Leo Records – MATINEE: SAINKHO NAMTCHYLAK / MIA ZABELKA + SIMON NABATOV + Film screening: 'Leo Records: Strictly For Our Friends'

Exactly 30 years and 3 months ago Leo Records was promoting a three-day international music festival called Unsung Music. The event was held at the Royal Festival Hall, London. The idea of the festival was to present innovative, improvisation-based music that had never been heard live in Great Britain before.

Spool 30 years forward, and this kind of music is regularly heard in many venues. To celebrate the thirty-year.25 anniversary of this music, Leo Records will present a one day celebration bringing the best practitioners of this genre to Cafe OTO. As part of the celebrations, we'll also be hosting a special matinee screening of the documentary, 'Leo Records : Strictly For Our Friends'.

Sainkho Namtchylak: Sainkho Namtchylak More than a generation has passed since the astounding singer Sainkho Namtchylak emerged from her homeland in Tuva, deep in Soviet Siberia, by the Mongolian border. She moved to Moscow, where her startling vocal gifts were recognized and featured internationally in the USSR's minority 'showcase' ensembles. Then on to Western Europe, where she became a phenomenon of creative improvised music and part of the genesis of the contemporary World Music scene. She put together various ensembles with young musicians, creating acclaimed productions, including the International music hits "Stepmother City" and "Time Out", plus the album Lost Rivers (FMP) and Letters (Leo Records).

Mia Zabelka: Mia Zabelka Mia Zabelka (violin, voice) is a sound artist, composer as well as an improviser from Vienna, with czech, jewish and french familiar background. After completing her training with a strong classical emphasis, she continued to construct and explore the limits of sound and music in a language entirely her own, based on the de- and reconstruction of the violin’s sonic possibilities, expanding the range of the instrument using live electronic devices, preparing it through the insertion of alien objects between or on the strings and innovative performance techniques. Mia Zabelka describes this process as AUTOMATIC PLAYING, continuously exploring sound and music as physical phenomena, always pushing back the boundaries in experimental performances and compositions that question established notions, improving the available techniques and given structures. The violin and her own voice and body are transformed in the process into sound bodies which are at once organic and primal, screaming, lyrical, composed and explosive. She has collaborated with a string of exciting artists from around the world, such as Robin Rimbaud, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, Dälek, Lydia Lunch, Alexei Borisov , Phill Niblock, John Zorn, John Russell, Maggie Nicols and Philippe Petit. She has given concerts and performances at many Festivals throughout Europe, America and Asia. Numerous CD, vinyl and video releases. Recipient of highly regarded prizes (3-time winner oft the Prix Ars Electronica) and awards, she was a guest of the DAAD’s (German Academic Exchange Service’s) international artists’ programme in Berlin and the Fulbright Commission in New York. Mia Zabelka is currently the artistic director of Phonofemme Festival Vienna and Klanghaus Untergreith in the region of South Styria.

Simon Nabatov: Simon Nabatov Simon Nabatov, pianist and composer, was born in Moscow 1959 in a musician's family. He started to play piano at the age of 3 and to compose at 6. After attending the renowned Central Music School and Moscow Conservatory he landed in 1979 in USA, where he continued his studies at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York, the city in which he spent the next 10 years. In 1989 he moved to Germany, settling in Cologne where he resides presently. His musical activities include jazz, improvised, experimental and world music. Nabatov has attained world-wide reputation through his solo concerts as well as numerous long-time collaborations – in duos with Steve Lacy, Nils Wogram, Tom Rainey, Han Bennink, Ernst Reijseger and Matthias Schubert; with the NDR Bigband; in quartets of Ray Anderson, Arthur Blythe and Perry Robinson, among others.