Tuesday 26 July 2022, 8pm
Excited to host this excellent line-up loosely themed around new experimental music from the Middle East, featuring musician, architect and researcher, Safa; the jaw-dropping duo of composer, turntablist and performer, Mariam Rezaei and vocalist and composer, Alya Al-Sultani; and music researcher, collector, DJ and radio host, Yamen Mekdad.
Mhamad Safa is a musician, architect and researcher, based between London and Beirut. Safa’s work focuses on multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He explores their intersections with aural legacies of traditional and subcultural practices as well as environments of conflict and violence. He conveys these auditory inquiries by assembling sound design, micro-sampling, algorithmic sound technology, psychoacoustics, field recordings, and their graphic interpretations. Culminating with heavily percussive and rhythmically odd interventions, these sonic irregularities are often repurposed as speculative experimentations on the futures of dance culture. In addition to his research in sound, film scoring and installations, he has released music both solo and collectively. Most recently, his album Ibtihalat was released on UIQ with compositions that contemplate sonorous futures of traditional musical practices from the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.
Mariam Rezaei (she/her) is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer whose 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.
Following on from the highly acclaimed Fractured (2024) and her ground-breaking Blud/Skeen/Bown trilogy (2019-2023), Rezaei will release Selected Adequate Works in early 2027. A major step forward in live turntablist composition, the double album captures the breadth of Rezaei’s vision from warped techno and mangled noise, to shimmering psychedelia and refracted chorales. Each track is recorded live in a single take, with Rezaei transforming her own samples alongside contributions from Elvin Brandhi, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, Julien Desprez, Lukas Koenig, Eleni Poulou, Lucy Railton and Stewart Smith.
Her major commissions include Scholar’s Record for Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, a four turntable tour-de-force which drew on the legendary festival’s audio archives, and 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, an orchestral collaboration with Matthew Shlomowitz for IMD Darmstadt/Tectonics Glasgow. This autumn, she premieres new projects with Ensemble Intercontemporain and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
In addition to her solo work, 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. Other collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Ensemble Contrechamps, Fritz Welch, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul and Ali Robertson.
In November 2022, Rezaei received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists in recognition of her contribution to music composition. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH. She is currently based in Newcastle, United Kingdom.
Alya Al-Sultani is a dramatic soprano, improvising vocalist and opera-maker from Basrah, Iraq. Her work is focused on the themes of liberation and love. Her current work includes a trio with Pat Thomas and Khabat Abas (Manara) and with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols, a duo with Maggie Nicols and an underground electronic / opera duo with GRANDMIXXER. She is working on a new opera with Jennifer Farmer, In The Teeth of the Wind, due to be debuted in 2026. She continues to be a student in the life-long study of maqam and Arabic music and has released albums of Iraqi folk songs and interpretations of Arabic poetry by living and past poets.
Her most recent releases include improvised solo opera suites "Three Ages of Woman/Mother", "Self Lost / Self Found" and "Return/Exile" and a protest album with Maggie Nicols "Free, Free". Her most recent release is "Immersion" with Robert Mitchell and Maggie Nicols and upcoming in September is Manara's debut album, both out on the UK label Discus.
Yamen Mekdad is a Syrian artist, filmmaker and community organiser based in London. His practice is an experimentation in radical collaboration with a focus on the relationship between sound and geography as well as the political possibility of sound. His interests in field recording, archiving, radio and grassroots organising led him to co-found the collectives Sawt of the Earth, Makkam and Sadaa Sound Syndicate. He is a frequent contributor to a number of radio stations, including Root, Balami, NTS and AlHara. Yamen is also curator and producer of Syrian Cassette Archives, the Syrian Arts and Culture Festival (SACF) and Sawt Syria a Boiler Room & Sadaa Sound Syndicate collaboration, exploring the inner worlds of the underground music scene in Syria and its exilic diaspora in Europe.
