Saturday 7 March 2026, 7.30pm
"Another year at Cafe OTO, another portal. A queer room to dance, cry and laugh with the musicians I love. This year I slip into Dyke Dub, into shifting sounds and strange weather, with the UK debut from the incredible Violence Gratuite, a duo with Xexa, Damsel Elysium, Maria Bertel and much more. New records, new forms. Come celebrate life with us." – Valentina Magaletti
Valentina Magaletti moves where rhythm is both pulse and possibility, a drummer and composer tracing lines between experimental shadowlands and open-stage light. She has played with Jandek, Thurston Moore, Mica Levi, Sampha, Upsammy, Nídia, Nicolas Jaar, Steve Shelley, Malcolm Mooney, Marta Salogni, Phew, Hania Rani, Cate Me Bin, Alpha Maid, Fred Frith, Maria Chavez, and Mariam Rezaei, and alongside underground visionaries such as Marlene Ribeiro (Gnod), Graham Lewis (Wire) and Thighpaulsandra (Coil). At London’s Barbican, she stood in for the late Jaki Liebezeit in The Can Project, letting rhythm inhabit absence, and has shaped countless orchestral and improvised performances.
One third of MOIN, and a vital presence in constellations like YPY (Goat), Shackleton, and Vanishing Twin, she sculpts music that drifts between dub, electronics, and free improvisation. In projects such as Tomaga (with Tom Relleen), Holy Tongue (with Al Wootton) and CZN (with João Pais Filipe), her rhythms become landscapes, narratives, and reveries—spaces where sound itself learns to breathe.
https://valentinamagaletti.com/Releases
https://valentinamagaletti.bandcamp.com/
XEXA is a Portuguese composer, vocalist and sound artist of São Tomé e Príncipe ancestry based in London. She graduated in Jewellery from António Arroio, Lisbon and Sonic Arts from Guildhall School Of Music and Drama, London. XEXA released her gorgeous debut LP ‘Vibrações de Prata’ in 2023 on Príncipe and has composed music for the British Music Collection, CMMAS, Lagos Art Biennale, Culturgest and ModaLisboa. Her live concerts in Europe have included Berghain Halle, The White Hotel, Nuits Sonores Brussels, Sónar Lisboa, Milan Design Week, Casa del Jazz Roma, Kelman Duran's residency at Cafe Oto, and Primavera Sound Barcelona. In Seoul, in 2024, she had a three-day residency performing immersed in a transfixional installation at Kia's exhibition “Opposites United: Intersections Beyond Boundaries” at SPACE S1. In Lisbon, in 2025, she presented the sound installation ‘Síncopes’ at CAM Gulbenkian, based on a collective creation project with researcher and sociologist Cristina Roldão, and stage director and actress Zia Soares. The project and piece were inspired by black women who lived (in) the city of Lisbon in the early 20th century. The new album ‘Kissom’ was released late 2025, "a brilliant, unexpected tilt into writhing, syrupy kizomba rhythms and smudged, vaulted chamber music, uncannily comparable to something like Arthur Russell or This Mortal Coil, supplying genuine WTAF moments of ingenuity throughout = fully our thing. A definitive AOTY shortlister." Boomkat dixit
A multidisciplinary artist and curator, Violaine Morgan Le Fur (aka Violence Gratuite) has spent the last few years sharpening her creative perspective, developing documentaries, producing exhibitions, and directing music videos and short films. 'Baleine à Boss' isn't just her debut album, but her first venture into music production; Le Fur had only begun to experiment with music software a few weeks before dubbing the record, a fact that makes this unique set only more bewildering. Singing and vocalizing candidly and producing each track alone, she sounds profoundly polished, invoking a beguiling haze of chanson, rap, no wave and experimental electronics that hovers around the margins of pop and the avant-garde.
Le Fur grew up in Paris's sprawling suburbs, and was provided with a diverse coterie of influences by her Breton mother and Cameroonian father. She's channeled her ancestry into her work before, splicing material from her mother's film archives with her own footage recorded in Bamiléké land to develop the autobiographical documentary 'À L'ouest' back in 2017. As Violence Gratuite, Le Fur thinks more cryptically, considering the vast forests of western Cameroon, lands ravaged by generations of bloodthirsty men and looping pulsing techno rhythms with fractured trap and the ghosts of French pop.
JASSS (Silvia Jiménez Alvarez) is a sound artist and producer raised on the Northern coast of Spain. Her parents were passionate about jazz, African and South American rhythms, which became some of the most formative influences in her life.
From an early age, her fascination with sound drove her pursuit of understanding the relationship between music and people. She left Spain to launch this endeavor, leaving behind a social and cultural landscape from which she felt increasingly alienated. Feeling fractured in focus, she began shaping a theme from the distractions, channeling it into new works.
The punk and hardcore roots of her youth evolved into a deep plunge in industrial, dub and experimental music—worlds of sound that were evocative in mystifying, inaccessible ways. After moving to the Netherlands in 2010, she began editing field recordings and probing the worlds of electronic music and soundscapes. She moved a year later to Berlin, where she scored several experimental films.
In 2015 she made her first appearance as a DJ with a distinct, eclectic style that would become her signature approach. After a few years of studio work, her first 12 inch, Caja Negra EP, was released on the American label Anunnaki Cartel. Her second record, Mother, was released that same year on the Italian label Mannequin Records, followed by Es Complicado, on the same label. These days, she is focused on the experimentation of sound and spaces, working on several projects including electroacoustic pieces, live, and audiovisual performances. Her first solo album, Weightless, was released in 2017 on the Swedish label iDEAL Recordings.
