Two performances by the musician, poet, visual artist Moor Mother. For each performance she will be joined by a set of guest performers (TBA). Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music.
Poster: Adélaïde de Alfaro
Doors: 7pm first show, 9pm second show
Tickets £10-20 Sliding Scale
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.
Photography: Ebru Yildiz
Thurston Moore started Sonic Youth in 1980 and has been at the forefront of the alternative rock scene since that particular sobriquet was first used to signify any music that challenged and defied the mainstream standard. With Sonic Youth, Moore turned on an entire generation to the value of experimentation in rock n roll – from its inspiration on a nascent Nirvana, to Sonic Youth’s own Daydream Nation album being chosen by the US Library of Congress for historical preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2006. Thurston records and performs in a cavalcade of disciplines ranging from free improvisation to acoustic composition to black/white metal/noise disruption. He has worked with Yoko Ono, John Zorn, David Toop, Cecil Taylor, Faust, Glenn Branca and many others. His residency at the Louvre in Paris included collaborations with Irmin Schmidt of CAN. Alongside his various activities in the musical world, he is involved with publishing and poetry, and teaches writing at Naropa University, Boulder CO, a school founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Thurston also teaches music at The Rhythmic Music Conservatory (Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium) in Copenhagen. Presently he performs and records solo, with various ensembles and in his own band, The Thurston Moore Group.
SHABAKA (fka Shabaka Hutchings) is a visionary multi-instrumentalist redefining musical boundaries. Born in London and raised in Barbados, he blends jazz, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and electronic influences with fearless improvisation. Best known for leading Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, he has collaborated with artists like Floating Points and Mulatu Astatke. In 2023, he announced a shift away from the saxophone, focusing on flutes such as the shakuhachi and quena. This transformation shapes Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, a deeply expressive album recorded live with musicians including Esperanza Spalding and Carlos Niño. Always merging sound and poetry, Hutchings invites listeners on a personal journey through rhythm and resonance. His music remains expansive, challenging, and deeply rooted in cultural storytelling, proving that exploration is at the heart of his artistry.
Alya Al-Sultani is a British-Iraqi dramatic soprano and composer of new opera living in London. Her work focuses on integration - of a diaspora identity, varied musical loves, the organic beauty of the human voice and the digital hum of modern life, structure and free improvisation.
Valentina Magaletti ‘s versatile technique, which can incorporate anything from vibes and marimba to contact microphones and found objects, results in a style that is forever evolving. Feeling just as comfortable performing behind a delicate ceramic kit as she does hammering out motorik rhythms, her creative take on percussion has resulted in a diverse discography and many interesting collaborations.
As a drummer, Magaletti moves effortlessly between the seemingly disparate worlds of alternative and mainstream music. She has played with artists such as Jandek, Pat Thomas, Deb Googe, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Steve Beresford, Steve Shelley, Lafawndah, Mica Levi, Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Nicolas Jaar to name a few. In addition to collaborating with the gamelan Ensemble Nist-Nah and drummers Malcom Catto, Julian Sartorius and Charles Hayward, she has played with stalwarts of the experimental underground scene like Gnod’s Marlene Ribeiro, Wire’s Graham Lewis, and Thighpaulsandra (Coil). In 2017, Valentina participated in The Can Project, standing in for the late Jaki Liebezeit, at London’s Barbican Centre.
Klein is an artist and musician whose work often blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Her music releases, films, and performances are often informed by urban mapping, surveillance, humor, hip-hop, noise, identity, and beyond. Her work has been shown and/or performed at Museums, Galleries, yards, squats, and pubs, including the infamous The Old Blue Last and the New Cross Inn.