Thursday 17 September 2026, 7.30pm
PROGRAMME 17 SEPTEMBER:
Sam Salem, Everyone No-one (2026)
Commissioned by NO HAY BANDA, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
Adrianne Munden-Dixon, violin
Audréanne Filion, cello
Lori Freedman, bass clarinet
Kalun Leung, trombone
Daniel Áñez, ondes Martenot
Noam Bierstone, percussion
Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, live sound
Sam Salem, electronics & vidéo
Dali de Saint Paul, new work (2026)
Co-commissioned by Another Sky & NO HAY BANDA
Dali de Saint Paul, voice & electronics
Adrianne Munden-Dixon, violin
Daniel Áñez, ondes Martenot
Noam Bierstone, percussion
Sam Salem, Everyone No-one
Everyone No-one is an immersive audiovisual concert work that is a rumination on obsolescence and the act of writing music for the end of history. Salem was born in a drab town in the middle of England, to a Palestinian father and Circassian mother. He grew up suspended between three cultures.
In 2025, for the first time in over 20 years, Salem returned to Jordan, reflecting on family history lost and new family histories found, immersing himself in colonial relics, sacred sites, forts and churches, the wide, open deserts, and also… the distant rumble of genocide. How does one process these thoughts and memories – of family, the long arc of history, the ongoing identity confusion of a second generation immigrant who is, of all things, a composer, with that rumble, quiet, inexorable, terrifying, that he continues to hear, even in his dreams?
This concert-length work of apophenia makes narrative connections between seemingly disparate threads, and includes an exploration of ancient cosmologies and their associated myths, Hermeticism / Occultism and its relationship to the scientific revolution of the 16th & 17th centuries, notions of technological, cultural, and personal nostalgia, and the slow / fast violence of colonial occupation. Or, it is perhaps a (brief) history of discredited, discarded or defunct ideas, technologies, art forms, musics – Sun worship, Cybernetics, Crusader castles, Carl Stalling’s “mickey mousing” for Looney Tunes, plunderphonics, and dance music that you can’t actually dance to. Perhaps it is a place where doom metal (with a heavy emphasis on the doom) meets Just Intonation meets musical automata meets symbolic AI. Where weight meets weightlessness.
Everyone No-one is a ritual of knowing and unknowing, for a world where we struggle to find truth and/or meaning in the cognitive dissonance of living in what Hesse described as the “Age of Feuilleton” while experiencing the horror of livestreamed genocide.
Dali de Saint Paul, new work
Beyond the historical frictions between communities, what traces do the descendants carry of their ancestors’ migrations? The exploration and deciphering of unconscious musical sediments of cultural heritage and the construction of a self – inevitably incomplete due to the gaps in its genealogy and history – is the focus of this new collaboration. This work revolves around the use of traditional instruments such as the violin, percussion and voice in North African cultures, combined with the ondes Martenot, which provides a necessary link to the electronic music that fuels our contemporary imaginations.
Another Sky is a London-based festival and artistic platform celebrating experimental music from the SWANA (South West Asia & North Africa) region and diaspora. We present composed, improvised and electronic music; short films and moving-image works; new commissions; workshops and an independent label & publisher fair. We are delighted to host NO HAY BANDA – long-time collaborators, extraordinary creative thinkers, community leaders and performers – for their UK debut, in celebration of their receipt of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Ensemble Prize 2026. Together we present a programme which includes three commissions which have been developed closely with the composers throughout 2026, by Dali de Saint Paul, Lucie Nezri and Sam Salem.
https://anotherskyfestival.com
NO HAY BANDA is a Montreal-based organization committed to the production and performance of music rooted in exploratory and avant-garde practices. NO HAY BANDA presents an annual concert series in Montreal that features a variety of local and visiting artists, and represents a flexible ensemble of musicians – a “house band” of sorts – that performs and tours original productions. Throughout these activities, NO HAY BANDA aims to provide a space for artists working on the fringes of established genres to realize projects that would not take place otherwise. Furthermore, NO HAY BANDA records and produces albums that are released on the in-house record label, No Hay Discos.
nohaybanda.ca
Supported by Arts Council England, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the Marchus Trust, Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Dali de Saint Paul is a raw experimental vocalist, a performer, a composer, a producer and cultural actor of the Bristol experimental music scene. Her particular use of vocals through fx blurs sonic borders, questions gender stereotypes and destabilises spatial and linguistic borders; as a lyricist, she mixes poetics and politics to bring intensity to her performances. With her self-exploding project EP/64 the Ephemeral Project 64, which involved more than 40 artists over six years (2016-22), Dali refreshed conceptions of improvisation, bringing back the focus on community in music culture. A prolific collaborator, she has worked with Moor Mother, Valentina Magaletti, Mariam Rezaei and more. She’s the searing voice of post-industrial duo HARRGA and of the experimental film, light and sound performance Penumbra. As a producer she operates under the alias Content Provider. In 2024 she received an Oram Award. In 2025 she held a three-day residency at Cafe Oto, performed at the New Music Biennial with Penumbra and released “Endless Summer” as Content Provider, which was named one of the best tapes of the year by The Quietus. In 2026 she presented her first solo performance, “Melted For Love”, at Sonics Acts in Amsterdam.
Sam Salem is an award-winning composer and artistic director. He creates audiovisual works for performers, electronics and video which challenge traditional notions of concert presentation and instrumental virtuosity. His work is fundamentally psychogeopraphical, informed by site-specific research – the layers of myth and history that he uncovers form the building blocks of his work. He is a founding member of Distractfold Ensemble and co-director of Another Sky. He has recently written for Mark Knoop, Noam Bierstone, Weston Olencki and Linda Jankowska, as well as a new work, The Museum of the Lowest Place (2026), which was supported by the PRS Foundation’s Composers’ Fund. He is PRiSM Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music.
https://www.osamahsalem.co.uk
