Thursday 14 January 2027, 7.30pm
Excited to host a three-day residency with multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer, Mariam Rezaei! Featuring collaborations with Rhodri Davies, Evicshen, Elvin Brandhi, Petronn Sphene, Edward George and Julien Desprez, plus a special talk on Derek Bailey with writer, Stewart Smith, and more, this should be a very special few nights with one of the most distinctive sonic artists working today.
Mariam Rezaei's 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.
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
Described by Ben Watson as "one of the unsung heroes of modern British music", Tony Bevan is an improvising virtuoso on Soprano, Tenor and Bass saxophones. Growing up in Aylesbury, he was mentored by the great Lol Coxhill. He later became involved with London Musicians Collective and Oxford Musicians Collective, leading to an invitation to play Derek Bailey's international symposium of improvisers, COMPANY in 1988. He subsequently released several albums on Bailey's INCUS as well as recording with Bailey himself. Bevan has played with the likes of Sunny Murray, Steve Reid, John Edwards, Mark Sanders and Phil Minton as well as leading his own groups.
Bevan currently lives in Glasgow, where he runs the fortnightly improvised music session Help Me I’m Melting. In addition to collaborating with members of the local music scene such as Fritz Welch, Una McGlone, Jer Reid and Bill Whitmer, Bevan invites visiting musicians such as Eddie Prevost, Ashley Wales, Seth Bennett and Johnny Hunter. His label Foghorn Records has documented some of these sessions, alongside studio and live dates with Tony Buck, Joe Morris, Jeb Bishop and Sunny Murray.
Stewart Smith is a music journalist, broadcaster and academic. He contributes regularly to The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, The Quietus, We Jazz, Tribune and Repeater Radio and teaches at Newcastle University. He is a board member of the Scottish Jazz Archive.
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