Friday 15 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.
Evicshen is the nom de guerre of sound artist, experimental music performer, and inventor Victoria Shen (she/her). Based in San Francisco, Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones.
Shen is notably the inventor of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable needles allowing her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. Shen's DIY approach extends beyond just instruments but also music releases. Her debut LP, Hair Birth, features copper album art that transforms the cover into a loudspeaker through which the record can be played. Recently, Shen has started releasing hand-made resin records embedded with found materials, each piece functions not only as playable music media but as unique art objects.
Performing solo with only his guitar and effects pedals as instruments themselves, his performance is a true performance that engages all the senses. The body is at the heart of his practice, and one theme still fuels his work today: what to do with bodies and their generated movements through music?
Originally conceived as a recorded sound piece, ‘Agora’ was created during the November 2020 confinement.
‘Agora’ is also a piece for electronics, impedance games, electric guitar and podoryhtmy, created during the autumn 2020 confinement and presented during the Italian Festival Cataclisma.
If Agora refers to the meeting place of the city, of the town, where the people come together, Agora also means “now” in Portuguese. Agora is twofold and plays from several points of view. A soft, explosive and joyful trance brings together podorythmics, high voltage electricity, guitar and body until their rupture and reconciliation. With playfulness and frenzy, a multiple world is negotiated through your listening.
‘Agora’ plunges us into the jungle of impedance. A jungle where the air is dry and moist and where the trees, a little too bright green, burn from within. Crackling under our steps, the road reveals a few shadows in the middle of the mud, dancing in a tap dance. The blackout is our vehicle, the electric tension our fuel.
Edward George is a writer and broadcaster. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). George is part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. He and hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows). George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and a wide cross-genre musical selection. Edward George lives and works in London.
