Monday 19 January 2026, 7.30pm
Following the acclaimed success of RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW’s second album ALIVE! (Discus Music) ~ praised by critics, featured across multiple “Best of 2023” lists, and celebrated in ‘Reader’s Digest’s Top Albums of 2023 ~ the ensemble now jumps into a bold new collaboration.
CIRCLES, RHRN’s forthcoming third album, draws on Charlotte Keeffe’s fascination with music ~ like life ~ being full of precious cycles and circles. To expand these ideas with electrifying imagination, RHRN is thrilled to welcome “the Madonna of the Turntables,” Mariam Rezaei, whose fierce creativity makes her a natural force for what’s to come...
Widely recognised as one of the UK’s most exciting improvisers, Charlotte Keeffe continues to astonish audiences; her performances are “in equal parts energetically joyous and delicately moving” (Cheltenham Jazz Festival). Within RHRN, she passionately leads a thriving laboratory of squelchy, sploshy, splashy Sound Brush (trumpet+/flugelhorn+) explorations ~ a space where gestures, textures, colours, and emotions are continuously unearthed.
“Keeffe shows notable strength of character as she runs the sonic and emotional gamut...” ~ Kevin Le Gendre, Jazzwise
Perhaps most thrilling of all: you are invited into this world. Audience members and listeners are warmly encouraged to become part of the soundscape ~ joining Keeffe, Ashley John Long, Ben Handysides, Moss Freed, and Mariam Rezaei with your voices, instruments, objects, toys, sketch pads... anything you wish. Together, you’ll help shape the circles, cycles, connections and wholeness at the heart of this music ~ Creative Freedom For All.
As Jazzwise declared, Keeffe’s work is “avant-garde for all!” ~ and RHRN’s new ventures seem certain to carry that ethos even further.
Charlotte Keeffe / sound brushes (trumpet and flugelhorn) and compositions
Ashley John Long / double bass
Ben Handysides / drums
Moss Freed / guitar
Mariam Rezaei / turntables
Mariam Rezaei (she/her) is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer whose work spans experimental new music, free improvisation, noise, mutant club music and hip-hop. The Anglo-Iranian virtuoso expands on classic turntablist skills by developing new techniques with vinyl, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Rezaei’s approach has been recognised by The Wire’s Peter Margasak as a “radical expansion of the artform.” Her innovations include free juggling, turntable sines, needle dripping, fractured loops and needle weaving. Across solo, duo, ensemble, orchestral and operatic works, Rezaei takes the philosophy and aesthetics of turntablism into new territory, creating wildly inventive, energetic and beautiful music.
Following on from the highly acclaimed Fractured (2024) and her ground-breaking Blud/Skeen/Bown trilogy (2019-2023), Rezaei will release Selected Adequate Works in early 2027. A major step forward in live turntablist composition, the double album captures the breadth of Rezaei’s vision from warped techno and mangled noise, to shimmering psychedelia and refracted chorales. Each track is recorded live in a single take, with Rezaei transforming her own samples alongside contributions from Elvin Brandhi, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, Julien Desprez, Lukas Koenig, Eleni Poulou, Lucy Railton and Stewart Smith.
Her major commissions include Scholar’s Record for Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, a four turntable tour-de-force which drew on the legendary festival’s audio archives, and 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, an orchestral collaboration with Matthew Shlomowitz for IMD Darmstadt/Tectonics Glasgow. This autumn, she premieres new projects with Ensemble Intercontemporain and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
In addition to her solo work, 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. Other collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Ensemble Contrechamps, Fritz Welch, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul and Ali Robertson.
In November 2022, Rezaei 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. She is currently based in Newcastle, United Kingdom.
