Saturday 4 November 2023, 7.30pm
Mariam Rezaei / turntables
Lukas Koenig / drums and electronics
Gabriele Mitelli / trumpet and electronics
Mette Rasmussen / alto saxophone
"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.
Lukas König (*1988) studied at Gustav Mahler Konservatorium in Vienna, Anton-Bruckner University in Linz and HKB in Bern. He was given the “Hans Koller Price- New York Scolarship” in 2009, the Bremen Jazzpreis and Bawag P.S.K. Next Generation Award in 2014 (with Kompost3). Klangforum Wien premiered his composition Stereogram1 at Konzerthaus Vienna in 2018 and in 2021 he was chosen to be artist of the Shape Network. In addition to performances at festivals worldwide he collaborated with Reggie Washington, Malcolm Braff, Steven Bernstein, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Audrey Chen, Julien Desprez, Chris Pitsiokos, Moormother, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Briggan Krauss, Dorian Concept, Leo Riegler, Freya Edmondes, Peter Kutin, Nik Hummer, Michael Fischer, Shahzad Isamaily, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, Elliott Sharp, Almog Sharvit, Brandon Seabrock, Adam O’Farrell, David Leon, MC Sensational, Elvin Brandhi, Petter Eldh, Otis Sandsjö, Klangforum Wien, Bilderbuch, Hoover Le, Martin Siewert, Franz Hautzinger, Maja Osojnik, Wolfgang Puschnig, Thomas Gansch, Andy Manndorff, David Murray, Die Strottern, Wolfgang Mitterer, Jon Sass, Otto Lechner, Patrice Heral, Guem , Raphael Preuschl, Paul Urbanek, Phil Yaeger, Wolfgang Schiftner, Martin Eberle, Sixtus Preiss, Manu Mayr, Clemens Salesny, Clemens Wenger, Jazzwerkstatt Wien, Greenwoman, Ensemble für neue Musik Zürich, Koenigleopold, Bilderbuch, 5KHD, Klangforum Wien and many more.
Gabriele Mitelli was born in Brescia in 1988. He studied with maestro Beppe Rusconi, and then continued with Markus Stockhausen in Cologne, Germany. In 2017, he was named the best new Italian talent by the critics of 'Musica Jazz' magazine and, in the same year, he won the SIAE 'Air' competition for artistic residencies abroad, with which he won a collaboration with the Conservatory of Lisbon and the Italian Cultural Institute in the Portuguese capital. His second album O.N.G. 'Crash', released by the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, was one of the best records in the 'European Jazz Chart'. In just a few years he has played in some of the most important European festivals, alongside exponents of jazz and impro music including Mats Gustaffson, Anna Högberg, Mette Rasmussen, Wayne Horovitz, Susanna Santos Silva, Elio Martusciello, Tobias Delius, Cristiano Calcagnile, Nino Locatelli, Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, John Edwards, Mark Sanders, Pasquale Mirra, Alexander Hawkins, Chris Speed, Gianluca Petrella, Ralph Alessi; he also collaborates regularly with Cristina Donà, one of the most appreciated singer-songwriters and performers in the Pop scene. In 2019, he released two new records, reviewed by international publications, which reach the top of the European charts: "The World Behind the Skin", released with We Insist! Records and 'Star Gaze Night', a duo with Rob Mazurek, produced by the Portuguese label Clean Feed.
Mette Rasmussen is a Danish saxophone player based in Trondheim, Norway. She works in the field of improvised music, drawing from a wide range of influences, spanning free jazz to textural soundwork. Rasmussen works on exploring the natural rawness of her instrument - experimenting on what the saxophone is capable of in sound and expression, with and without preparations. Much in demand, she has performed with the likes of Alan Silva, Chris Corsano, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and with her Trio Riot group with Sam Andreae and David Meier.
"Mette Rasmussen has a remarkably fluid and expressive tone on the alto saxophone. Her playing at times evokes the rich, heavenward clarity of Albert Ayler, at others the throaty roar of Mats Gustafsson. Equally, though, she’s able to sidestep these influences and assert her own individual sound in piercingly high tones and controlled outbursts of free playing." - Viennese Waltz
