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The room was dark on a December evening
at Empty Gallery, enough so that one guest
lost his footing and spilled his sake, shortly
before Rashad Becker began his musical
descent into an unknown, borderless world.
The Hong Kong space’s black walls and
faint lights soon became even dimmer, as
revelers took their seats and watched the
Syrian native step before his rig of cables,
knobs and switches, joined by percussionist
Eli Keszler. In the darkness, Becker’s hands
danced, twisting and turning, illuminated
under a spotlight for a moment before they
drifted and floated and faded into unlit
space again. His tortured electronic tones,
paired with Keszler’s rolling, improvisational
strikes on a drum kit, sounded like messages
from a future world. The duo had begun
collaborating in 2015, developing tracks
together during tours in Europe and America.
It would be easy to bill Becker as an
experimental sound artist, but the reticent
47-year-old resists that label. “People do use
the term. They use it as if it is a genre,” said
Becker the day after he performed at Empty
Gallery. “It makes me a little bit sad if people
call [my music] experimental. For me, the
era of experimentation is not where I am
anymore. This is not a laboratory. I do have a
strategy and I do know what I look for.”
Indeed, the blueprints of Becker’s
soundscapes are vast. With more than 20
years of experience in the music industry,
the esteemed musician and mastering
engineer estimated that 4,500 to 6,000
productions bear his touch. Often, he
remains uncredited—officially, Becker
has around 1,600 notches on his belt—but
check the liner notes of any noteworthy
electronic music release from the past
decade or so, and there is a good chance
that the phrase “Mastered by Rashad
Becker” will appear in the credits. His own
itch to create—and, dare I say, experiment—
culminated in his debut album in 2013,
Traditional Music of Notional Species,
Vol. 1. Three years later, he delivered the
second volume.
Given Becker’s position at the forefront
of electronic music, few would call him
traditional. Nevertheless, he said the titles
of the two albums are rooted in his own
“fascination with the quality of tradition,” in
which there is a lack of authorial attachment.
“When you look at anything that is conceived
as traditional—it doesn’t matter if it’s writing,
music, clothes—someone made a decision
[to forge its design or structure]. Over the
years, there was this single other person who
had made a little change to that, and so on.”
Becker mulls the small, throwaway choices
made generations or centuries apart by many
anonymous people that have shaped our
customs, cultures and lore; he is transfixed
by the men and women who made those
judgment calls but did not clamor for
recognition. “There are countries where
traditional music is very much alive, and we
have contemporary composers who make
names for themselves by writing ‘traditional’
songs,” Becker said. “But if you think of
traditional music, then you think of legacy,
pieces that have been played for hundreds
of years, and that idea of authorship
completely vanishes.”
Becker’s own compositions drone, heave,
careen, teeter. Behind notes and tones
that hiss, spout, puff, snore and pop, finer
intellectual exchange takes place, and
persists. “Borders might shift,” Becker said,
“but still you could make a landscape from
the music of traditions, and it would endure
geopolitical changes.” About his creative
process, Becker said, “I think of attributes,
characteristics, moods, and link them. When
I see a consistent set of parameters, I sonify
them. That becomes one piece. I want to see
the music as something that could be played
for hundreds of years.” His collaborator,
Keszler, describes Becker’s process as “raw
and direct,” and added, “I would say you can
draw a line between his outlook, his lifestyle,
his political thinking and the way he works
through music.”
Becker has lived in Europe for 32 years,
primarily sticking to his base in Berlin. It
was there that Rashad Hassan took a new
last name, carving out a niche in the city’s
famed electronic music scene. Stephen
Cheng, the founder of Empty Gallery, who
has followed Becker’s musical career for
years, described the artist’s work by saying,
“He has an amazing sonic world that is
teeming with life. There’s a kind of novelistic
quality to it.” Cheng also recalled his first
encounter with Becker, before establishing
the gallery in 2015: “He invited me to his
studio and offered me these delicious dates!Years later, when he visited the gallery for
the first time, I offered him black fermented
garlic for a cold he was nursing.”
Though Syrian by birth, Becker never
truly hooked into the diaspora Syrian art
community in Germany, where the likes of
the late Marwan Kassab-Bachi (1934–2016)
have left indelible impressions. Regarding
the strife in the country of his birth, and
whether he feels obligated to respond to it in
his art, Becker humbly said, “I would deny
myself, because I would feel it’s exploitative
and just wrong. I would feel ashamed if I
dealt with it on an artistic level, like I was
feasting on something that is beyond what I
can emotionally comprehend.”
What’s next for the artist? Firstly,
another change of name: Rashad Becker
will transform yet again, this time taking
his wife’s last name to become Rashad
Hosoi. Though ever-itinerant, Becker
(or Hosoi) has grown tired of Europe,
and feels a calling from mainland China
because “people are seemingly fearless of
each other,” particularly in the central or
southwestern regions of the country. South
America might also be an option, where
new experiences and sounds await him.
When he was in Hong Kong to perform with
Eli Keszler at Empty Gallery, the pair also
recorded part of an upcoming release at
the disused Mount Davis Fortress, a storied
location where colonial British military
forces were targeted by heavy Japanese
aerial bombardments during the Battle of
Hong Kong in December 1941. “We were
shown a lot of different options for locations
to work around Hong Kong, and we decided
on the Mount Davis Fortress based on the
shape of the concrete structure and its
environment, which seemed potentially
very interesting for recording,” Keszler said.
“We were both curious about its history
and character after seeing pictures of this
remarkable place.”
In the meantime, Becker has left us
with two volumes of the imagined sonic
scribblings of an occult, long-lost tribe.
He has recorded and mapped their
soundscapes, civilization and traditions.
These aural designs are our gateways into
the grandness of history, and might even
reconnect us with the rituals and legacies of
our own forebears.