Wednesday 30 June 2021, 7.30pm
Dramatic soprano, composer and improvising vocalist Alya Al-Sultani joins experimental turntablist and composer Mariam Rezaei for their debut duo performance at Cafe Oto. Eschewing stereotypes, they will warp and weave elements of opera, hiphop, noise and free improv together. Both Al-Sultani and Rezaei will playing with Middle Eastern poetry, vocal improv and instrumental samples in a free-form collaboration that will push at the boundaries of two turntables and one microphone.
Award-winning experimental composer Cassandra Miller is known for her large-scale orchestral works with the likes of Charles Curtis, Plus-Minus and BBC SSO. In this rare live performance, Miller will improvise solo, moving between vocals and instruments. This special performance will be luminous and promises to unveil more of the profoundly beautiful music that we love from Miller.
Experimental composer, performer and visual artist Amy Cutler will perform across musical mediums. Her delicate mixture of reductionism, experimental electronics, found sounds and ethereal vocals make up her gorgeously unique sound palette. Fresh from the release of her new album ’the ends (also end) of (the)earth and variants’, Cutler will perform live with multiple instruments and experimental vocals.
Alya Al-Sultani is a vocalist and composer based in London, UK. Her first musical experiences were Iraqi folk songs sung by her great grandmother and radio broadcasts of Um Kolthum, Abdel-Halim and Fairouz which she listened to with her family while drinking sweet black tea infused with cardamom. After leaving Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, her family settled in Tottenham, North London where she began to discover the incredible new sounds of the 80s and music from the Caribbean.
Her musical education was entirely classically-focussed, on piano and voice. She learned the importance of technique, tradition, theory, respecting fellow musicians and respecting the music. But she did not learn freedom and it is this she has sought for the last decade. The pursuit of freedom in music is driven by her aesthetic, her immigrant experience and her Eastern feminism.
Apart from working on her own projects, Alya enjoys debuting new music for contemporary composers and experimenting with opera, including the integration of improvisation techniques, microtonal ideas and Eastern influences.
Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer. Working at the nexus of experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club musics and hip-hop, Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Her work has been described as “genuinely ground-breaking” (London Jazz News 2022) and “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian 2022). Praised by The Wire, Uncut and Bandcamp Daily, her latest release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) is one of The Quietus’s cassette releases of 2024.In November 2022, she received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists in recognition of her contribution to music composition. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH, and is writing a book on turntablism for Repeater.
In addition to her solo work, Rezaei’s projects include a Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez (making their US premiere at Big Ears 2025), supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, trumpeter/electronics Gabriele Mitelli and drummer Lukas Koenig), and orchestral compositions with Matthew Shlomowitz (6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra). She recently performed Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music with guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe. Other collaborations include duos with Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Valentina Magaletti, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Lukas Koenig, Mette Rasmussen, Gabriele Mitelli, Okkyung Lee and Ali Robertson, Black Top with Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss and Leon Foster Thomas, and a quartet with DJ Sniff, Rex Chen and DJ SlowPitchSound at Taipei Biennial 2023.
CASSANDRA MILLER is a Canadian composer living in London. Her notated compositions often explore transcription as a creative process, through which the expressive vocal qualities of pre-existing music are both magnified and transfigured. Other compositions sometimes take the form of collaborations and that combine automatic singing and mimicry to create vulnerable and hospitable spaces for deep listening.
Amy is an artist, cultural geographer, and live cinema artist who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. In her career in the GeoHumanities she has completed a PhD, a post-doc, and an ECR fellowship, and she has exhibited her work or run live events with organisations including Somerset House, Sheffield Doc Fest, the Natural History Museum, and Kew Gardens. Her geography training impacts her work as a musician, performer, and designer, and she works frequently on the production of immersive and live cinema and exhibition events provoking and changing the public conversation around ideas of space, geography, and nature-cultures. She is also a cross-disciplinary lecturer and teaches more publicly too, often developing unusual live sessions and field-trips for museums, festivals, and galleries.
