Artist Bio — Nancy Mounir

A versatile multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer, Nancy Mounir is a key member of Egypt’s alternative music scene. She contributes original music to theater productions, films, and international art installations. Mounir plays a range of instruments—including violin, piano, bass, Theremin, and the traditional Egyptian bamboo flute called the kawala—and in the process she has explored both the harmonic principles of the Western canon and the microtonal foundations of Arabic maqam (musical modes). Lately she has stepped further into the limelight with her solo debut album (3 June 2022, Simsara Records), Nozhet El Nofous — a transcendent exploration of musical freedom through the lens of century-old archival recordings. She was born in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and now lives in Egypt’s capital, Cairo.

IG: @mounirnancy

Photo by: Eslam Abd El Salam

Born in an isolated community of Borneo Island in 1993 Wanton Witch is a DJ and producer with a hyper-sensitive connection and approach to sound through performance. Coming of age in the relative isolation of island life, it wasn't until relocating to Bangkok that she was able to access the different communities of musical genres that she would later travel between. With an early taste for trap and hip hop, she began working in the deconstructed club and techno scene where she found her musical voice, beginning her DJ career in 2018. Wanton is also a cofounder and original member of Queer underground creative collective 'Non Non Non' that has become a Bangkok nightlife staple.

Being an "outsider" musician and producer with no formal training, it was the fortuitous crossing of paths online that has sparked the creative collaboration between Wanton and label owner and creative director Lucy. Last year Stroboscopic Artefacts celebrated ten years established between experimental and dance floor spectres and this is the first record the label is releasing after one year break, marking the launch of a new chapter for the imprint. It is with releases like the eponymous debut album from Wanton Witch and the support given to emerging artists like her that the imprint continues to forge pathways within the industry.

Featuring 11 tracks, these recordings are the first body of work from the Bangkok producer, and include many different snapshots of electronic music genres from IDM and experimental to hardcore and rave, using caustic electronics to deconstruct traditional track conventions. This collection of cuts read more as a complete soundscape, like listening to a live set. The phrenetic jump from genre to genre, the mixing of diverse sound textures and landscapes reflect Wanton Witch's own experience navigating a hostile world as a Queer trans woman in Malaysia. The intense energy with which each track is cut together reminds the listener of the nostalgia of mixtapes and a time in life when identity is being constructed.

Wanton Witch has created an album which feels like a reflection of the aggregation that already exists within musical internet sub-cultures and communities. A place where many diverse and contrasting sound palettes, textures, and structures can fit together to create a new different, Queer way of seeing the world. Plumbs the depths of her lived experience to produce a chaotic and scathingly honest portrait of her state of being. Her electrostatic landscapes ruthlessly pursue their own interests, building rickety bridges between the rhythmic propulsion of hardcore and a darkened rave anti-euphoria. A cubist dancefloor sensibility unfurls, its protracted beats inviting the throwing of impossible shapes. The complexities inform the structure, or lack thereof, of wanton's music and results in wildly avant-garde works of sound design formulated to go for the jugular. Each one is more sonic collage than song, aural mood boards of textures and atmospherics which sees her dealing with her experiences in real time. At its core, wanton's modus operandi is to allow for an understanding of the trans experience by way of empathy. This makes for a vision wrought with vulnerability and heartfelt honesty to the point that wanton's compositions become alarmingly accessible. It arrives as another sublime body of work that utilises and subverts the conventions of electronic music to humanise the experience of being other.

In conclusion of Wanton's rousing debut year of 2021, her album was humbly selected and featured as one of the Best albums of 2021 by Resident advisor, Mixmag Japan and many more. Shortly after, label head Lucy released a full length album named 'Lucy Plays Wanton Witch' featuring re-interpretations of the original material in a whole new body of work. This is a follow up full-length album by Lucy not approached as a usual remixes record, but instead a fully fleshed out new body of work with the WW material being an integral part of Lucy's sonic palette.

IG: @wantonwitch

Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991, Beirut, based Berlin) is an artist, composer, technologist, writer, and DJ whose indisciplinary practice ranges from steganography to performance, machine learning, ecotoxicology, visual art, philosophy of intelligence and history of science and music. Khazrik works with a trans-millennial production of knowledge based on an environmental understanding of the techno-politics of voice, media, and code. While tracing the history, political economy, and myths of discipline, her indisciplinary practice revolves around the collective search and need for polymathic resonance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and long-term future. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University (LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT (US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.



Her multi-channel sound installations and performances have been commissioned by Para Site (HK), Kunsthalle Wien (AT), LACE (US), Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi (PL), ar/ge kunst (IT) and LUMA Foundation (CH), among others. Her essays and short stories have been published in edited anthologies and multiple publications like Bidayat Journal (LB), Zweikommasieben (CH), MadaMasr (EG), Kohl Journal (LB), The Funambulist (FR), and Ibraaz (US), to name a few.

Her indisciplinary research-based work has been presented at the Stanford Research Institute (US), the Arab Image Foundation (LB), Birbeck’s School of Law at UCL (UK), Center for Documentary Arts and Research at UCSC (US), and Amnesty International (UK & DE), among others.

Khazrik has been a fellow at Home Workspace Programme (2012–13), Digital Earth (2018–19), HfK Bremen (2020), and SHAPE Platform (2021–22), and is at present a principal investigator at Research on the Arts Programme by ACSS and AFAC (2021–22), a fellow at If I Can’t Dance (2022–23), and Helmholtz Center (2022–23), and visiting faculty at the Critical Media Lab in UoB (CH), and the Live Art Forms programme at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg (DE).

From a race of bioluminescent extraterrestrial creatures with Nubian features booming in speakers.

IG: @ixa_psyborg

Julmud is a producer, percussionist, keyboardist, vocalist and a music researcher based in Ramallah-Palestine that creates, composes, samples and combines sounds from across the globe to create his own non-generic form of music. He has produced work for different artists such as Haykal, Al Nather, Muqata’a, Makimakkuk and Walaa Sbait among others who are also part of his crew (Saleb Wahad -1). He is currently in the process of producing a variety of solo and collaborative works. His debut album ‘Tuqoos’ was released in March 30th 2022 on Bilna’es.

Photo credit: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Copenhagen based producer & DJ, Matriark has justifiably earned her spot in the worldwide clubbing scene with music productions and DJing energy that reflects the 90s and 00s trance era but also expanding the genre itself with sentimental valued additions of the current era.

Being a part of the infamous bunkerbauer collective, and co-founder of Megatech Industries, the Norwegian artist is currently one of the most reliable trance equipment creators in the globe.

Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practise and writing he explores performative forms of estrangment as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow) and lectured and taught in institutions such as Dutch Art Intstitute, Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VII, Princeton University and Goldsmiths College. In 2017 he completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier. Along with Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009). In 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing plus interviews and reviews of performances. Anthony Iles and Mattin are currently in the final stages of editing the volume Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What Is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Archive Books). Urbanomic has just published this year his book Social Dissonance. Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao and Regler and has over 100 releases in different labels worldwide. Mattin is currently co-hosting with Miguel Prado on the podcast Social Discipline and he is also part of Noise Research Union with Cecile Melaspine, Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado and Inigo Wilkins. Mattin took part in 2017 in dokumenta14 in Athens and Kassel.

IG: @abjectmusic

twitter: @abjectmusic