Friday 2 May 2025, 7.30pm
For her residency at Cafe OTO, Dali is curating 3 nights for experimentalists, avant-gardistes and dancefloor destroyers. Inviting a big crew from Bristol, where she’s based, and beyond, as many guests are international artists. Some of them are returning to OTO, many are coming for the first time, they all have crossed her path over the years and as music is made of connections, they have been creating music together. This line-up is made of great musicians and DJs widely engaged in culture; some are DIY promoters, part of various collectives, labels, in different countries and contexts. They've been working not only to produce their music but also to spread music from other musicians around them, in their communities thus resisting the shrinking political climate. The 3 days are a celebration of activism in music.
Dali de Saint Paul is a raw experimental vocalist, a performer, a composer, a producer and cultural actor of the Bristol experimental music scene.
In her music, Dali’s particular use of vocals through fx blurs sonic borders, questions gender stereotypes and destabilizes spatial and linguistic borders; as lyricist, she mixes poetics and politics bringing intensity to her performances.
With her self-exploding project EP/64 the Ephemeral Project 64, which involved more than 40 artists over six years (2016-22), Dali refreshed conceptions of improvisation, bringing back the focus on community in music culture. She’s a prolific collaborator, other projects including 16mm avant folk feminine ensemble Viridian, dub modular trio dark idl, super improv group Ondata Rossa, post-industrial duo Harrga, and experimental film, light and sound performance Penumbra, which has been commissioned by Outlands Network in spring 2024.
She collaborated with Moor Mother, Valentina Magaletti, Ossia and Maxwell Sterling to name a few. As a producer she operates under the alias Content Provider. Dali is a member of the Avon Terror Corps label and has appeared on many international compilations and releases.
From 2015 to 2020, she has curated The Sound Cupboard, a monthly night of marginal, improvised and experimental music in Bristol. In 2023, Dali co-funded the co-op platform Music to Come to support musicians working with experimental sounds, developing new connections between artists, collaborations and creating events.
Her projects have gained audience and attention from national and international press, such as The Wire, The Quietus, BBC radio 3 or The New Noise, she toured across Europe playing international festivals with different projects : Atonal (Berlin), WOS (Santiago), Bone & Iklectik (Barcelona), Variations (Nantes), Open Ear (Sherkin Islands) and festivals across the UK: Supernormal (Braziers Park), Supersonic (Birmingham), Counterflows (Glasgow), Boundaries (Sunderland), Bristol New Music (Bristol), Another Sky (London).
https://www.instagram.com/dalidesaintpaul/
https://linktr.ee/dalidesaintpaul
The 2 musicians had already played together once when Mariam came to play in Bristol in July 2024, improvising with Valentina Magaletti, it was a brilliant trio ! For the residency, Mariam and Dali will create new music as a duo, Mariam using her incredible skills to process live some of Dali’s vocals, creating for her, a basis to structure a new sonic dialogue.
Mariam Rezaei
Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument,” Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer. Working at the nexus of experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club music and hip-hop, Rezaei uses a digital vinyl system, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Her work has been described as “genuinely ground-breaking” (London Jazz News2022) and “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian 2022). Praised by The Wire, Uncu tand Bandcamp Daily, her latest release FRACTURED (Heat Crimes) is one of The Quietus Cassette releases of 2024. In November 2022, she 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, and is writing a book on turntablism for Repeater. In addition to her solo work, Rezaei’s projects include a Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez (making their US premiere at Big Ears 2025), supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, trumpeter/electronics Gabriele Mitelli and drummer Lukas Koenig), and orchestral compositions with Matthew Shlomowitz (6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra). She recently performed Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music With guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe. Other Collaborations Include duos with Jennifer Walshe, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Valentina Magaletti, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Lukas Koenig, Mette Rasmussen, Gabriele Mitelli, Okkyung Lee And Ali Robertson, Black Top with Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, Cleveland Watkiss and Leon Foster Thomas, and a quartet with DJ Sniff, Rex Chen and DJ SlowPitchSound at Taipei Biennial 2023
“Mariam Rezaei continues pushing the limits of her instrument on Fractured... it culminates inRezaei’s most expansive, nuanced work yet, moving from high energy frenzies into tender droning pieces...Fractured joyfully bamboozling. Elegantly contorted, playfully fierce, coherently scattered as it rips apart form and expectation.” - Daryl Worthington, Spools Out: The Best Cassettes of 2024,The Quietus
“A spellbinding set by turntablist Mariam Rezaei, whose fingers and hands area blur, darting back and forth across the decks so quickly it is as though she’d been sped up.” - Lucy Thraves, Out.Fest review The Wire, 2024
https://www.instagram.com/mariam_rezaei/
https://mariamrezaei.co.uk/
https://mariamrezaei.bandcamp.com/
https://heatcrimes.bandcamp.com/album/fractured
https://heatcrimes.bandcamp.com/album/bown
Ardor or Entropy is Nzʉmbe’s first album in nine years, following 2015's Titubeo.
During this period, philosopher and artist Miguel Prado’s sonic output has included synthesizing a sonic Gernika with his band HARRGA alongside Dali de Saint Paul, and crafting a hallucinatory sci-fi mythology for Lucrecia Dalt’s latest album, ¡Ay!."
Rewiring the conventions of chamber electronics and postmodern songwriting.
Here it is presented: A Spanish’ song cycle on love and cosmological redshift. The distant echo of Tristan‐and‐Iseult’s smoking gun where lovemaking becomes an enactment of entropy, a transformation between the dynamic and the static, the human and the fetish, illustrating the inevitable decline into chaos and stillness.
A beached singing voice against electro-acoustic backdrops ranging from the caustic, viscous to the bone crushingly dense worldbuilding shared by HR Giger, Ballard and Pynchon. Transcendental and psychotic vistas that boldly examine human fragility and the surrounding abyss of godlessness.
https://www.instagram.com/miguelprad0/
https://drownedbylocals.bandcamp.com/album/ardor-or-entropy
Adrián de Alfonso (formerly known as Don The Tiger) is a Spanish performing musician based in Berlin opening a dialogue between places and the collective FM transmission possible in them. His performances transfigure flamenco, copla, bolero, tango and sardana through unhinged sampling/midi techniques, stripped-down chanting, musique concrète outbursts, and outlandish operatic procedures.
De Alfonso has collaborated with Lucrecia Dalt, Carla Bozulich, Valerio Tricoli, Lydia Lunch, Aksak Maboul, Francesco Cavaliere, Josephine Foster, Victor Herrero, Robert Forster, GY!BE, Arnau Sala, Sam Ashley, Macromassa, etc.
Attendees are encouraged to bring their own functioning FM radios, so they can actively participate in the act of sounding / listening.
https://www.instagram.com/adriandealfonso/
https://mapledeathrecords.bandcamp.com/album/viator
Nice Strangers is Silvia Mal. She is a radio producer and co-runs Sagome, a label and series of events focusing on experimental electronics, wonky beats and electroacoustic explorations
https://www.instagram.com/nice_strangers/
https://www.mixcloud.com/noboundsradio/silvia-mal-20th-november-2024/
https://soundcloud.com/thelotradio/nice-strangers-zaereo-the-lot-radio-01-12-2025
