Tuesday 9 September 2025, 7.30pm
A triple-bill from the Portobello Road institution, featuring the London debut of Lamin Fofana, an OTO return for Ottomani Parker, plus DJ sets from Sagome co-founder Nice Strangers and Honest Jon's alumna Bisi Adeniji.
To mark its release on Honest Jon’s, Lamin Fofana will showcase his new record 'Works in Metal'. The release is part of an ongoing body of his sound-sculpture constructions, which finds Fofana melting MIDI and digital audio like liquid metal and shaping and forging something new.
Lamin Fofana’s music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond, and explores notions of movement, migration, alienation and belonging. Influenced by the maelstrom of sounds and experiences in his youth - he lived in Sierra Leone and Guinea in his childhood, before moving to Harlem and Virginia as a teenager - his creative expression has always been marked by experimentation, and the search for an art that reflects his experiences and gives a voice to those in similar situations. From ambient to techno, his experimental sounds often involve his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifesting in multi-sensory live performances and installations. These have been showcased globally, and often feature in his compositions, field recordings and archival material. A DJ for nearly as long as he has been creating music, Fofana also hosts a monthly radio show on NTS Radio.
Ottomani Parker is a collision of jazz and dub techno. The project blends live dubbing of Abraham Parker’s trumpet, Izz Karpel's saxophone, Hayato Takahashi's keys and synths, and Bint Mbareh's voice into an unbound array of rhythms, samples and percussive elements, with Big Hands at the controls. Their sound - which has found a home on labels such as Trule, Baroque Sunburst, Marionette and Blank Mind - borrows from Basic Channel, Miles Davis and Jon Hassell, with a heavy current of dub running beneath compositions and live shows. The group’s performances often involve other musicians (Yusuf Ahmed, Buster Woodruff-Bryant, Alabaster De Plume and Andrea Campisi), and are always steeped in improvisation.
