UH Fest & Trafó House pres. Xexa, Mariam Rezaei, Bója, Bölöni/Kovács-Vajda/Lichter: A dolog él!, Eszelős meszelős

XEXA is a Portuguese composer, vocalist and sound artist of São Tomé e Príncipe ancestry based in London, with a gorgeous debut LP ‘Vibrações de Prata’ released in 2023 on Príncipe, one of the most innovative club music labels of the last decade merging new dance sounds with Lisbon's postcolonial polyrhytmic legacy and culture from Africa. Last year Kissom, her new material came out, "a brilliant, unexpected tilt into writhing, syrupy kizomba rhythms and smudged, vaulted chamber music, uncannily comparable to something like Arthur Russell or This Mortal Coil", as Boomkat wrote.

Mariam Rezaei is Anglo-Iranian composer, turntablist and performer working across experimental new music, free improvisation, mutant club music and hip-hop. Described by The Wire as “one of the most technically adept and creatively daring artists to use the turntable as a musical instrument”, while her music as “high-velocity sonic surrealism” by The Guardian. Her latest solo release Fractured on Athens-based Heat Crimes and featured Elvin Brandhi, in addition to her solo work, Rezaei is a member of the international free music supergroup The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, trumpeter/electronics Gabriele Mitelli and drummer Lukas König) and the pioneering Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez.

Bója is the duo of Martin Bódis & Máté Elod Janky aka Alley Catss, merging live electronics and improvisational percussion into harrowing, high-energy, dynamically disorienting clouds. Rooted in psychedelia, doom, dub, drone, and the spaces between, and inspired by Otomo Yoshihide, Bója forges path-finding sonic rituals driven by rhythm, flow, and texture.

The Thing in the Coffin, newest creation of renowned Hungarian experimental music director Péter Lichter, is an experimental horror film constructed entirely from digital and analog footage of old vampire movies. Lichter used visual material from dozens of Dracula adaptations — including 35mm and Super 8 reels — which he transformed through various forms of material decay and distortion, such as film rot, dyeing, glitch effects, digital manipulation, reprinting, and re-filming. The screening at Trafó will be accompanied by the improvised electronic music by Bence Kovács-Vajda and Anna Bölöni, authors of the original soundtrack, this time entirely re-imagined live as The Thing Is Alive!

Eszelős meszelős is a project of Balázs Kovács, mastermind and mentor of the Pécs electronic music community, and the man behind Dióbél label. Balázs Kovács as Eszelős meszelős presents near-natural themes realized by synthetic, physically modeled instruments and algorithmic midi-effects, with countless human and machine errors. On this evening he will be accompanied by spoken word.