Moor Mother

Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Camae's work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Hall, Documenta 15, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Glastonbury Festival. Through the lens and practice of Black Quantum Futurism the art she makes is a statement for the future, as well as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes. She specializes in practical concepts, but works in speculation and historical concepts. Moor Mother creates soundscapes using field sounds and archival sound collage in order to create sonic maps that allow us to journey to our buried histories and futures. She is an artist who, through writing, music, film, visual art, socially engaged art, and creative research, explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming oppressive linear temporalities into empowering, alternative temporalities. Her work seeks to inspire practical techniques of vision and agency against a forever expanding re -conquering of land, housing, and health in Black communities. Camae is a Pew Fellow, a The Kitchen Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee, a Leeway Transformation Award, a Blade of Grass Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, and a Rad Girls Philly Artist of the Year. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, WORM! Rotterdam residency, and the Creative Capital and CERN collide residency with Black Quantum Futurism. 

Shovel Dance Collective

After a variety of regular meet-ups, chance encounters and song-filled trips to Margate by old friends, new friends and friends of friends - the nine musicians of Shovel Dance Collective were formed. They are brought together by a communal passion for the folk traditions of England, Scotland, Ireland, and beyond. Not only preserving, they act to nurture and synthesise this source material with the members eclectic interest in other musical forms, by drawing sensibilities from drone, free improvisation, contemporary classical and metal. With a rich array of instrumentation at their disposal they dig up new ways of playing through research in primary sources and folkloric history. Woven deeply into the fabric of the collective is a sense of folk as the music of working people, a set of narratives that hold within them queer histories, proto-feminist narratives and the rich world of those who created and create the wealths of the world. They are simultaneously traditional and experimental, not seeing folk music as an archaeological artefact to be unearthed, but as a living and breathing communal activity that is inviting and generous to those it speaks to.

Elaine Mitchener

Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary / experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic unit The Rolling Calf (with Jason Yarde and Neil Charles). Her regular collaborators include: composers George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, and Tansy Davies; visual artists Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay and The Otolith Group; chamber ensembles Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, and Klangforum Wien; choreographer Dam van Huynh’s company; and experimental musicians such as Moor Mother, Loré Lixenberg, Saul Williams, Pat Thomas and David Toop. While developing her own projects, Elaine continues to work as a collaborative and interpretive singer.

www.elainemitchener.com

dirar kalash

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.

Pat Thomas

Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music. He has played with Derek Bailey in Company Week (1990/91) and in the trio AND (with Noble) – with Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra and in Duo with Lol Coxhill. 

"Sartorially shabby as Thomas may be, and on first impression even rather stolid, he has a somewhat imperious charisma that’s immediately amplified when he starts to play. Unlike other pianists whose virtuosity seems to be racing ahead of their thought processes Thomas always seems supremely in command of his gift, and his playing, no matter how free and ready to tangle with abstraction, always carries a charge of authoritative exactitude." - The Jazzmann

Imani Mason Jordan

Imani Mason Jordan (b. 1992, London) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator interested in poetics and performance.

Imani has written numerous articles, reviews, essays, poems, plays and love letters, some of which they have published. Since 2016, they have developed a keen interest in poetics, oration, experimentation and practices of reading aloud, from which they have synthesised a performance practice that centres writing and collaboration as well as using the speaking voice as an instrument. After completing their MA in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths in 2019, their pamphlet OBJECTS WHO TESTIFY was published by Taylor Le Melle at PSS.

Imani is currently working on their debut poetry collection, THE BOOK OF SLASH POEMS and their solo performance work TREAD/MILL. Recent performance/audio projects include: EARTHLY ACCOMPLICE (2023) with Felix Taylor at MACBA, Barcelona & Crosness Pumping Station, London; ATLANTIC RAILTON: LIVE (2021) with Ain Bailey at Serpentine Pavilion, London & WELCOME NOTE IN A WELCOME SPEECH (2019) with Libita Sibungu at Gasworks, London & Spike Island, Bristol.

Imani is Director of PAPERFLESH PUBLISHING, a multi-genre small press and editing studio for the intellectually rigorous, politically minded black writer. Imani has curated various exhibitions and public programmes alongside Rabz Lansiquot as Languid Hands (2019-) and SYFU (2018).

Alya Al-Sultani

Alya Al-Sultani is a vocalist and composer based in London, UK. Her first musical experiences were Iraqi folk songs sung by her great grandmother and radio broadcasts of Um Kolthum, Abdel-Halim and Fairouz which she listened to with her family while drinking sweet black tea infused with cardamom. After leaving Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, her family settled in Tottenham, North London where she began to discover the incredible new sounds of the 80s and music from the Caribbean.

Her musical education was entirely classically-focussed, on piano and voice. She learned the importance of technique, tradition, theory, respecting fellow musicians and respecting the music. But she did not learn freedom and it is this she has sought for the last decade. The pursuit of freedom in music is driven by her aesthetic, her immigrant experience and her Eastern feminism.

Apart from working on her own projects, Alya enjoys debuting new music for contemporary composers and experimenting with opera, including the integration of improvisation techniques, microtonal ideas and Eastern influences.