Tuesday 21 October 2025, 7.30pm
Please note that Jamie Hamilton's set makes use of stroboscopic video.
Bristol label Collapsing Drums launches its new compilation with a night of playful experimentalism and compelling sonics, showcasing a small slice of the 23 artists featured on the cassette — available in pre-release form for the first time at the event.
Turntablist Mariam Rezaei performs two duo sets: one with Mr AKA Amazing, who crafts vulnerable lo-fi hip hop via Shepherd’s Bush arts centre 54 The Gate; the other with Evo Ethel, polymath lynchpin of Bristol art-rock outfit Ex Agent, whose recent EP on Collapsing Drums was named Cal Cashin’s favourite of the year in Loud & Quiet. The night also features Glasgow's Han (GLARC): expect darkly humorous, skewed spoken word and electronics, framed around her lived experience working in the NHS. Jamie Hamilton’s layered, contemporary classical set will add nuance to the chaos...
The cassette includes tracks from Robyn Rocket, Elaine Mitchener, Graham Dunning, Valentina Magaletti & Fannny Chiarello, Sculpture, DJ Marcelle and many other top artists.
“Collapsing Drums tells the stories that matter in a post-pandemic world” – The Wire
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.
Duane Warner (known as Mr AKA Amazing) makes distinctively vulnerable lo-fi hip-hop and distorted EDM, which he builds around voice notes using his phone. His softly spoken lyrics are raw and vulnerable, often about feeling misunderstood, although when performing live he enters a hyped-up surrealist MC mode. Duane loves to collaborate, and recently stormed Bristol with an impromptu appearance with super-versatile drummer Dan Johnson, which has led to this first ever London appearance of the duo.
'Illegibility Mistakable: Master AKA Mr Amazing on Collapsing Drums collects several tracks from earlier, self-released albums – Think Big and Am I Being Unreasonable – into one righteous lump of lo-fi hiphop that’s somewhere between cLOUDDEAD and Adam Bohman. “MANGOBAY” sounds like someone wrestling with the ideas of life and relationships while speaking through a broken supermarket tannoy.' — Spenser Tomson, The Wire
Evo Ethel is a Welsh multi-instrumentalist, sound artist, and improviser currently based in Bristol, their solo practise weaves together elements of free-jazz, music-concrete, and electro-acoustic experimentation, often using objects, woodwind, and electronics to craft fractured soundscapes layered with improvised, noise led, multi-phonic woodwind. They have performed solo at En Masse Festival (Bristol), and took part in a one-off duo performance alongside Bridget Ferrill for the ‘Improvised and Experimental’ series at Hosek Contemporary (Berlin).
Rooted in Bristol’s DIY and experimental scenes, Evo’s group work with Ex Agent and Foot Foot has led to a mix of improvised, and non-improvised performances alongside Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Mark Stewart and Gareth Sager (The Pop Group), and Deb Googe (My Bloody Valentine). As a co-founder of the No Clique event series with Improv’s Greatest Hits, Evo collaboratively curated evenings of one off, spontaneous musical groups championing an ethos of unpredictability, and community led experimentation.
Han - Han is a part-time noisemaker, part-time healthcare worker, part-time runner of the inimitable Events Research Programme institution (a monthly subscription-based events series), part-time recipient of the title of Scotland's “most successful cash-in-hand DJ”. She lives in Glasgow. With her first release, GLARC 00000000000000000000000000000016, she materialised the audio output of a fictitious institute of ecoterrorism with its unearthly hold music and cautionary reminders to make time to lie flat. Since then she has released a fantastically sludgy mixtape of original work on Trilogy Tapes alongside a slew of singles across various cassette compilations. Catch her in London before she goes off and travels the world.
https://thetrilogytapes.bandcamp.com/album/leaving-a-spoon-in-a-tub-10
Jamie Hamilton is a composer, performer, and multimedia artist.
He combines sound, multimedia, technology, and words to create music exploring the ways in which listening is linked to our perception of the world.
His music has been broadcast on BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, and BBC Radio 3, and he's worked with artists such as Elaine Mitchener, Lucy Railton, Silje Aker Johnsen, and writers like Luke Williams (Goldsmith Prize 2022), and the poet Caroline Bergvall.
His current projects include producing a new album with Meredith Monk and Phaedra Ensemble, and an ongoing project at a Naval Dockyard about stammering and water.
