Our good friends SAPAT are presenting the following amazing FREE show:

SAPAT

porKistra

ABDUR-RA’UF GHARIB

Saturday July 25th, 2026
at B-Side
1076 E. Washington Street, 2nd Floor
Louisville, KY 40206

FREE ADMISSION

21+
Doors: 7:00 pm
Music: 7:30 pm

For twenty-five years, Louisville’s SAPAT has explored drone, minimalist composition, and experiments that blur the boundaries between rock, jazz, folk, and free improvisation, creating performances where time, resonance, and collective listening become compositional materials. This concert features the premiere of Lyric Dispositions, a new work by ABDUR-RA’UF GHARIB. Although Ra’uf spent more than fifty years making music in private, he only began performing publicly a few years ago after joining SAPAT. For Lyric Dispositions, SAPAT divides into four trios that weave through GHARIB‘selectronic score, creating a performance that is equal parts composition, improvisation, and discovery.

porKistra is Louisville’s premier porch-centric acoustic quick strike instrumental duo. Equally at home on stages, pedestrian bridges, tunnels, or in front of the fireplace, the instrumentation is bizarre, the interplay compelling, the genre elusive. Thomas Deakin on clarinet and Stephanie Nilles on melodica wend and wind through tight compositions with wild flights of improvisation, humor, and psychosis. Please enjoy this imaginary folk music from the land of our hearts.  

Despite making music at home for more than fifty years, ABDUR-RA’UF GHARIB only began performing with other musicians about three years ago, when Lowe Sutherland invited him to join SAPAT. Before that, life had other assignments. He and his wife raised five daughters while he worked first building massive pipe organs and later as a railroad conductor. Neither profession leaves much room for rehearsals, though both seem like reasonable preparation for experimental music.

His stories have an uncanny way of collapsing decades into a single afternoon. He saw John Cage in Alabama in the 1970s. He talked with Sun Ra on the telephone in the 1980s. He belongs to a reading group working through Rumi’s Masnavi which has six books and roughly 25,000 couplets. By the time they finish, Montana may have drifted somewhere else. One suspects he has shaken hands with a few ghosts but is too polite to mention it.

These days he plays guitar for four to six hours every day, wandering effortlessly between Bach and the ecstatic wreckage of Sonny Sharrock, Derek Bailey, and Henry Kaiser. Somewhere along the way he also began composing electronic music that sounds as though several weather systems have agreed to share one central nervous system.

Soon ABDUR-RA’UF GHARIB will be moving to Montana, making this July 25th performance his final appearance with SAPAT. The evening will feature the premiere of his composition Lyric Dispositions. For this piece, the ensemble will be divided into four trios, and Kris Abplanalp will attempt to conduct them.

There is something fitting about this music arriving just before a departure. Compositions, unlike people, are usually good at being in two places at once. -Kris Abplanalp.

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