Porest – aka: Mark Gergis is a composer, performer, producer and international audio/visual archivist. Across twenty years, Porest has released several solo and group efforts incorporating multi-layered music, pop songs, audio collage, field recordings, and surrealistic radio dramas. His solo and group live performances slip between heady multi-instrumentation, political dirty bombs and absurdist irreverence. Gergis was a co-founder of the experimental Bay Area music and performance collective Mono Pause (1993–2004) and its offshoot Neung Phak, which performs inspired renditions of music from southeast Asia. Since 2003, with the Sublime Frequencies label, an ethnographic music and film collective out of Seattle, Washington – and more recently, with his own record label – Sham Palace, Mark has found a platform to aptly share decades of research and countless hours of archived international music, film footage and field recordings acquired during extensive travels in the Middle East, South East Asia and elsewhere. He is also responsible for introducing Syrian singer Omar Souleyman to western audiences, compiling four releases on Sublime Frequencies, one on Sham Palace, and producing and co-arranging Omar and Bjork’s collaborative EP, Crystalline in 2011. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.