Saturday 30 May 2026, 7.30pm
Pleased note that the ticket price includes entry for the full, eight-venue festival.
Dialled In London returns on Saturday 30th May 2026 for its fifth birthday — a multi-venue all-dayer stretching across Dalston from day into night. The festival spans Café OTO, EartH, Rio Cinema, Shacklewell Arms, Total Refreshment Centre and beyond, bringing together over 40 artists across DJ sets, live performance, film, comedy and a vinyl fair. Live headliners include Lifafa (making his London debut), Sarathy Korwar, Baria (formerly of The xx) and EXCISE DEPT, alongside a deep programme of selectors, label takeovers and emerging talent from across the South Asian diaspora and beyond. It’s the biggest edition yet — and the most expansive.
Café OTO hosts a Honiunhoni Records takeover as part of Dialled In London 2026. Honiunhoni — the Pakistan-based label and collective dedicated to preserving and recontextualising South Asian musical traditions — curate an intimate programme of live performances that sit at the intersection of archival practice and contemporary sound. Muslim Shaggan and Tony & Billa are among the confirmed acts, bringing live instrumentation and storytelling into one of London’s most respected spaces for experimental and boundary-crossing music. It’s a natural pairing — Café OTO’s commitment to adventurous listening meets Honiunhoni’s deep excavation of sound from across the subcontinent.
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Muslim Shaggan is a vocalist from Lahore, Pakistan.. His vocal delivery is technically sophisticated, yet tender. Muslim’s versatile musicality is rooted in a convergence of histories. He descends from Bhai Mardana (1459-1534), the muslim musician companion of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. This lineage of Rababi musicians eventually adopted the Gwalior style of Hindustani vocal music. Muslim was trained by one of its finest exponents, his grandfather, Ustad Ghulam Hassan Shaggan, who carefully prepared him to carry on this centuries old legacy from the young age of 7.
Today, Muslim is one of the most accomplished classical vocalists of his generation in Pakistan. He regularly performs at all major classical music festivals and venues in the country, as well as radio and television. Beyond Muslim's prowess in the Khayal genre, he is equally adept at a variety of other South Asian musical forms, including contemporary and folk styles. His musical experiments are rooted in traditional knowledge, yet unconstrained by its rigorous methodologies.
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Tony & Billa brings together two world-renowned maestros of their instruments, Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan on Sitar, and Ustad Shahbaz Hussain on Tabla. In this project, they shed away their honorific titles and engage in risky improvisations, based on purely Raag based approaches to musical presentation. Pakistani musicians playing edgy ‘Indian Classical’. We just call it Raagdari.
Tony/Ashraf inherits a distinct, ninth-generation Sitar style from his ancestors, once court musicians of Poonch, in present day Kashmir, and his father, Ustad Sharif Khan. Billa/Shahbaz, was born in England but learnt from three of the most important Tabla players of the 20th century Punjab Gharana: Mian Shaukat Hussain, Ustad Allah Rakha Khan, and Ustad Fayaz Khan. They met in England in 2006, almost a decade after Tony had moved to Germany. This jori/pair, formed in Europe, matured during yearly visits to Pakistan, eventually becoming permanent and formidable headliners at the most prestigious classical music festivals in Pakistan. It was after the sound and expression we achieved at the APMC Karachi Festival in 2024, that we decided to reformulate this project as Tony & Billa, which will begin touring in Europe and UK, starting this summer. Their debut album is set to be released by honiunhoni in May 2026.
