Monolith Cocktail Blog

Our continuing partnership with the leading Italian culture/music site and platform Kalporz. Words by Monica Mazzoli. Translation by Dominic Valvona.

Each month the Monolith Cocktail shares posts from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. May’s swap finds Monica Mazzoli introducing us to the Belgian-Iraqi trio Use Knife.

“You can’t separate politics from art. […] When we worked together with Saif, that was already a political thing”. With this clear and concise statement released to The Quietus in 2023, Kwinten Mordijck – one of the three minds that gave life to the Belgian-Iraqi trio Use Knife – emphasized the socio-political nature of the artistic project that he was setting up with Stef Heeren and Saif Al-Qaissy . Almost two years have passed and on March 28^th, 2025 the second album under the name Use Knife, État Coupable, was released, but Mordijck ’s sentence now rings truer than ever.

The trio’s first album The Shedding of Skin (2022) was born from the meeting of Mordijck, Heeren and Al-Qaissy during a musical research residency at the cultural center of Gent Viernulvier: long sonic jams in which to confront the need to “feel the other’s point of view when making music”, and to think about how “someone from another culture reacts when making music with you” (words in quotation marks by Heeren – always – to The Quietus). 

On one side two Belgian musicians who have abandoned their previous sound guise between alt-folk and electroacoustic music ( Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat ) to experiment with analogue and modular synths and measure themselves against the rhythmic complexity of Arabic and Iraqi music (in this case), on the other, an Iraqi singer and percussionist who left his homeland (Iraq) to escape the war and gives voice to his experiences in music (read the lyrics of “Freedom, Asshole”).

Two distant worlds: neither of the two prevails over the other but a rhythmic magma with many facets is created between West and East. The opening track of État Coupable, the latest album by the trio mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem in My Heart), “Demain Sera Mieux” is paradigmatic in this sense. In the four and a half minutes of the piece, a 10/6 time signature (popular in Iraq but also in Armenian and Turkish music) is grafted onto a vortex of synths. Or again: the vibrations, the industrial beats of a track like “ Iraqi Drum Set ” are also ignited by the daf percussions (i.e. a frame drum that is part of the Middle Eastern musical tradition) and the chaos of words resulting from sampling the trio’s conversations about Iraqi instruments and their pronunciation.

The sound discourse of Use Knife (the name comes from a verse by Current 93, “the stars spell grammar or use knife”) is sharp and in media res: there are no preambles, we enter into the heart of an artistic creation that wants to become action. MM