Friday 3 November 2023, 7.30pm
Mariam Rezaei & Edward George
Mariam Rezaei solo
"This is residency is all about new music, new partnerships, new dynamics. I admire all the musicians and they’re all very different to each other. Most significantly, they’re all composer-performer-improvisers working in multi-disciplinary contexts.
I always joke about Limp Bizkit and being the DJ in a big band, so making a group with Lukas Koenig, Mette Rasmussen and Gabriele Mitelli is both a dream and a joke come true. I’ve got a cheeky sense of humour, but I’m deadly serious about music making and finding a fun and interesting dynamic with other musicians.
Turntablism is a series of ever evolving continuums. I know and understand this, not only in my being, but in my music. Through its sensitivity and nuance, the turntable creates new timbres and unusual techniques when paired with a string ensemble. For this residency I’ll be working with violinist Angharad Davies, and cellists Atzi Muramatsu and Semay Wu. We are not going to rehearse, we are not going to talk about it, we’re just going to turn up and play.
I’m a great admirer of Edward George’s The Strangeness of Dub. For me there’s a clear affinity between dub and turntablism and I’m looking forward to exploring this together. There is a strangeness and absurdity to the turntable that is often misconstrued. More often than not, developments in music have come from unsung heroes. Perhaps sometimes those innovators don’t understand the significance of what they’ve discovered.
Ahead of the residency, I’m going to ask the musicians to send me solo recordings which I can manipulate and transform on the turntables. I’m looking to find extraordinary new sounds in real time, stretching and extending the acoustic instruments beyond their real-life capabilities. That’s what to expect from the residency." – Mariam Rezaei
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.
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.
