Lonnie Holley is an African-American artist, musician & art educator. A true original with a generous, uplifting & warm spirit.

We welcome Lonnie back to The Cube for a two night residency of improvisation & deep feeling. No two shows are ever the same and it is always an honour to be in his company.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. Lonnie’s art and music are born out of struggle and hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of a furious curiosity and biological necessity. 

That drive manifests in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, music, and filmmaking.  His art has been featured in exhibitions and publications throughout the world, and is in the collections of major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Tate Modern & Camden Art Centre alongside many others. 

He has experimented with film, photography, and video throughout his career. His directorial debut, the narrative short I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. 

Free spirited, soulful music with a stream of consciousness energy that orbits similar visionaries such as Sun Ra, Joni Mitchell & Gil Scott-Heron. Lonnie has released seven critically acclaimed albums including Just Before Music (2012), MITH (included as one of the best albums of the decade by The New Yorker) & the latest Tonky, earlier this year. He has toured extensively throughout the United States and the Americas, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, sharing stages with Bon Iver, Shahzad Ismaily, Bill Callahan, Tinariwen, Daniel Lanois, Laraaji and others. 

Lonnie continues to make art, music, and as he puts it, “thoughtsmith,” from his home and studio in Atlanta, Georgia and around the world.

“I keep seeing what’s happening in the world and trying to make music about it” - Lonnie Holley

Shahzad Ismaily joins for both nights as a very special guest. Shahzad is an American multi-instrumentalist & composer of Pakistani descent who has worked in theatre & film and contributed his distinctive musical language to 100s of records by artists including Marc Ribot, John Zorn, Yoko Ono, Laraaji, Colin Stetson, Sam Amidon, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & Laurie Anderson as well as a key presence on the grammy award winning albums of Arooj Aftab.

Patricia Cadavid is a Colombian-born immigrant, sound artist & researcher. Patricia’s work explores the relationships and effects of coloniality in new media through the lens of migratory experience and decolonial & anticolonial thought.

Her working practice draws on ancestral technologies, often silenced & erased by colonisation, and the connections between art & science, to reactivate these identities, histories & customs in the present through an artistic process involving video, sound interfaces, tangible live coding & multimedia performance.

Knotted textures of noise & scurried rhythms build & evolve into deep percussive sound rituals that invite contemplation and a way of listening & honouring to the echoes of the past. Patricia has exhibited at festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), ADAF (Greece), the NIME conference, and in venues across the United States, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Colombia and released the sound work Tawa in 2021 on Vienna’s Small Forms label.

Tonight’s performance will be based around Spiral, an audiovisual composition that activates ancestral Andean technologies through two custom-built instruments, the Electronic_Khipu_and the Kanchay_Yupana //, to explore sound as a medium of memory, resistance, and ritual. The piece blends field recordings, live sound manipulation, and visuals inspired by Andean cosmology, creating an immersive sonic ritual that embodies Indigenous knowledge in the present.

Spiral premiered earlier this year at University of California, Los Angeles ’s Fowler Museum as part of the Sound + Science 30 symposium.

It is dedicated to all the people and beings in the world who have been forced to abandon their homes by war, colonisation and greed.

No one is illegal on stolen land

Monday 10th November w/ Shahzad Ismaily & Allan Gilbert Balon

Tuesday 11th November w/ Shahzad Ismaily & Patricia Cadavid