Wednesday 25 March 2026, 7.30pm
The Otolith Collective’s Department of Xenogenesis and Radicant_Editions present a concert celebrating the release of the LP METLASR by Tyler Friedman.
METLASR is an album for microtonal idiophone ensemble and modular synthesizer. It draws on the legacies of downtown minimalism, connecting avant-garde composition, aspects of global traditional musics and advanced synthesis techniques into an endless cascade of pirouetting geometric melodics in 24 note per octave Just Intonation. Friedman’s performance will be a structured improvisation in the style of the album: spectrally fusing the virtual pitched percussion (Gamelan, Vibraphone, Mbira, Tingklik, Marimba) with analogue electronics – accumulating into a glowing harmonic mass and immersive hypnotic whorl.
Returning to Café Oto, Seth Ayyaz will present a new configuration of hQi.LIVE, his long-term SuperCollider system. Working with nay and tonbak, electroacoustic transformation, machine listening, and generative processes, the live improvisation unfolds over 8-channel surround. Drawing on the melodic and rhythmic logics of Middle Eastern musics, the performance is in tension with maqām and iqā‘āt traditions, using algorithms, micro-tuning, and generative synthesis to produce asymmetric pulses, cyclical forms, and destabilised time.
The evening will be completed with a DJ set by London based artist and composer Ain Bailey.
Department of Xenogenesis is a time space convened by The Otolith Collective of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. An ongoing space time for convening public online and offline discussions, performances, screenings and exhibitions with artists, filmmakers, theorists, and musicians.
Tyler Friedman is a composer and synthesist whose music vacillates between cosmic impulses and analytical inclinations. Escaping the rift between post-club experimentalism and the theory-driven partition of contemporary art, his output spans numerous releases, soundtracks, installations, collaborations and performances and draws on an unwieldy arsenal of divergent references and tactics. His music has been released on Sweden’s Kontra Musik, Arjuna Records, Tokyo-based Protection and Radicant_Editions. In the context of contemporary art, Friedman works to manifest conceptual constellations in sonic form. He has been responsible for the sonics of collaborative projects that have been commissioned and presented worldwide, including at dOCUMENTA(13), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Manifesta, Cycle Music & Arts Festival and the Yokohama Triennale among others. He is a long term collaborator of the Otolith Group, with whom he has developed the sonics of well over a dozen films and installations.
https://linktr.ee/tylerfriedman
Seth Ayyaz is a London-based sound artist and composer-performer who explores listening as a material, social, and computational process. His practice spans electroacoustic composition, live electronics, improvisation, noise, and diasporic Islamic musical traditions, with a focus on performing with listening machines — human and otherwise.
Ayyaz’s work has been presented internationally at venues and festivals including ICA London, MaerzMusik Berlin, Kunsthalle Luzern, Sonorities Festival (Belfast), and Irtijal (Beirut). This performance continues his ongoing engagement with Café Oto as a site for exploratory sound practice.
Ain Bailey is an artist, composer and DJ. Her compositions encompass field recordings and found sounds and are often inspired by reflections on silence and absence, feminist activism and architectural acoustics. She has developed numerous collaborations with performance, sonic and visual artists, creating multichannel and mixed media installations and soundtracks for moving image, live performance and dance. Her practice explores sonic autobiographies and the constellation of sounds that form individual and community identities.
Previous work includes Oh Adelaide, a collaboration with artist Sonia Boyce (Tate Britain, the Whitechapel Gallery, The Kitchen, New York); The Range (Eastside Projects, Birmingham; And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love (Cubitt Gallery, London); Remember To Exhale created with Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski (Studio Voltaire, London as part of their Desperate Living programme). Version (Wysing Arts Centre); Atlantic Railton, within architect Sumayya Vally’s 2021 Serpentine Pavillion and as part of the Listening To The City sound installation programme; Untitled: (Our Wedding) (CCS Bard, NYC), Trioesque (Bruckenmusik Festival, Cologne) and FOUR (FACT, Liverpool)
The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist led organisation supporting intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process-based forms of development. We create environments, co-commission artists, and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions here and elsewhere.
Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal vision. The Collective are committed to maintaining and animating an experimental and worldmaking approach. Performing across disciplines such as visual art, performance, new music, film and video, new technology and critical writing, they draw a diverse range of audiences. The public programme emerges from this convergence of relationships across the world, the UK and in London, both within worlds of common purpose but also through a methodology of debate and thinking that is para-academic and within the civic realm. They are dedicated to ways of working as artists who curate, investigating and practising collaboration and its social potentials.
The Otolith Collective's platforms emerge as workshops, reading groups, gatherings, panels, book launches, exhibitions, events, discussions, publications and screening programmes.
Radicant_Editions is a Venice based record label and production platform founded by composer Tyler Friedman and curator Antonia Majaca in 2026. METLASR is the label’s debut release.
www.instagram.com/Radicant_editions
