Thursday 7 August 2025, 7.30pm
VENTIL RECORDS is a Vienna-based platform and label for adventurous, experimental music, founded in 2015. For this special concert night at Cafe OTO, the label brings together a powerful lineup of artists they’ve collaborated with over the past decade—expect an intense night.
The full line-up includes:
The event is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum London
‘PLF propel punk’s DIY idealism into a new era … ‘ (John Twells – Unsound Festival)
PLF is an unique trio consisting of drummer Lukas König, instrument maker and sonic experimentalist Peter Kutin and vocalist Elvin Brandhi, also known as Fridge. The band emerged from their collaborative efforts, with origins dating back several years. PLF’s music blends post-punk, noise-pop, and experimental improvisations. Their sound is shaped by a distinctive approach to instrumentation, with Kutin using self-designed light-feedback machines and synthesizers, while König enriches percussion with electronics. Elvin Brandhi’s vocals add a wild, primal dimension to their music. They draw inspiration from various sources, creating their very own synthesis of sound art and experimental music.
PLF has performed at numerous prestigious festivals, including the Unsound Festival and Elevate Festival. They debuted with the album “EPDEMO” released by the UK label Opal Tapes, followed by their “ParziFoooooooooooL” under the Vienna-based avant-garde platform Ventil-records. A third record will be out in early 2025.
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.
Billy Roisz is a Vienna-based musician and filmmaker. Self-taught, Billy Roisz sees her creative humus in the extremely open DIY environment of the digital and analog electronic and noise scene in Vienna at the Y2K turn (phonotaktik, rhiz, mego, vidok, klingt.org). Since 1998 she works with the media video and sound. The aesthetics of image and sound glitches, such as feedback and distortion, is one of her central fields of experimentation.
The artistic realization usually takes the form of audio-visual live performances, concerts, cinematic works and spatial installations, often solo, but also in close collaboration with artists from the fields of experimental electronics and noise, composed new and old music, film, theater and performance.
Billy Roisz's works have been presented at numerous renowned international festivals, including LUFF Lausanne, Meakusma Eupen, RISC @ Louvre Paris, Donaufestival Krems, Heart Of Noise Festival Innsbruck, Wien Modern, Musikprotokoll, Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf, unlimited Wels, Sonic Acts Amsterdam, Biennale Sao Paolo, 8 Bridges Festival Cologne, Donaueschingen, Berlinale, IFF Rotterdam, Transmediale, Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Centre Pompidou, MACBA Barcelona, Museo Serralves Porto and many more.
Her music has been released on editionsMego, hathut, for/wind, mikroton. interstellar, and her latest solo 12" vinyl bajo has been released on ventil records. Her video works are distributed by sixpackfilm and lightcone.
In their project "The Answer is no" Maja Osojnik and Ursula Winterauer use the same sound sources - voice, electric bass and sampler. This conscious choice creates a live situation that creates an exciting mirroring on a visual and sonic level. Their goal is to explore, expand and deconstruct the sonic possibilities of their instruments, entering into an intense dialogue in the process. In their joint project, the musicians and composers Maja Osojnik and Ursula Winterauer move skilfully in the border area between analog and digital sounds and between virtual and real spaces.
Maja Osojnik works as a singer, composer, improvising electroacoustic musician, sound artist, producer, mostly using voice, paetzold bass recorders, field recordings, DJ-CDs, tapes and other lo-fi electronic devices, toys, trash and found objects. Maja made a name for herself in different musical fields, such as early music, contemporary, experimental, electronic, jazz, free improvisation, sound art and heavier music. Moving in limbo between analogue and digital art, virtual and real spaces, she tries to expand, deconstruct and reinterpret the tonal spectra of mentioned instruments and to assign them new roles – a process reminiscent of building anagrams. She composes music for dance, theater, film, radio plays, sound installations and various ensembles. In Addition to teaching composition and free improvisation she runs the Label Mamka Records, dedicated to the publication of high quality self-produced sound recordings in small hand-made/printed series. Her art, solo performances, works and formations, ao. Rdeča Raketa, ZSAMM, Broken.Heart.Collector, All.The.Terms.We.Are, Maja Osojnik Band, Subshrubs, Low Frequency Orchestra etc. were presented at various international festivals.
http://maja.klingt.org
https://www.instagram.com/majaosojnik/
Ursula Winterauer aka Gischt is a composer and producer for electronic music based in Vienna. Within her artistic practice she generates raw sounds between brutality and atmospheric diffusion. Her eclectic soundscapes deliver differentiated interpretations of the genres industrial, techno and ambient, which are reflected by means of bass guitar, synthesiser and electro-smog clouds. Her works have been performed at various Austrian festivals like donaufestival, musikprotokoll, unsafe+sounds, as well as in in cities such as Zurich, Berlin, Priština, Riga and New York. Winterauer has collaborated with artists from various fields, including Annja Krautgasser, Claudia Larcher, Elisabeth B. Tambwé, Conny Zenk and Antoinette Zwirchmayr. In addition to curatorial work, she runs the Ventil Records label and develops compositions for film and contemporary dance.
https://gischt.xyz/
https://www.instagram.com/gischt____
https://gischt.xyz/the-answer-is-no/
