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Play Monk arrives in a gatefold, reverse board 2CD designed by Maja Larrson. Cover photograph of Thelonius Monk at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco in 1968 by Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Inside photographs of حمد [Ahmed] by Stefan Lacandler. Recorded and mixed by Benedic Lamdin on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd March, 2025 at Fish Factory Studios, London. Mastered by Andreas LUPO Lubich. Produced by Seymour Wright/OTOROKU. After 6 albums re-imagining the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, أحمد [Ahmed] turn to the material of Malik’s bandmate Thelonious Monk in the group's ongoing search for future music.  Before going on to develop his own groundbreaking approach to jazz, Ahmed Abdul-Malik worked in Thelonious Monk’s late 1950’s quartets - appearing on seminal Monk recordings: Thelonious In Action (1958) and Misterioso (1958), and the more recently unearthed Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (2005). Abdul-Malik and Monk share a critical engagement with time - specifically in challenging its linear trajectory and offering sites and modes of synthesis and rupture instead. In their music, fragments of time are scattered and re-arranged in the present, an idea central too to the project of أحمد [Ahmed]. Over several decades, all four members of أحمد [Ahmed] have engaged with Monk’s standards in various individual and collective ways, but Play Monk, recorded in the same three-day London studio sessions as Sama’a (Audition), is the first released documentation of the group's versions of Monk’s music which began with a spontaneous interpretation of ‘Evidence’ in Novara, Italy, 2023.   Across 2CDs, أحمد [Ahmed] atomize Monk’s ‘standards’ - transforming each composition into a shifting quantum time artifact. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and spatial gestures of each piece become complex vernacular forms, creating a dialogue in time and a (red)shifting lens through which to view our material present. Into the fissures of Monk’s form, أحمد [Ahmed]  pour their own play - colliding and dancing with Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Caribbean diasporic music, European improvisation and Jah Shaka in their pursuit of future music. “Monk’s music is not played so much as grasped, condensed and catapulted through the vagaries of time,” writes Fielding Hope. “Monk famously used to dance in circles. In flight from the numerical bind, أحمد [Ahmed] make music that sounds like it could float on forever.”

أحمد [Ahmed] – Play Monk

Olavi Laiho’s aliterative anti-fascist text written in 1944 in Oulu prison just before his execution. First time publsihed in its original Finnish and in English translation. Introduction by Minna Henriksson.   Olavi Laiho (1907-1944) was a writer, political organiser, and communist agitator, who was first imprisoned in 1932 – a time when ‘communist laws’ were in effect in Finland – for producing political material and running an illegal printing press in his home. He opposed Finland’s WW2 era fighting alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, edited illegal journals, but also planned armed resistance and facilitated correspondence between the party’s leadership in Helsinki and the Soviet embassy in Stockholm. He managed to hide from the police from when the Continuation War broke in summer 1941 until 22nd of December 1942, when he was arrested while visiting his sister in the parish of Paimio. Laiho was sentenced to death for treason and high treason. He was executed on 2nd of September, being the last Finnish citizen to be executed in Finland.  Just a couple of weeks before his execution, Laiho wrote a remarkable essay ‘Katso Koota’ [Look at K], using only words starting with the letter K. It gives a vivid picture of the political situation of the time: the war is still ongoing, but it has become evident that Finland is on the losing side. Not knowing his execution date, Laiho eagerly awaits a new batch of books to arrive at the prison library, enjoying his coffee substitute and the sound of distant music ... ‘Katso Koota’ is an early example of Finnish modern alliterative writing, a lipogram, a literary technique in which every word must start with the same letter. Laiho’s ‘Katso Koota’ predates the French Oulipo (‘workshop of potential literature’) of the 1960s. Considering that he produced his ‘constrained writing’ under conditions of extreme political and cultural confinement, it can be considered a true form of avant-garde subversion.  Published for the first time based on the manuscript at the People’s Archives, the booklet includes its content translation, a short introduction by Minna Henriksson and two illustrations by Kaisa Junttila.  Designed by Otso Peräsaari, the book is printed in 200 copies and is produced in Kalastaman Seripaja silkscreen workshop and If By Magic risography print house. The publication is realised in the context of the Counter-Libraries exhibition at the Library of the Labour Movement, Helsinki.A5 Staplebound, Softcover, 16 pages (Silkscreen and risoprint) Rab-Rab, Helsinki, October, 2025

Olavi Laiho – Look at K

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أحمد [Ahmed] – 'Play Monk' launch show