BEAST presents: Loula Yorke and Hadi Bastani

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Loula Yorke is a composer, sound artist and improviser with a specialism in live modular synthesis. In 2020 her community-focused electronics practice was recognised with a Special commendation from the Oram Awards. Her 2021 SPILL Commission Atari Punk Girls – an audacious and energetic live show co-composed with a group of girls and gender minority young people who built their own DIY synthesisers – was recommended by audiences as an “unexpected highlight of the festival”.
Loula’s trademark hardware livesets blend noise, vintage drum machine sounds, algorithmically-generated rhythms and melodies to create kaleidoscopic collages. She’s performed in warehouses, arts centres and livestreams: this year supporting Hiro Kone in Bristol, and Rival Consoles in Norwich. She’s had radio play on BBC R3, R1 & 1XTRA, and coverage in Electronic Sound, The Wire, DJ Mag, and Bandcamp Daily, being described as “one of the most interesting voices in analog electronics”, and, “a DIY noisenik champion!” Loula also improvises with poet-vocalist Una Lee as OULAN: in 2022 they’ve played at Cafe Oto, Colchester Arts Centre and Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast.

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Hadi Bastani is a sound artist, anthropologist, and composer. His creative practice explores relationships between sounds, spaces, and social processes through electroacoustic composition, live performance, and installation art. His scholarship engages with combined affordances of ethnography and practice-led research in sound. It examines and articulates socio-technological and spatial assemblages that underpin experimental musicking on the one hand and people’s sense of belonging on the other, focusing on post-revolutionary Iran. His investigation of contemporary Iranian experimental electronic music practice (2015-2019) formed the first comprehensive research on the subject and culminated in a book that will be published through Routledge in 2024.