Mariam Rezaei (she/her) is a multi-award-winning composer, turntablist and performer whose work spans experimental new music, free improvisation, noise, mutant club music and hip-hop. The Anglo-Iranian virtuoso expands on classic turntablist skills by developing new techniques with vinyl, allowing her to manipulate an expansive range of samples in real time. Rezaei’s approach has been recognised by The Wire’s Peter Margasak as a “radical expansion of the artform.” Her innovations include free juggling, turntable sines, needle dripping, fractured loops and needle weaving. Across solo, duo, ensemble, orchestral and operatic works, Rezaei takes the philosophy and aesthetics of turntablism into new territory, creating wildly inventive, energetic and beautiful music.
Following on from the highly acclaimed Fractured (2024) and her ground-breaking Blud/Skeen/Bown trilogy (2019-2023), Rezaei will release Selected Adequate Works on Heat Crimes in early 2027. A major step forward in live turntablist composition, this double album captures the breadth of Rezaei’s vision from warped techno and mangled noise, to shimmering psychedelia and haunting chorales. Each track is recorded live in a single take, with Rezaei transforming her own samples alongside contributions from the likes of Elvin Brandhi, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, Julien Desprez, Lukas Koenig, Kenosist, Eleni Poulou and Lucy Railton. With its cyclonic noise guitars and rampaging amen breaks, “Avant Weird” fully lives up to The Wire’s description of Rezaei’s work as “turntablism at its most physical and extreme; it gets you in the guts.” The album also showcases her sensitivity, as she stretches and pulls Railton’s cello into expressive new forms on “wound”, and transforms a choir through her newest technique, fractured loops, on “Lorna”.
Rezaei has also undertaken major commissions such as Scholar’s Recordfor Donaueschinger Musiktage 2025, a four turntable tour-de-force which drew on the legendary festival’s audio archives, and 6 Scenes for Turntable and Orchestra, an orchestral collaboration with Matthew Shlomowitz which was premiered at IMD Darmstadt 2023 and subsequently performed with orchestras in Glasgow, Brussels and Warsaw. In 2024, she gave the first turntablist performance of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music with guitarist Kobe Van Cauwenberghe at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Other recent projects include The Contrechamps Method, a collaboration with Ensemble Contrechamps, and upcoming commissions from Ensemble Intercontemporain Jukebox Contemporain and HCMF 26 with The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters.
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), the pioneering Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez, 1984 with Kobe Van Cauwenberghe and Sakina Abdou, and Fire! Orchestra.
Other key collaborators include Pat Thomas, Bill Orcutt, dj sniff, Jennifer Walshe, Rhodri Davies, Edward George, Farida Amadou, Mats Gustafsson, Yeah You (Gwilly Edmondez and Elvin Brandhi), Petronn Sphene, Valentina Magaletti, Robyn Rocket, Thurston Moore, Lasse Marhaug, Evicshen, Fritz Welch, Eleni Poulou, John Butcher, Maria Chavez, Soumaya Pheline, Raymond MacDonald, Lukas König, Angharad Davies, Okkyung Lee, Dali de St Paul, Pierre Bleuse, Ilan Volkov, Kenosist, Ali Robertson, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, London Improvisers Orchestra and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.
In November 2022, Rezaei received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists in recognition of her contribution to music composition. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH. She is currently based in Newcastle, United Kingdom.
released on heatcrimes
FRACTURED
Recorded live in one take using various creative turntablist techniques, 'FRACTURED' is a snapshot of Mariam Rezaei's emotional state as she peers out from her studio at the "fucked up" world beyond the walls. Like its incendiary predecessor 'BOWN', the album torches genre boundaries, melting down punk, breakcore, electroacoustic music, Eurodance, avant-rock, grime, hip-hop and free noise until unprecedented contours begin to appear. This time, Rezaei's teeth are fully bared - if 'BOWN' skewered stuffy outside perceptions of her craft, 'FRACTURED' challenges and dares to confront not just the technical constraints of her process, but the meaning behind popularity, nostalgia and experimentation during a time of chaos. Blithe and refreshingly raw, it's a cracked, cacophonous soundtrack to a deafeningly broken era.
Rezaei has been developing her own style of turntablism since she was a teenager, and rethinks the formula from its base elements, contrasting samples and genre identifiers, and analyzing her own signature techniques. Using two to four turntables at a time, she employs free juggling, turntable sines (controlling sine waves using the pitch slider), turntable quartets, needle dripping and needle weaving - two new methods she debuts on 'FRACTURED'. The former involves composing music made specifically for needle dropping on multiple decks at a once ('jaw'). The latter is a way of using a digital vinyl system to loop music live using two decks, with nothing predetermined. "Once released from the loops," she explains, "the music continues to play forwards, never reversing back - ALWAYS FALLING FORWARDS." We can hear this clearly on 'cut', a blistering collaboration with European experimental trio MOPCUT, aka vocalist Audrey Chen, guitarist Julian Desprez and percussionist Lukas König. Working from a "quick recording of a soundcheck," Rezaei doesn't exactly deconstruct the band's clatter of elasticated croaks, itchy rhythms and angular guitars, but interrupts its logic, looping and multiplying each element to push everything off course.
She uses the same process on 'vengabussed', but the result is completely different. Here, inspired by Eliane Radigue electronics and Suzanne Ciani's revelatory synthesizer experiments, Rezaei contorts the melody from Vengaboys' 1998 hit 'We Like To Party!', turning it into an unrecognizably elegiac meditation on nostalgia and hedonism. The more eccentric side of the dancefloor is illuminated on 'Weirdo club musics', a "massive big up to the weirdos that go clubbing to anything" that showcases Rezaei's labyrinthine turntable drumming and an unexpected vocoded turn from Elvin Brandhi, and she tries and fails to adhere to the 4/4 template on 'going straight (and fucking it up)'. "It always bores the hell out of me and feels totally fake as fuck" she admits, shadowing Aphex Twin's iconic 'Windowlicker' with her chattering juggled beats and metallic prangs. Rezaei thinks back to a stimulating conversation with double bassist and composer Joëlle Leandre on 'the rage (for Joëlle)', using that fury to energize a gritty tonal experiment that funnels samples of Stewart Smith's guitar playing through various distortion pedals.
And Rezaei's electronically-enhanced voice materializes on the long finale 'animosity', chopped and screwed to draw out its thrumming, weightless intensity. Contrasting the rest of the album's relative bluster, it's a rare moment of tranquility that provides space to consider the over-arching themes. Rezaei's perception of genre might be fragmented, but 'Fractured' sprawls out like a mosaic, where every component part adds color, shape and physicality to an ornate whole
Turntable Trio
Mariam Rezaei, Maria Chavez, Victoria Shen
Front cover of Wire Magazine, April 2023. A power trio in New Turntablism.
