Saturday 9 September 2023, 10.30pm, The Yard
Exist is a festival and event series founded in Palestine, with the aim of building bridges between artists, musicians, DJs and curators from Palestine and across the globe. Its broad, transnational family are united in a desire to use art to impact their environments in critical ways, and through their engagement with anti-colonialism in the context of Palestine and beyond. Originally founded in 2019 by Odai Masri, Exist has since taken place as an ephemeral but impactful meeting point for musicians and artists who care for the Palestinian cause, and manifest this care in how they love one another. We've listened to our music, grown our family and danced together for hours in Ramallah, Amman, Beirut, Athens, Oslo and Berlin; now we've invited our collective to grace Cafe Oto and The Yard in London. The festival now defines itself as a growing family of siege-breakers who refuse to let Palestinian artists confront injustice alone. Exist is proud to bring together film, talks, music, performance, and dance events from underground veterans such as Choronzon and Drew McDowall as well as super powerful Exist heads like Kujo and Dirar Kalash.
This festival is generously funded by the following parties:
Tony Tremlett
Laure Genillard
DRTCO
Other People Imprint
On Friday the 30th of June 2023, Odai Masri aka Oddz, the founder of the festival suddenly passed away, leaving us with an abundant and deep conviction of what a generous ancestor can do for us.
We owe Odai the vision and groundwork for the accomplishments of this festival, its tightly knit network, and most importantly, we owe him our ethos of marrying uncompromising sound curation with uncompromising caregiving. He insisted on queering Palestinian narratives while resisting victimhood by acting as one another's care structures. This edition acts as a moment to remember him gracefully and extend gratitude for the time we were lucky to share with him. We invite our audience to act as carriers for these memories which we are so privileged to be able to keep with us. Exist is Odai's legacy, and we insist on keeping it strong, fearless and bound by love
an iconic global entity and walking piece of art, dahc dermur is a figurehead in london nightlife and a powerful voice in our community.
each set is designed to parallel with the human condition, constructing emotional cinematic scores that are musical paintings set to performance. coloured with influences of butoh and japanese film noir, he utilises elements of experimental techno, power electronics, industrial soundscapes, ambient, classical, dark wave and ebm.
he has shared billings with the likes of ancient methods, phase fatale, orphx, rrose, paula temple and samuel kerridge and has been been featured on boiler room tv. He is an essential part of kaos london and khemia records.
dirar kalash (b. 1982) is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of instrumental, compositional and improvisational contexts. kalash also extends his practice into inter-disciplinary theoretical research. he has produced several solo and collaborative musical albums and is active as touring musician, in addition to that he also created several sound installations, live audio-visual performances, field recordings and soundscape compositions series under the title of Sonic Front.
Based between Athens and London, Lee Adams is a multi-media artist, DJ and curator who has worked extensively with sound, film and visual installations, from re-scoring a lost David Toop soundscape for conceptual artist John Latham, to collaborating with noise violinist Mia Zabelka on the touring project Rotten Sun.
Working under the name Choronzon he plays expansive and cinematic dj sets fusing elements of techno, noise, experimental electronics, synthwave and body music for clubs, galleries and festivals across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
He curated and performed at The Boiler Room: Kaos London edition and has completed a four year residency on Rinse FM. He has created podcasts for New Brvtalism, Phormix, Root Radio (Istanbul) and Mindless (Morocco). He runs Khemia Records and also curates the Kaos London Podcast series.
Most recently he has started producing in collaboration with LAW334 as S U T U R E. Their track Panspermia was released on Khemia Records in 2021 and Vajra was included on a vinyl V/A by the Georgian label Murder Tbilisi in June 2022, an upcoming releases for Liber Null (Berlin) is currently in production.
https://soundcloud.com/choronzonkaos
Renata’s sound was shaped throughout her years of beat-based explorations, using the decks and drum machines in her deconstruct/reconstruct approach. Her art draws vision and inspiration from the murkier edges of beat processions, and takes shape as a manifestation of dissent through her ever-evolving modus operandi. During her stint in London, she branched out through residencies within the local scene alongside launching her own series under “The Calling” banner. She then returned to Beirut in 2016 and joined the Frequent Defect team with whom she shares a similar drive to address collective issues through multidisciplinary art forms. Renata is consistently endeavoring as an artist, curator and co-director of Frequent Defect while feeding into the collective force seeking to confront conditioning and the underlying taboo subjects through unapologetic radical art.
