Tough Sell is back with another night of far-out, form-crossing international experimentalism: a double header night featuring musician Neil Luck and visual artist Monika Czyżyk with their kaleidoscopic film work Almanach along with a special live performance; and Rojin Sharafi delivering mutant, ruptured sound worlds across acoustic and digital textures.

ROJIN SHARAFI

Rojin Sharafi is a Tehran-born, Vienna-based sound artist, composer, and performer working across electroacoustic music, noise, and experimental electronics. Her visceral sonic language blends analog, acoustic, and digital tools, exploring tension, rupture, and transformation. Praised by The Wire for her “thrilling, variegated” sound world, Sharafi’s latest album O.O.Orifice follows critically acclaimed releases including Urns Waiting to be Fed (2019), Zangaar (2020), and Kariz (2021). She also performs with the folk futurist ensemble HUUUM. Her work has been presented internationally, from London to New York, affirming her as a vital voice in experimental music.

Sharafi's music transcends established forms and conventions, venturing into uncharted electroacoustic cartographies. Disrupting hierarchies of rhythm, melody, and timbre, her compositions flow through mutating sounds, avoiding any predictable climax or conclusion. In this sonic journey, traces of traditional Iranian music subvert against metallic percussion, 8-bit particles, and nuanced textures, challenging logical canons and probing the unknown.

NEIL LUCK & MONIKA CZYŻYK: ALMANACH

A hybrid mix of docu-fiction, music video, and experimental performance, this film interweaves staged and impromptu encounters between musicians across multiple locations who use organic materials as instruments. These musicians become nodes between traditions, histories, craft practices, and nations, connecting through the elemental forces of stone, wood, air, bamboo, shell, and clay. Their performances unfold like a hypnotic, shamanic dance, where bodies, landscapes, and sound resonate in ever-expanding echoes.
 
Shot across Germany, the UK, Finland, and Sweden in 2023–2024, the film employs a variety of formats—4K digital, 8mm, 360-degree video, 3D lidar scans, and digital animation—blurring the line between the tangible and the digital. Similarly, its sonic world merges documentary, field recordings, voice messages, sampled dance music, foley, and electronic soundscapes, creating a fluid interplay between organic and synthetic sound.

The film screening will be followed by a live performance by Neil and Monika together with local players, playing organic instruments featured in the film.

Neil Luck is a musician based in the UK. His work often explores the pathos and interaction between live human performance and multimedia, and attempts to frame the act of music making as something curious, or weird, or useful, or spectacular in and of itself. Neil’s work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings. 

Monika Czyżyk is a visual artist based in Helsinki. She primarily works with moving image and VR within the context of experimental documentaries, socially engaged projects. Her ongoing body of work expands upon a form of techno-sublime aesthetic, exploring human and non-human scales, sonic disruptions, impossible landscapes, and ungraspable truths.