Friday, 16 February, 2024 - 20:00

ANTONIA KATTOU // MARLAIS // JIMMY TRASH

Door 20.00 Uhr | Concerts 20.30 Uhr | Tickets (AK) € 12,--

Between ethereal pasts and new folk futures, sometimes stylistic matchups present themselves in the most harmonic and exciting ways. Both Cyprius-born ANTONIA KATTOU and Berlin-Based MARLAIS present pieces deep from their cultural inheritances, but updated with modern soundscaping devices and new composing techniques. 
ANTONIA KATTOU will be releasing her second album “May You Live In Interesting Times” (a rebetiko sci-fi concept album!) by combining vintage Rebetiko recordings and her own field recordings alongside loops, pedals and her own virtuosity to enhance feelings of memory, loss and contortion (consider THE CARETAKER doing a Balkans project). MARLAIS performs folk pieces of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic heritage, with a redefined emphasis on vocal performance and drone, loops and microtonal distortion, and explores the space between the harmonic intimacy of drinking,love and loss songs of villages of old and harsh analog frequencies. 
Joining them is JIMMY TRASH, with a special presentation through the night of finds from his months in Greece researching for his SONGLINES project. He will spin original vinyl copies of Rebetiko, Laiko, Klarina Ipirotika and Balkan Folk music.

ANTONIA KATTOU (1999, Nicosia, Cyprus) is a composer, musician- improviser and sound artist based in Nicosia. Her work encompasses with acoustic and electroacoustic composition, improvisation and semi-improvisation, field recordings, analogue electronics, post-folk and storytelling. She experiments with nostalgia and transdisciplinary. Works of her have been commissioned and presented in PLUG Contemporary Music Festival, at St Andrews University - Intersections 2021, at Art making in the Anthropocene, at Festival Interrupted, at CoMA 2020 Festival of New Music - listed as one of the Young Generation Composers, at Royal Holloway, University of London and performed mainly in the UK by various ensembles and soloists such as RCS Brass, Nordic Viola, Ruth Morley & Laura Bowler, RCS Composers Ensemble and New Music Collective RHUL. In 2022 she co-created her duo called Ichomagnetic Thoughts. In 2023 she also appears solo in her solo project called Mystiki Fleva (ΜΦ). Antonia’s passion for ethnomusicology and composition led her to Royal Holloway, University of London where she graduated with a Bachelor of Music (Hons). She holds a master degree in composition (MMus in Composition) from Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where she studied with David Fennessy and Alistair MacDonald, supported by an RCS Trust scholarship. She is now a PhD student in Theory and Philosophy of Education at the University of Cyprus, studying with Marianna Papastefanou.

MARLAIS is the stage name of Michael Culme Seymour, who has been living and working in Berlin since 2011. After gaining a following on Soundcloud for his remixes of Alt-J and his folk-sampling beat driven instrumentals, Marlais consolidated this style into his debut EP “Dreams of Jarvis”, inspired by the literary fantastical folk worlds created by Dylan Thomas, whose middle name Marlais adopted to be his moniker. 2016 saw a directional change musically: “Warm at Last”, his debut full length album hosted traditional ballads and songs from Britain and Ireland, sung to experimental electronic arrangements. Slotting in between songs were a mixture of instrumentals, slow moving drones, whirling guitar loops and ambient explorations. During this time he also co-hosted with Phil Smith “We Just Met” on Berlin Community Radio for several years until the station shut down. In 2019 saw the release of “Meeting is a Pleasure” with Stuttgart label Treibender Teppich and in 2020 with the same label the EP “Died For Love” in 2021, songs of love and heartbreak featuring Phil Smith

on piano. In July 2022, Marlais self-released “The Nightingales Are Drunk” an album of 10 traditional folk songs sung unaccompanied, recorded directly on tape while on a residency in Tusheti, Georgia. Marlais also hosts a show on the Tbilisi based Mutant Radio, entitled “Gurkenmusik”.

Australian DJ, musician, filmmaker and journalist JIMMY TRASH has been a staple of Berlin good times for 17 years. He has been a research assistant and editor for several African and South American based music labels and has finished films focussing on folk magic and culture through the Balkans and his own families’ dirt track racing in Australia. As a musician Jimmy fused pan-African rhythms with minimalist synthesisers and his festival "Trashfest " ran for over 10 years and celebrated noisy subculture from all over the world. Jimmy wrote and performed a musical theater piece about the history of Man taming Nature for the esteemed Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt and is now completing a season of the podcast "Songlines with Jimmy Trash'' focussing on the untold stories of folk music from strained political times from all over the world.

Supported within the program LIVE500 by Initiative Musik e.V. with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM)
 

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