Ohm Hourani^CA/QC

Assembling an ambitious bricolage of taut, percussive tech house and swinging, free jazz influences, Hourani brings the folkloric roots of his Eastern upbringing into the world of contemporary house music. Marked by a passion for seamless engineering and minimalistic flair, his releases thrum with the organic liveliness that comes from a passion for uncharted sonic exploration.

Born in Jordan, Hourani developed a club presence at an early age, building a formidable reputation in clubs from Lebanon to Beirut. Drawn to Montreal in 2009 to pursue a degree in electronic sound engineering at Musitechnic Institute, Hourani would go on to teach at the same Institute later in life, while honing the intricacies of sound engineering with his own fascination for vinyl culture and dance music. Hourani would go on to tweak his own strain of minimal, overweight low end and deep house soul through his Anoma label, including a much-lauded 2014 collaboration with Amsterdam house pioneer San Proper. Hourani sought out other opportunities for collaboration, such as multiple performances with Do Mi and her textural, eloquent vocal stylings, which elegantly share sonic real estate with his tightly rolling rhythms to evoke a kind of future-soul. Hourani’s first full length album Jazz of the Machine shows two impulses at work—a near-obsessive attention to the science behind programmed drum machines' frequencies and algorithms, and jazz's freewheeling improvisational chaos—Ricardo Villalobos meet Miles Davis.

For his latest foray at MUTEK, Hourani will bring his latest album to life, weaving a sonic canvas of numerous organic and synthetic layers into a performance supported by a cast of musicians that includes singer Do Mi and veteran producer and bassist Ben Nevile—in which they inject oxygen straight into the veins of the machine.