Rachika Nayar + Maria Chavez, Mariam Rezaei, Victoria Shen

In just two short years, Rachika Nayar’s compositions of digitally processed guitar have reimagined the limits of both the instrument and of electronic music. Her 2021 full-length debut, Our Hands Against the Dusk, mutated her six-strings beyond recognition into lush, ghostly landscapes, while a companion EP “fragments” revealed the modest guitar loops that made up the raw material for the former’s contorted sound design. Her massive second LP, Heaven Come Crashing, released in 2022, takes a dramatic left-turn, trading her previous ambient sensibilities for vivid electronic maximalism. Retaining her mangled guitar stylings, she explores a sonic world of blistering passion through M1 piano stabs, supersaws, Amen breaks, and colossal synth harmonies a la “Dead Cities”-era M83. For this constant sense of reinvention, her releases have drawn acclaim from publications including The New York Times, Fader, Vulture, NPR, and Pitchfork, the latter of which named her sophomore LP "Best New Music."

Pioneers of New Turntablism, Maria Chavez, Victoria Shen (aka Evicshen) and Mariam Rezaei come together to compose and perform as a trio this April. Co-commissioned by Counterflows festival in Glasgow and Rewire in The Hague, the project represents the first time three female turntablists of colour have come together in this way. The trio bring together elements of musique concrète, free improvisation, noise, techno and hip-hop with instrument building and modification. Each artist has a wildly different approach to turntablism. Among the techniques deployed will be skratching, beatjuggling, sampling and looping, while the technologies will include double needle head shells and acrylic needle nails. The trio’s compositional aesthetics weave through sound sculpture, maximalism/minimalism and sonic destruction. Together, they will show that New Turntablism is beyond technique, genre or compositional theory; it’s about the unknown.