Malika Makouf Rasmussen

Early life

Rasmussen was born 1965 in Algiers, Algeria, to Algerian-Norwegian parents. Her family left Algeria and stayed in Budapest, Hungary, for a year before in 1970 they ended in Norway. Rasmussen started to play classical guitar at the age nine and later picked up the electric bass. When fifteen she went to stay in Paris for a year with her father. She resided in Fredrikstad after returning to Norway, and was involved in different bands there. She studied music at Sønstevold Institute of Music and at nineteen she graduated from Greåker Music College.

Career

Rasmussen started her professional career in Paris, France (1985). During this period she was inspired by the creative friction emerging when people of different backgrounds are put together, and she found the way back to what she has described as her roots and began to develop a musical expression within the then new genre termed world music. When she returned to Oslo in the 1990s, she worked as a session musician and initiated several of her own band projects beside musical and cultural studies at Telemark University College and the Norwegian Academy of Music.

She has toured widely in Europe and Africa, and has performed at a number of festivals and concert halls around the world, like the Harare International Music and Film Festival, Olympia Paris, Tune In (Stockholm), Great Bear (New York), MELA (Oslo), Vanløse Kulturhus (Copenhagen).

Rasmussen has collaborated on numerous recordings and has released four solo albums, Exit Cairo (2006) including with Bugge Wesseltoft and Mari Boine, On Club (2008), Urbanized (2010) and So Easy So High (2012). Today (2016) she plays a number of instruments and is working on a master of philosophy at the University of Oslo.

Honors

Solo albums

Collaborations

Single albums