Sunday 11 August 2019, 7.30pm
What's described as "a trumpet player trapped in a two dimensional universe" is in fact the unique work of Lucas Abela (also know as Justice Yeldham), a maverick musician with an unhealthy obsession with sheets of broken glass. In his now infamous show which has astonished and bemused countless people in over 45 countries, Abela ecstatically purses his lips against panes of amplified glass whilst deftly employing various vocal techniques ranging from throat singing to raspberries, to turn the discarded shards into crude musical instruments. The results are a wild array of oddly controlled cacophonous noise teetering on the edge of music. This show quite simply needs to be witnessed to be fully appreciated, let alone understood.
"Lucas is just captivating. It's incredible how he can flip the feeling of a room upside down and sonically theres just no other sound like his" - ZACH HILL - Death Grips
"the most exciting performer I have seen in the last three years – in fact, since I first saw Iggy Pop" - Bruce Russell - WIRE
magazine.
"brilliantly immediate performance, galvanising and alien and funny, and free of safe gestures and easy comparisons." - Frances Morgan - the quietus.
Formerly known as Justice Yeldham, Granpa is the new persona for maverick Australian free noise musician Lucas Abela. The difference between the two are subtle, Abela still performs on shards of broken glass turned into crude musical instruments. Played by pursing his lips against the panes and vibrating them using vocal techniques akin to throat singing crossed with raspberries, creating an erratic array of strangely controlled, while oddly musical, cacophonous noise. While Yeldham is centered on ecstatic pure improvisation often resulting in maniacal performances, Granpa is an attempt to rein in the instrument and take it in a more musical direction. Abela also hopes the change might help to dispel the negative connotations his bloody forays as Yeldham have created, the blood for some overshadowing a truly unique musical output. However this transformation is far from complete Yeldham being the Hyde to Granpa’s Jekyll, occasionally taking over his subconscious.
http://dualplover.com/yeldham/
Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer working across experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club music and hip-hop. Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time using classic turntablist skills and her own innovative techniques.
The Anglo-Iranian virtuoso’s latest solo release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) has been praised by The Wire, Uncut and Bandcamp Daily, and was one of The Quietus’ cassette releases of 2024. 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.
Her co-composition with Matthew Shlomowitz, 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, was premiered at IMD Darmstadt 2023, while in October 2025, she premiered Scholar’s Record, a major commission for the 75th Donaueschinger Musiktage that draws on the legendary festival’s audio archives. Other recent projects include a collaboration with Ensemble Contrechamps and upcoming commissions from Ensemble Intercontemporain and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
Other collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Fritz Welch, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul, Kenosist and Ali Robertson.
Tom Wheatley (b. 1991, London) is a composer and improviser, operating in the fractious and fertile interfaces of acoustic and digital sound, extending instruments via technique and technology. Beginning with the double bass, he also works with synthetic sound and processing, and plays a wide selection of instruments in collaboration with a broad range of performers and instrumentalists, from long-standing duos to one-off improvisations.
His score as composer for Giulio Bertelli’s striking debut feature film Agon (2025) was released in 2026 on PAN records. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics), the film is a triptych of three female athletes preparing for a fictional Olympic games. Straddling fiction and documentary, the score reflects the film’s hyper-focus on the gesture of sports performances, each protagonist mirrored by an instrumentalist: fencing with cellist Ute Kanngiesser; rifle shooting with saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, and judo with percussionist Seijiro Murayama, with his bandmate Grundik Kasyansky on electronics and Harry Gorskí-Brown on bagpipes completing the chamber group.
Prior to Agon he worked on scores with award-winning composer Daniel Blumberg, including the Oscar and BAFTA winning score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), as well as director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come (2020), and The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), for which he played viola da gamba and other early European string instruments.
His active projects as a musician centre around the duo Tennota with Grundik Kasyansky, formed in 2019. Once described as ‘half techno, half free jazz’, the project is about the generative friction between physical and digital arenas. They take primary materials – gut strings, sine waves, tree sap, feedback – and engage them with contemporary technologies, towards a taut and nebulous rhythmic language. They have released albums on Accidental Meetings, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, and most recently a collaboration with artist and musician Rosa Anschútz on Meakusma.
Other projects include an ongoing collaboration with Italian fashion project GR10K. Among their collaborations was Stringent Manners, a performance at Auditorium San Fedele for the launch of GR10K SS25: Nine Pounds of Dead Landscape. Wheatley worked on musical direction, performance, and co-composition with Andrea Slaviero, choreographing students from the Milan Conservatory as both models and instrumentalists for this ambitious six hour piece, which harnessed the students boredom and frustration to shape the performance.
Growing up in a multi-generational family of musicians, he is a seasoned instrumentalist. Over the years, he has collaborated and performed with stalwarts and luminaries of contemporary music, including Eddie Prévost, Billy Steiger, Ute Kanngiesser, Adam Christensen, Jim White, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, Ilan Volkov, Steve Noble, Sachiko M, and John Edwards, with releases on OtoRoku, Matchless and Earshots.
