»I never want musicians to feel restricted or obedient in the way I once felt within classical music.«

Khabat Abas is an artist of many facets. As a cellist, she is mainly active in improvised music—as a soloist and in groups such as the Non-Ensemble Sweden, the London Improvisation Orchestra and the Duo Moment. As a self-taught music instrument maker, she has been devoting herself to unusual materials and techniques for the cello for many years. The music instruments she creates open up idiosyncratic soundscapes. Some of them resemble sculptures rather than traditional cellos and, due to their materials, they are metaphorically charged. Among Abas's music instrument creations is a »Bomb Shell Cello,« made from a bomb shell she found at a bazaar in her hometown of Sulaymaniyah. She also uses materials such as a coat made of safety pins, which she wraps around her cello, animal skin, which she uses to replace the wooden cover of the instrument, and a device for the playing hand, which deliberately restricts its range of motion. Abas' conceptual compositions and installations carry ambiguous socio-cultural connotations and often encompass the body, its limits and possibilities. She currently lives in London. In 2026, she will come to Berlin as a fellow of the DAAD Artist Program. In conversation with field notes, Khabat Abas talks about her plans for this year, the challenges of building a cello on one’s own, and how her youth in Kurdistan-Iraq shaped her relationship with sound.

You’re currently pursuing your PhD at the Goldsmiths, University of London. What is the subject of your thesis?

Khabat Abas (KA): My instrument or the concept of all my instruments, that is: why I changing them, and the experience of how the relationship between me and my instrument leads to a different knowledge.

What do you mean by different knowledge?

KA: I’m a classically trained cellist, which means I have a certain method, a certain technique, and a certain way of understanding the instrument. But when I change the material of the instrument, I cannot use that same technique. I have to gain a different knowledge to apply to this new instrument. I have to interact differently with the material that I made it of because it's not capable of doing the same things as a normal wooden cello. In the beginning this was very difficult for me because classical training tells you not to come out of the box of classical music, in which you have four strings with a bow, nothing else. That’s what the compositions you’re playing are made for.
When I make instruments with other materials I have to rethink because their shape is that of a cello, the strings are the same but the sound isn’t and neither is my relation to the instrument. I either have to play it in a different way oradapt techniques of other instruments to it. The skin cello, for example, I can play as a drum. In order to practice drumming I tried a combination between daf, which is a Kurdish percussion style, and a cello. And I extended theobjects I use to play the cello from a bow to percussion objects like mallets or a ball to rub it on the skin.

It sounds like you’re challenging yourself with these inventions. What what made you do that? Were you bored with your instrument?

KA: I didn’t start inventing new instruments because I was bored in a simple sense, it came from growing up in Kurdistan, Iraq, during the Gulf War, where nothing was stable, not even the tools we played music with. When I learned to play the cello, we didn’t have proper strings, so when one snapped, we tied a knot in it and kept playing. You can imagine how impossible it is to hit a perfect pitch on a knotted string. That struggle shaped the way I hear sound, and it eventually inspired one of my conceptual pieces, »Beethoven in Baghdad«, where musicians actually perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s music using knotted strings. It reveals how music transforms under pressure, just like I had to.
Later, the routine of orchestra life started to feel limiting. That’s when I began improvising and questioning the instrument itself: What if the material of the cello changed? How would the sound and my relationship to it change?
I went to a number of Western instrument makers—one of them in Berlin, actually—, and I asked them to build a skin cello for me. But they all just laughed at me and said it was not possible to make and instrument like this and to play on it. They were trained to build classical instruments for playing classical music. In this mindset it is not easy to adapt your thinking to the change of the material. So in 2016, I made the skin cello myself. It has a wooden frame shaped like a cello but the cover is made out of animal skin.

In your pieces and improvisations—even with the classical cello—you have a very specific way of creating a connection between the instrument and the performer. One time I saw you pick up a hand full of sand in the middle of a performance and rub it on the surface of the cello. It looked like you were caressing the instrument and damaging its wood at the same time.

KA: I try to use all the techniques that I learned from my different instruments. Some of them I learned by mistake, when they happened during a performance. For example, in a residency in Huddersfield I made this instrument in a frame, which is like a room full of strings. I went inside this room to play them. During performance I worked with the bow. The rosin got onto my hand and all of a sudden I was making this strange squeaky sound. In another performance—just like in the one you saw—I cracked some Roisin and just tried it on a normal cello. That gave me so much joy because I felt deeply connected with the experience of this sound, going inside it and witnessing it become something different. What I do when I am playing the instrument is to explore the sounds from a distance and then get closer to them with the various techniques I developed for the different instruments.

In the score for your piece »Kch« from 2022 you ask the performer to use their breath until they get too tired to continue and to use their bow until it gets caught up in the string. These actions have something very intimate and at the same time very demanding about them. What are the effects? How do you deal with this when you write for other musicians?

KA: When I work with other musicians, I always think about how willing they are to step into unfamiliar territory. Some of the techniques I use ask them to rethink how they relate to their instrument, for example, rubbing rosin directly onto the body of the instrument. Many hesitate, and I understand why. Instruments carry a kind of sacredness in classical culture.

But for me, the true value of an instrument lies in the sound it can unlock, in how it can expand a performer’s expression, not in keeping it untouched. I never want musicians to feel restricted or obedient in the way I once felt within classical music. That’s why many of my pieces use graphic scores or open instructions. I give performers space to interpret, to discover, to find their own voice within the work. The score becomes more of a suggestion than a fixed map.

»Kch« follows this philosophy. It is a piece that asks the performer to breathe until they reach the edge of exhaustion. These gestures are intimate and demanding by design. The title »Kch« — meaning »daughter« or »girl« – relates to the poetry of the Kurdish writer Sara Feqe Khidr, who writes about the pressures placed on women in her society. 

In the piece, the performer’s breath becomes a physical echo of the poem, a way of making the difficulty of breathing, of existing, visible and audible. It’s not about pushing a musician to their limit; it’s about giving form to a reality that too often remains unseen.

How does your collaboration with the musicians you write for usually unfold?

KA: I’m not a composer in the traditional sense of the word. Usually I’m not writing my compositions for someone specific or as a performance or a sound installation. Most of the time I have a concept, for which I need to find the right medium. I don’t have a fixed group that I play with or write for. Composing to me means developing the way that I need to express this concept and then giving the performer the liberty to work with it. My pieces have been performed in Kurdistan, in Germany – like in Klangwerkstatt for instance –, in Sweden, in the UK, and each time they have taken on a different form. It's not like I write the composition and the group comes to play it. When I’m invited to participate in an event, I suggest a composition, which I think could work with the context.

You will be in Berlin from May 2026 on as fellow of the DAAD Artist Program. What are your plans for that year?

KA: My plan is simply to make sound, make noise, and connect with artists. Berlin has an incredible community, and there are already a few people I would like to collaborate with. I’m hoping to realise an idea I’ve had for a long time, a sound installation. And I want to finish building a new instrument. I started it years ago but never completed it,  and it will take time and knowledge to finally bring it to life.

What does this new music instrument entail?

KA: I don't know yet. Each instrument that I make comes from the idea of a need. But when I start building I don't know the outcome. Maybe it will be something impressive or maybe it won’t. For me that’s a good starting point. When I made the bombshell cello I expected a completely different outcome because it was made out of metal. I had made a prototype from a tam-tam, which was very resonant. I put a string on the tam-tam and the sound was amazing. With the bombshell I expected the same thing but then there was just this dry, annoying sound emanating from the instrument. The material of the bombshell cello is very thick and not resonating at all, so I had to amplify it and do a lot of things with it before it was working.

It will probably go the same way with my new instrument. Sometimes I need a sound that I cannot make acoustically and I’ve started working with a small equipment of electronics. But I find it distracting to interact with a computer while I play my cello at the same time. When I touch a computer, I don't know what I am playing. I forget it and I cannot connect with brain, body, hand and instrument in that way. I want to avoid this distraction and build an instrument that has these capacities. The instrument that I’m making may still have the same shape as a cello but it will be quite different from the acoustic ones that I made. I don't know if I'm gonna succeed.

You you said you were planning to collaborate with some other artists in Berlin. 

KA (laughs): Yeah… I didn't tell them yet, actually. I have a few people on my mind. But I will ask them first and then I will tell you. Not now. Sorry.