Aida Nadeem

Aida Nadeem was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1965; she grew up in the downtown section of the lively Middle Eastern metropolis. Her childhood and adolescence were colored by cultural diversity and she grew up in the midst of an inspiring and progressive political milieu. Already in her early childhood, Aida started to unfurl her musical and creative talents as a singer, a dancer and a poet. When she was twelve years old, Aida became very interested in classical music.

When she was twelve years old, Aida became very interested in classical music. At that time, she began her studies at the prestigious academy for music and ballet in Baghdad, which happened to be the country's only educational institution of the kind. Her main instrument was the bassoon. Accordingly, her repertoire consisted of both classical and avant-garde music, while Arabic music remained an integral part of her sound world, as a natural element of everyday life. At the time, the primary sources of inspiration for her were composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Arthur Honegger. Early on, Aida Nadeem devoted herself to cultivating sublime instrumental proficiency and in 1986, she gained employment with Iraq's symphony orchestra.

In light of the political ferment in Iraq, Aida chose to subordinate her musical interests in favor of a more active political commitment. Her ensuing politically related activities ultimately resulted in the fact that Aida was forced to flee from her native country. On the personal level, these events spelled out nothing short of a tragedy, which would later come to manifest itself as a decisive and vital element in her continuing artistic work.

Aida Nadeem moved to Denmark in 1991. In the following year, she enrolled for study at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, with bassoon as her main instrument. At the same time that she was moving forward with her education in the realm of classical music, Nadeem began to nurture a serious interest as well in the more hard-driving underground scene, world music and crossover. The sources of inspiration were multifarious and included the work of artists as diverse as Bill Laswell, Nina Hagen, Transglobal Underground and [artistTalvin Singh. During these years, Aida Nadeem managed to lay the cornerstone for a new and unique musical universe, where the inspiration gathered from the West and her longing for her native country could be amalgamated and unfurled. The constituent ingredients were hard-driving electronic beats, oriental sound surfaces and most especially, a new and powerful vocal expression, with Arabic and Turkmen as the lyrical and language-related context.

In short order, Aida Nadeem attained the heights of resounding success with her band, 'Arabian Underground', which was the first organic bid on a new boundary-breaking sound. Aida Nadeem distinguished herself in Denmark as one of the very few prominent foreign artists to make a breakthrough on the scene and to make a wide impact. The next phase in the development was her project, 'Arabtronica', which carried Aida Nadeem out and onto the club scene, to larger concert venues and last but not least, to international music festivals. Among such appearances, special mention must be made here of her concert appearance at the Roskilde Festival in 2002; this event signaled a kind of high-water mark in her career up to that time.

In 2003, shortly before the fighting in Iraq began to escalate into an affair of global proportions, a new and even more visionary project, 'Out of Baghdad', began to take shape. Under the influence of the harsh and grim circumstances in her native country and of her many memories of better days in Baghdad, Aida Nadeem turned her quest toward a more expressive, poetic and original form of expression. Through the vehicle of this project, she soon gained international recognition and found that there was a demand for her participation at important European music festivals like Womad, Cambridge and Glastonbury. At the same time, the 'Out of Baghdad'-project served to usher in a rewarding and many-faceted collaboration with artists from many different parts of the world and specifically with Aki Nawaz and The Angel Brothers.

Aida Nadeem's passionate, expressive and thought-provoking performance is the result of the artist's journey through life - an indefatigably committed search for new sources of inspiration and a productive collaboration with unique artists and producers from the global arena.