Andrius Arutiunian – Arizona Club, 2022

A composer by training, Andrius Arutiunian works with hybrid forms of sound in installations, video works and performances. His multidisciplinary work explores nonWestern knowledge, esoteric and vernacular narratives, and alternative ways of organising the world. Through themes as varied as oil drilling and voice, border violence and artificial intelligence technologies, and the emergence of ethio-jazz, Andrius Arutiunian’s work often challenges the notion of musical, social and political harmony through hypnotic and enigmatic sound forms.

The Arizona Club installation considers “the idea of music as a space of transfer and refuge”. The work refers to the Arizona Club, a historical 1960s nightclub in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, frequented by local Armenian musicians. The latter have arrived decades earlier as a children marching band — orphans during the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire — and have formed the Royal Imperial Brass Band, participating in the Addis Ababa music scene and the development of the ethio-jazz genre. Andrius Arutiunian’s installation is made of out-ofdate brass instruments discarded from various music schools, which have likely been played by multiple generations of kids, and have been remodelled into three new brass objects. Broadcast through a set of vibrating plates attached to the instruments, a composed soundtrack propagates electronic sounds that merge with the natural resonances of the objects, creating a syncretic and organic sound environment with harmonic influences from Armenian and Ethiopian music.