“I want people to see how full of possibility and potential the turntable is,” says Mariam Rezaei, the Newcastle turntablist and composer who has been steadily building a wider international audience since last year’s blazingly original album BOWN. “I’m very much of the Edward George frame of mind, that there are many stories written within the music that we are just waiting to discover. That’s a big part of how I approach the turntable. I have to embrace things I dislike, in order to push through to something I do like and believe in.”
This spirit of exploration fills every corner of BOWN: an unpredictable, intense and slyly funny collection of single-take performances. The movement of the album feels indebted to free jazz, darting from the woozy, pulsing ‘MARIAMBA’ to the boiling industrial noise of ‘SHORTIE SHORTS’. Sounds spanning marimbas, drums and the human voice – including Alya Al-Sutani’s striking spoken-word reflections on femininity in ‘I WANT U 2’, declaring “civilisation is female” – are splintered, wound up together and dispersed. “It was a very fun experiment,” she says, “bringing together different sound worlds in a visceral way that’s live. I have zero interest in an edited studio album, because I’m a performer. It wouldn’t feel real.”
Two decades into her career, she describes the success of BOWN as “fuel to do more.” She has since collaborated with orchestras and other turntablists, and formed her new band The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters: a collaboration with Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet and electronics, and drummer Lukas Koenig. “It’s free of genre, it’s multi-genre,” she says of their scorching improvised performances. “It’s whatever we decide in the moment.”
Most recently, she has been making a new album she teases as “a whole other step away from BOWN,” featuring her own drum machine work and a digital vinyl technique called needle-weaving. “A sample plays forward, and I catch it in a live loop,” she explains. “Once I release the loop, the record continues to play forward. You get an effect like someone weaving on a loom, who is making a larger pattern, stops to weave something small within it, then goes back to the main weave.” Combining dub, hip hop and thrash metal, she also notes her use of sine tones, which she has been honing through her live performances. “The whole room reduces to this ball of energy, and it’s super concentrated – you feel these beatings through your body,” she says. “The turntable’s meant to do this. It’s the perfect instrument to play with pitch and swing it around.”
Much of the past year has been spent intensively touring, and introducing new audiences to her striking approach to turntablism. Recent shows include an appearance at improvising vocalist Elvin Brandhi’s residency at London’s Cafe OTO, also joined by Petronn Sphene (AKA Urocerus Gigas of Guttersnipe) and knitwear designer Ilana Blumberg (invited to come onstage and unravel a jumper). “At the height of Saturday night,” Rezaei recalls, “Ilana had the room in silence for five minutes, then the rest of us ran onstage and presented this wonderful wall of noise. Frenetic, frantic beats. The audience was totally wild. All the way through the set, Ilana was unravelling this jumper, and after she’d managed it, the room burst into this huge applause. Nobody knew what anyone was going to do.”
Improvisation is, Rezaei explains, integral to turntablism. “The experiment is always putting the needle to the record – you don’t know when the sound is going to come out, and there’s always the possibility the record will skip.” DJs who get frustrated with the medium’s unpredictability, she suggests, are missing the point. “Is it a mistake? No! It’s a question – answer it. Until turntablists understand that, things will continue to be stuck in a certain place.”
That spirit of innovation has been studied, Rezaei reveals in her Baker’s Dozen, from ground-breaking artists spanning jazz, hip hop and electronica. Her selections also feature many of the female artists who have inspired her with their agency and conviction, as well as some less celebrated heroes. These records have come to her at various points throughout her life and remarkable career, and she begins with an album she discovered in childhood.
Mariam Rezeai performs at OUT.FEST in Barreiro, Portugal, which takes place from 2 to 6 October. For the full line-up and more information, click here.
To begin reading her Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below.
