Mohini Dey

Upon its release in 2023, Mohini Dey’s self-titled debut album was a sensation, combining jazz bass and traditional Indian music to create a unique sound. Encouraged by her parents, she began learning electric bass as a child. She wrote her first song at the age of 13, and included it on her debut album. At 14 she accompanied the US-American jazz guitarist Mike Stern on his India tour. Later, extensive research trips took her to the rural areas of North and South India, where she played with traditional musicians, especially drummers. On the subject of her playing, she has said: ‘I’m thinking like a drummer.’ With her husband Mark Hartsuch on saxophone and Gino Banks on drums, she founded the trio MaMoGi in which she uses her unmistakable electric bass to bring together influences from traditional Indian music, mainly mridangam and tabla, with jazz, funk, and metal. Alongside the bass, she is also an arranger, singer, and producer and has worked with legends like Quincy Jones, Zakir Hussain, and Stanley Clarke. In 2015, Forbes India listed her among the most successful musicians under thirty, while Music Radar included her among the top ten bassists of the twenty-first century. Her concert at the Sonic Pluriverse Festival: Bass Cultures is her first stage appearance in Germany.

 

Ana Tijoux

Ana Tijoux was born in France to Chilean parents who had fled Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. For Tijoux, the family’s return to Chile in 1993 meant moving to an unfamiliar country. In Santiago, she became part of the rap scene where Chile’s past and present are dealt with in critical terms.

In 2006, she released her first single and her career began to gather momentum. She made a name for herself as a rapper and singer-songwriter with strong lyrics, an explicitly political and feminist message, and a catchy mix of hip-hop, funk, soul, jazz, Andean folk music, and Latin American rhythms that won her several prizes and Grammy nominations. The use of one of her songs in the series Breaking Bad gave her career a further boost. In 2023, while releasing her fifth studio album, she also published her first volume of poetry, Sacar la voz. She returns to themes of social inequality, women’s rights, ecocide, resistance, solidarity, and rebellion throughout her work, and with the same advice: ‘Do not lose your laughter.’