Hassina Sakhri is an electroacoustic artist creating visionary soundscapes that are both healing and contemplative, drawing from intuition and the intellect. Her works strike a balance between control and improvisation. And she draws from a diverse variety of musical genres to inform her work.
From a young age, Hassina was drawn to music. She began studying European classical singing at the age of eight, performing in several choirs. At 15, she received private classical vocal training at the Conservatoire with Gillian Howard. She studied creative education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Lyon, before moving to London to train with Peter Harrison from the Royal Academy of Music.
At the same time, Hassina studied engineering and music technology at Westminster College and composition classes at Morley College, as well as singing in the Morley choir.
Throughout this time, Hassina experimented with many musical genres, including Gregorian Chants, Latino House and Jazz. This work garnered her recording deals in Japan, Belgium and the UK.
Despite this in-depth knowledge and success in music, she wanted to explore a more liberatory mode. She began improvising within her compositions. These new works evolved and combined with Hassina’s photography to produce sonic art pieces accompanied by photography and video productions.
It was this new work that helped her earn her Masters in Contemporary Arts and Music with distinction at Oxford Brookes University. She studied electroacoustic music with Apostolos Loufopoulos and Annette Vande Gorne.
It is here that her work takes on the form we see today: a combination of form and the formless. Drawing from sources of mystical works and the use of sound in healing modalities around the world, her sonic art also began shaping around new purposes.
Hassina’s process often begins visually, with sounds gradually accumulating around the idea of the sonic space she wants to create. Rather than focusing on the linear score, her work accrues texture and meaning through layering, montage, collage, ambient sounds and fragments of poetry. These works are then further processed, generating soundscapes that are consciously constructed while leaving open the possibilities for synchronicity through improvisation and discovery.
Many works integrate samples from nature and the patterns of religious ritual as if coming from some more primordial place in the human spirit. Narratives emerge and dissipate over the long pieces, haunting the experience rather than defining it.
Hassina creates sonic art both in stand-alone pieces as well as for meditation. The meditation works create hypnotic, undulating auditory experiences — finding in-and-out flow patterns in nature to serve as a baseline to improvise over.