for the first time in her life, Oriental music emanating from a tape recorder on the counter. Influenced by a city full of different cultures, their languages and musical styles, Ann.Mate travels frequently throughout Europe, producing her own bastard mixes and re-edits, fusing sounds and vocals from around the world.
“...For the love of music! With a single mission: Life, like good music, never dies!“
Ipek Ipekcioglu- Berlin/Kreuztanbul
Aka DJ Ipek, born the daughter of Turkish immigrants in Bavaria, is a typical ‚Alamanci’ German who has set up her main camp for the last 22 years in Berlin. She has been raised in the Orient within the Occident. As Kismet, fate, wanted it, she spun her first tunes at the infamous queer party „Morgenland-Schleiertanz“ at the SO36 nightclub.
Resident DJ for the past seven years at the Gayhane party night, she has shaped one of Berlin’s most legendary and colorful club nights. The beat caught on – and went out into the world! Just recently she was named one of the most important women of Berlin by the influential city magazine, Zitty.
It is not just in Berlin that her innovative fusions of Oriental dancefloor with House and Techno-music have been all the rage on the dancefloor. With a good sense for business, she is exporting her sound to New York, to the deserts of Mali, to Salvador de Bahia and Stockholm.
Her style, which she calls „Eclectic Arabesk ConFUSION OrAsia“, is a groovy, strong, feminine and sensual mix of Nu-Oriental Dance, Pop, Desi-Bollywood-Bhangra-Indian-Soundz, Breakbeats, Tech Buka House, Asian Electronics, and Queerdance. DJ Ipek takes whatever is best from Techno, House, Breakbeats, Drum n’Base, R&B and Pop, coloring it with Oriental and Asian sound attacks. She is resident DJ at Gayhane/SO36, Club Deewane/1234, Reorient/Stockholm, Kanakwood/Berlin.
The Dancers
ERDAL- Berlin/Istanbul
Model, go-go dancer, started performing at Gayhane/SO36 in 1998. He has been on tour as dancer and artist with the cabaret group „Salon Oriental“ for three years. Erdal loves to let loose when he is dancing, playing with his audience and feeling its heat.
SABUHA SALAAM- Kapadokia/Berlin
Belly-dancer, actor, fortune teller and writer of a horoscope column, started her/his career as co-founder of „Salon Oriental“ at the cult club night Gayhane in Berlin. S/he is known from films like „Lola and BillidiKid“. SABUHA SALAAM is infamous also for her/his appearances together with Drag-King Mehmet Machogurt aka DJ IPEK. S/he is a little bitch who loves to flirt with her/his audience.
The Percussionist
MARIE L.- Rio de Janeiro/Berlin
Already as a child, she had her mind set on becoming a drummer and a DJ. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Marie L. grew up with soul, funk, and jazz, as well as film music from the 60s, Disco-Music from the 70s, and the rhythm of Samba, which can be heard through open windows all over Brazil. She knew that she had the groove in her soul. She plays drums, percussion instruments and writes music reviews.
When she came to Berlin in 1995, she immediately began appearing in different clubs and at different events in the capital and its surroundings. She quickly made a name for herself in the alternative Brasilian music and world music scene.
Above all, Marie L. wants to deconstruct clichés about Brasilian music, presenting to her audiences a different, danceable kind of Brasil, a Brasil that has more to offer than carnaval.
Neide Alves-Pilger- Rio de Janeiro/Berlin
In her work as percussionist, she bridges the world of ‚academic music’ on the one hand and that of popular ‚street culture’ associated with Brasilian folklore on the other.
The only woman to have graduated from the Conservatory of Recife in percussion, she studied music pedagogy a the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Her true passion, however, always remained with the lived cultures of the Brasilian North East.
After moving to Berlin in 1999, NEIDE ALVES-PILGER became interested in electronic club music, jazz and ‚transcultural’ musical projects. Her skills can be admired on a number of CDs, such as Sa Grama (Group Sa Grama), Egenho (Group Sa Grama), Prisma – a Música de Dimas sedícias, Auto da Compadecida (Soundtrack, Sa Grama), Natasha Records.
The Singer
Dahlia Schweitzer / New York-
With shows from London to Berlin, New York to Rome, Dahlia Schweitzer is an artist, performer, and personality constantly serving up what's now, what's new, what's next in the worlds of music, editorial, photography, and nightlife.
Taking a "creative director" approach to her work, Dahlia regularly hosts exclusive events at which her music is performed, her photography exhibited, and her writings read. As such, she combines punk do-it-yourself ethics with the multimedia all-angles-covered relentlessness of a commercial brand.
Singer Dahlia will join the Akasha Crew at their Showcase/Flight World@Popkomm with her own brewed, composed and produced electro/punk/pop/clash songs.
Booking and Contact Info:
Ipek Ipekcioglu, Lenaustr.8-9, 12047 Berlin; T:+49 30 612 86 840 /F:+49 30 612 86 841; Germany ; www.djipek.com mail@djipek.com