45 years · Tunis → Berlin → Samarkand
One line,never lifted.
I am not a label and not an agency. I am a person with a life's work — and that is best told as one continuous line.
Born in Tunisia in 1954, in Berlin since 1975. In between there is no rupture but a connection: what I heard on the radio as a child is the same thing I later brought onto Berlin stages — only that nobody here knew it.
Over four decades that grew into a profession for which there is no degree course. You learn it by doing it: contracts, visas, soundchecks, programme booklets, hosting, night shifts at the turntables and conversations with ensembles who do not speak a word of German and are still supposed to be on stage on time.
What remains is a handful of houses, a series that would not exist without me, and a voice many people recognised on Berlin radio. And the conviction that musical borders should be dismantled, not guarded.
The series is called Café Global, the voice Nouris Radyoun — and what can be booked from it today is listed under Services.
The timeline
Stations of one line.
Born
Born in Tunisia. Malouf, chaabi and the radio of the Mediterranean are the first music I know — long before I know you can make a profession out of it.
Arrival
I come to West Berlin. A city with a wall, with space and with a curiosity that did not exist elsewhere in that form. Everything that follows is organised from here.
Piranha
First stop in the professional music business: Piranha, out of which WOMEX later grew — the world's largest trade fair for global music. Here I learn how international concerts actually come about.
Concert, dance and theatre promoter
More than three decades as a promoter for concerts, dance and theatre at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It is the longest and most formative collaboration of my working life.
Café Global
I found and run Café Global — the series in which audience and music from all over the world meet as equals. It becomes the signature my work is recognised by.
Backstage · à la Carte
Presenter at RBB Radio Multikulti, among others with the shows «Backstage» and «à la Carte» — until the station was shut down in 2008. The voice remains: Nouris Radyoun carries the idea on.
CD productions
Music editing and CD productions at the Wergo label. An artist profile on Discogs documents what has remained tangible of it.
Sharq Taronalari
Contributing to the UNESCO-listed festival Sharq Taronalari on the Registan in Samarkand. The point where the bridge reaches beyond the Middle East all the way into Central Asia.
Attitude
Why I do it this way.
No roster, an ear
I do not sell a list of artists. I listen until I have understood what an ensemble actually does — and only then do I think about which stage it belongs on.
Origin is not a genre
«World music» is a shelf label, not a description. Someone from Tunis does not have to sound like Tunis. My programmes treat musicians as authors, not as ambassadors.
A chance for the unfamiliar
The sentence above everything: culture is the ability to give the unfamiliar in our lives a chance. Everything else — dramaturgy, visas, riders — is craft in the service of that sentence.
Culture is the ability to give the unfamiliar in our lives a chance.
Read on
What came of it.
Eight programmes, ten formats and a radio voice. See what is concretely bookable out of these 45 years — or write to me directly.