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 dramatic soprano, improvising vocalist and opera-maker from Basrah, Iraq. Her work is focused on the themes of liberation and love. Her current work includes a trio with Pat Thomas and Khabat Abas (Manara) and with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols, a duo with Maggie Nicols and an underground electronic / opera duo with GRANDMIXXER. She is working on a new opera with Jennifer Farmer, In The Teeth of the Wind, due to be debuted in 2026. She continues to be a student in the life-long study of maqam and Arabic music and has released albums of Iraqi folk songs and interpretations of Arabic poetry by living and past poets.
Her most recent releases include improvised solo opera suites "Three Ages of Woman/Mother", "Self Lost / Self Found" and "Return/Exile" and a protest album with Maggie Nicols "Free, Free". Her most recent release is "Immersion" with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols and upcoming in September is Manara's debut album, both out on the UK label Discus.
Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer working across experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club music and hip-hop. Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time using classic turntablist skills and her own innovative techniques.
The Anglo-Iranian virtuoso’s latest solo release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) has been praised by The Wire, Uncut and Bandcamp Daily, and was one of The Quietus’ cassette releases of 2024. Rezaei is a member of the international free music supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the pioneering Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez, 1984 with Kobe Van Cauwenberghe and Sakina Abdou, and Fire! Orchestra.
Her co-composition with Matthew Shlomowitz, 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, was premiered at IMD Darmstadt 2023, while in October 2025, she premiered Scholar’s Record, a major commission for the 75th Donaueschinger Musiktage that draws on the legendary festival’s audio archives. Other recent projects include a collaboration with Ensemble Contrechamps and upcoming commissions from Ensemble Intercontemporain and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
Other collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Fritz Welch, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul, Kenosist and Ali Robertson.
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.
