Thursday 9 October 2025, 7.30pm
Brief Encounters is a London based platform for experimental and emerging sound. For its first time at Cafe OTO, the series presents an evening of live transmissions moving between tenderness and intensity. This edition gathers international voices from Berlin, Cyprus and Copenhagen, each carving out their own terrain of sound, at once fragile, forceful and alive in the room.
Joined by t0ni (Berlin), whose stripped back melodies carry raw emotion into immersive, shifting forms; Spivak (Cyprus), returning with new work that folds myth and pop into intimate liturgies and deconstructed dance; and jjjacob (Copenhagen), head of the Katharsis label, merging radiant synths and fractured rhythms into cathartic release. The evening is completed by Basic Chanel (London), founder of Untitled 909.
t0ni is an Italo-Australian electronic music producer, DJ,and founder of the label and art collective Soul Feeder. His work as a producer conveys raw emotions through carefully crafted melodies and loops stripped down to their essence, seeking a subtle, ever-shifting minimalistic balance. With his latest record “Ego Death Memories”, t0ni has further solidified his sound and aesthetic, building on his distinct approach to electronic music and pushing his artistic vision even further. Deeply personal in nature, the album translates the emotions of lived experience into sound, capturing the immediate, intense feelings of the individual. His uniquely melodic and minimalistic approach conveys raw, crushing emotions, drawing the listener into a visceral, immersive experience.
t0ni has gained recognition in the experimental electronic music community through his highly eclectic DJ sets and live performances, touring across Europe and internationally. Over years of performing, he has shared the stage with some of the most influential artists in the scene and played a key role in bringing people together through his Electronic avantgardepostingTM group in the mid-2010s. After spending several years living and performing in China, t0ni is now based in Berlin, where he continues to shape the local experimental music scene. He has performed at many recognized music events and festivals, including MENT Festival, Ars Electronica, and CTM Festival.
Maria Spivak (b. 1989, Limassol) is a musician and sound artist based in Cyprus. She makes her return to Cafe Oto with Brief Encounters with a body of new work, following the release of her 2023 and 2024 projects 'You Win Again' and 'Violences, respectively. Her work is a play on the nuances and poetics of pop, exploring themes that allude to her myth-inspiring heritage in a folk-tainted voyage of esoteric explorations. Her debut LP, ΜΕΤΆ ΤΟ ΡΈΙΒ, released on Ecstatic Recordings in 2020, is a chiaroscuro blend of hypnagogic pop, smudged synths, and ambient electronics, infused with the spirit of the local DIY scene. Her tape release, Rare Backwards, was presented as an addendum to the LP in the same year.Spivak has worked towards this seemingly effortless style and conception of atmosphere for a decade, flowering from MA studies in Architecture in the UK, to develop her roots in Cyprus, where she draws on the energies of a small but active local scene, as well as the island’s agitated recent history, against a backdrop of myth-inspiring topography, that all help imbue her style of sound sculpture with a distinctive, quietly conflicted soul. Her lyrics rotate effortlessly from Greek to English, her live performances comprising intimate sonic liturgies with bursts of energetic and often deconstructed 90’s-inspired techno.
jjjacob is a Copenhagen-based electronic artist who heads up local label Katharsis. Exploring the line between fragility and force, softness and impact, merging radiant synths, fractured samples and unpredictable rhythms, his tracks can feel like half-forgotten dreams, drifting and delicate one moment, breaking open the next. The music moves between meditative calm and rugged emotional intensity, carrying both beauty and unease. He treats music as a language for what cannot be spoken, translating delight and despair into something that moves through air. In 2020, he founded katharsis to release music by artists around the world that seeks transformation through emotional release. Each live performance becomes a cathartic ritual, each track a step through uncharted emotional terrain. In the noise and the quiet, jjjacob searches for the moment where change begins.
