Saturday 24 July 2021, 7.30pm
Chinabot celebrates its 4th anniversary with a new label compilation 'Tetra Hysteria Manifesto'
Nilufar Habibian is a composer of acoustic and electronic music, an award-winning qanun-player and an improviser based in London. Alongside concert music, her interdisciplinary collaborations have included scores for contemporary dance and film.
She has received her diploma in music from Tehran Music Conservatoire and studied Persian classical music in Iran under the supervision of the most prominent Iranian Maestros. She has received her bachelor in music from the Royal Holloway University of London and her master in composition from Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
As a composer, she tries to investigate and express human conditions through sound and explore new sounds that carry and convey multiple meanings, emotions and characters.
Her pieces have performed at different venues such as The Place, Wigmore Hall and Milton Court in the UK and Kennedy Center Millennium Stage (Washington DC) and Roulette Hall (New York) in the US.
As a qanun player, Nilufar performs a variety of musical styles ranging from Persian classical and Middle-Eastern music to avant-garde and experimental contemporary Western music. In her solo performances, she tries to offer new interpretations of the Persian classical repertoire approaching it from a new and modern (technically and aesthetically) viewpoint. She has performed at venues and concert halls such as Vahdat Hall, Rudaki Hall, Milad Hall in Iran and Purcell Room, Cadogan Hall and Cafe OTO in the UK.
Some other collaborations include a storytelling project with City University and Tiny Owl publisher called “The phoenix of Persia”, for which she made incidental music. She also composed an electronic track for “These Are Our Friends Too”, an album that highlights the work the charity FORWARD does towards ending female genital mutilation. In March 2021, her recent electronic piece was released in a compilation Album by Iranian label Noise A Noise.
https://soundcloud.com/nilufar-habibian
Poulomi Desai's unique, modified sitar embraces elements of chance, challenge and subversion - industrial, noise influenced improvised, art performances. Her prepared / bowed sitar is extended with modified cassette decks playing her field recordings, circuit bent toys, optikinetic instruments, kitchen knives, axes and massage tools. It is a conscious response and reaction to the idea of 'authenticity' seeking to break the rules and expectations of how a 'sacred' instrument should be played, the strictures upon the player, the guru-shishya approach, and the assumptions made upon the identity of the player herself. Her sitar is the primary basis for sonic improvisation and exploration; an allegorical antidote to the objectification of the 'South Asian woman's body' in 'Bollywood' cinema / 'popular culture' and, in a broader sense, affirming her idea of 'Noise' as protest. She runs the Usurp Art space in the suburbs and is currently the Curator of the Grunwick strike exhibition.
www.poulomidesai.tumblr.com | www.usurp.org.uk
Beachers is the project of London-based Daryl Worthington. He works in the crossovers between accidental and composed sounds, hi and lo-fi audio, with a particular interest in the beauty of the mundane. This takes an array of approaches, from explorations of the materiality and ritual of radio signals through to analogue synthesis, field recording and musique concrete explorations, cassette collages and sample-based computer music. Beachers releases have appeared on czaszka (rec.), Shimmering Moods, Fractal Meat, Never Anything Records and Still Heat Recordings.
“When I think about the three Beachers releases I’ve heard, the main connective tissue is the underlying curiosity. Worthington is an explorer. He never seems settled, but there’s a certain comfort in the fluidity of his sound. As a listener, it keeps me guessing and excited about where the road will take the project next.” Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis
"Beachers couldn’t have planned to tune into a broadcast of wailing violins (or operatic voices?) on The Interview's “Happiness Isn’t in the Struggle”, yet his decision to swathe the harmonies within folds of static, denying the listener the beauty of the full signal, is both masterful and heartbreaking." Jack Chuter, ATTN Magazine
“Beachers' All Houses Are Haunted is, to me, astounding. It covers so much ground while retaining a specific vision, it’s just magical. There are moments of strange ambient stillness punctuated by gated vocal recordings, possibly radio snippets, but that’s a guess.” Aidan Hanratty, Bandcloud
https://beachers.bandcamp.com/
Cerpintxt is an electroacoustic post-ape progress report from the cosmic madhouse, through the medium of voice, auto-destruction, wind-guided experiments in protoconversation. Her work is concerned with generating an invented language of a particular strain of softness through phonetic entropy and augmented instrumentation. While the textural counterparts rely on broken turntablism, interdependent generative sampling, prepared Kacapi, seismic microphones and hydrophones. The hauntological element of her work explores a form of sonic activism against the weaponization of love in Egypt. She will be joined by Ruben Sonnoli on piano, where the duo improvises a noir-jazz loosely narrated thread of voices, tape machines and rogue acoustics.
https://soundcloud.com/alaayussry
'Asian R&B and hip-hop, Ambient are wrapped up in a hazy chopped and screwed fog. Home calls out to you but she is obscured from vision. You close your eyes and rely on sound to take you back. Birds chirping, the buzz of a radio fading in and out, the hiss of an old cassette tape. That longing for home seems to stretch on and on. That distance stretching on and on. Nostalgia can feel so slow sometimes. Lose yourself in it, recall those memories. Fall asleep and dream of home.' text by Miles Oyasumi
https://www.nts.live/shows/ony
https://ony777.bandcamp.com/album/eternal-screw
https://soundcloud.com/ony-777
