Against The Clock: Khyam Allami

Khyam Allami is an Iraqi-British musician and composer whose career has spanned several decades and multiple instruments. Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Allami decided to reconnect with his roots, and began to study the Oud, Arabic and Iraqi music, which he explored on his 2011 debut solo album, Resonance/Dissonance. Allami’s current focus, which he launched as part of this year’s CTM Festival, is Apotome, a project developed with creative studio Counterpoint. Apotome is a generative music system focused on transcultural tunings and their subsets, which has been designed to operate alongside Leimma a sister application that is used to explore and create these tunings. Both Apotome and Leimma run on free-to-use, accessible browser-based applications. Allami’s aim is to highlight the biases present in modern DAWs and production tools, in order to create transcultural tools for music-making that allow anyone to explore musical cultures outside of the Western system. In this episode of Against The Clo