Independent South London Music Festival

www.thisisgala.co.uk

Freelance journalist, broadcaster and DJ.

An emblematic artist of the Palestinian underground scene, SAMA’ is one of the first DJs and electronic music producers to emerge from the region. Her sound, an original punchy kind of techno, is dry and musical all at once and has quickly made its way across Europe and beyond.
 
SAMA, meaning ‘sky’ in Arabic, started mixing in 2006 in parties around Ramallah, Palestine. Several years later she started producing her own music and expanding her interest in synthesis in 2010, with a focus on techno, house, and other deeper sub-genres of electronic music.
 
The artist graduated from the United Kingdom with a BSc in Audio Engineering and Music Production, then moved to Cairo where she worked as a sound designer for film, became a music producer and then instructor. SAMA’ now runs her own Audio Engineering & Sound Design company working across films and documentaries in the Middle East. In 2017, she was selected as a Laureate by the French Institute, and during that time attended a residency at the International City of Arts in Paris. SAMA’ also runs a publishing company called Awyav, representing independent artists from the Arab world.
 
In late 2018, SAMA’s Boiler Room performance and the associated documentary about the scene in Palestine went viral and more and more people are seeing that music has no boundaries. SAMA’ was recently listed in SheSaid.So’s Alternative Power 100 List, and plays a high-profile set at Ibiza’s World Heritage Site of Dalt Vila for the International Music Summit in late May. She is currently working on a studio album.

Producer, DJ, Middle Name Records, Balamii Monthly Show
 
Sam Poggioli, aka Sampology, is a DJ, producer, recording engineer, visual artist and former Worldwide FM host from Brisbane/Meanjin. Over the last fifteen years, Sam has been a key player in the rise of Australia’s burgeoning hip-hop, deep house, future jazz and broken beat scenes. Since 2017, he’s released records through Soul Has No Tempo, his own Middle Name Records label, and crafted uptempo remixes for Quantic, Kerbside Collection, Winston Surfshirt and Myele Manzanza.

In the early days of his career, Sam made his mark by performing acclaimed audiovisual DJ sets at festivals and nightclubs throughout Australia, New Zealand, South Asia, Europe and North America. In more recent years, however, he’s balanced his considered skills in the DJ booth with his personal evolution as a composer, producer and recording engineer. Revelling in lush, atmospheric soundscapes which draw from the grandiose splendour of the natural landscape that surrounds his hometown, Sam’s music embraces ornate melodic beauty, blending with syncopated rhythms, low-end theory and lush vocals.

Before he took his audiovisual DJ sets to the world, Sam sharpened his musical knowledge and skills while working at the iconic Butter Beats record store and spinning a mixture of hip-hop, breaks and drum and bass at nightclubs across Brisbane. The road he walked to that point began in his mid-teens after he was exposed to New York’s Native Tongues collective and The Avalanches from Melbourne/Naarm. 

Fascinated by the sampledelic production techniques that helped take hip-hop to new levels in the 90s, Sam learned the basics of computer music production from his cousins, who were already performing nationally in a live electronica group. However, for the first act of his career, DJing was where Sam really shined. Soon enough, he was gracing stages alongside underground US and UK hip-hop stars like Blackalicious and Roots Manuva.

After proving himself nationally and overseas, Sam felt compelled to reconnect with Brisbane’s musical community and focus on his own growth as a producer and composer. This time around, as opposed to DJs and beatmakers, he was hanging out with a generation of trained instrumentalists and singers like Laneous and Noah Slee, who were reshaping the sounds of neo-soul, RnB, broken beat and jazz in the city. After learning more about recording equipment, he began collaborating with them on the material that made up his debut EP, Natural Selections (Soul Has No Tempo, 2016).

Sam also began to spend more time in the grandiose natural landscape that surrounds Brisbane and found himself reflecting on the formative musical experiences of his childhood, like being exposed to string music ensembles by his father and aunt, who’ve both spent decades as members of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Sam also thought back to his early teens when he sang in a cathedral choir. As he began to carve out his own composition and production sound, choral music, harmony, and string textures became a crucial counterpoint to the rhythmic sensibilities he’d learned from DJing hip-hop and dance music to audiences across the globe.

By 2018, Sam was recording local choirs and string sections and had built a strong community of like-minded musicians around himself. That year, he established his own independent label and recording studio, Middle Name Records. He inaugurated it with the release of his soulful deep house EP Mt Glorious featuring Dudley Perkins, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Jordan Rakei, and Middle Name Dance Tracks Vol 1, a collection of broken beat, disco and house tracks he’d recorded with friends as Middle Name Dance Band.

In 2019, the tastemaker Gilles Peterson invited Sam to host a monthly online radio show on Worldwide FM, giving him a platform to share his ever-expanding musical taste with a global audience. Through his shows, emerging soul, jazz, RnB, hip-hop, and club music from Australia and New Zealand stood shoulder to shoulder with the freshest new cuts and reissues from the global underground.

Two years later, Sam released his debut album, Regrowth, through Middle Name Records. Featuring collaborations with Laneous, Allysha Joy (30/70 Collective), Silent Jay, Seven Davis Jr (US) and James Chatburn, the album showed off his hard-won growth as a composer and producer with inimitable style. Through a heady mixture of live instrumentation, synthesisers, machine beats and soaring voices, Regrowth charted a course through hip-hop, dance, ambient and jazz-funk, earning him comparisons to Bonobo, Jamie XX, Kaytranada and Jon Hopkins along the way.

After the release of Regrowth, Sam realised he’d spent the first half of his career chasing the cutting-edge underground sounds of North America and Europe. When he looked around him, he saw that in the wake of Melbourne/Naarm jazz-funk band Hiatus Kaiyote’s international success, the world was looking at Australia. Since then, he’s been working to document the sound of Brisbane’s underground through Middle Name Records. Sam hopes that in the future, the label’s discography may inspire a new generation of music lovers. Maybe in a decade, someone going through the bins in a record store in London or Manchester will become fascinated by the 2020s Brisbane sound.

Ryan C is a house and techno DJ based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), NZ. 

He spent his formative years travelling solo around the desolate Southern African coast, the stars his blanket and the ocean his teacher. 
After being missing for 14 years, he was ‘liberated’ by the Red Cross in Northern Africa ‘working’ on an Ethiopian pirate ship in the Gulf of Aden. 
He was in desperate need of revitalisation, so was moved to their base deep in the Amazon basin, in Peru, near the border of Brazil, where he was healed by Amazonian Shamans using an ancient technique.
The Amazonian tribe then guided him by canoe through the Amazon river to the coast of Brazil where he found a group of underground tribal techno-heads living on an island and learnt the ways of techno.

After finding out about an illustrious island in the South-Pacific where the earth moves and sky is painted with lava from deep inside the earth, he made his way to Aotearoa where he continues his search inwards, through music.

You'll also find me hosting the Midnight Marauders radio show on Radio Active Friday nights 11-1am and organising events with the amazing Open Air crew!

NTS Wednesdays 11-1pm

Bookings: 
alexandra@higher-ground.de
N/S America: alo@prismaartists.com
Management: info@shyone.co.uk
Send music to: tunes.shyone@gmail.com

MGMT
cg@285.group & ts@285.group

DJ Bookings 

ollie.seaman@teamwass.com

PROMOS  
emailccdisco@gmail.com

From rural Victoria to the world, CC:DISCO! has built her life around one guiding principle: music first! CC’s career has given her the perfect creative outlets to express her first love – be it DJing around the globe, holding down a regular radio show, or curating her acclaimed First Light compilations.

On her road from radio host to warm-up DJ to headliner, CC has never once compromised on her sound. Slow, pumping, romantic, playful, uplifting – these are the feels that people around the world have experienced listening to CC in action. Ultimately it’s about connecting with other music lovers on a physical and emotional level: less chin-stroking, more dancing!

You could be chilling in a listening bar in her adopted home town of Lisbon, getting freaky in the late hours at Sub Club, DJOON or Good Room, or losing your mind during a headline slot at major festivals like Kala, Pitch Music & Arts, Love International, Glastonbury or Sonar by Night – even on the biggest stages, it always feels like CC is playing just for you. She transmits this feeling regularly over the airwaves as well, appearing on Rinse FM, NTS, BBC6, RA and Dublab, and making multiple appearances for Boiler Room.

CC keeps loyal connections with the Australian scene and the musicians she meets on her international travels, channelling these into her First Light compilations. Now two volumes deep, the series has already given a platform to diverse artists from across Australia, Japan, Zambia, Indonesia, Canada and Sweden.

Perhaps that’s the real fundamental of CC’s path as an artist – the space she creates for others. It’s reflected in the reminder she often gives after a gig: that the DJ just plays the music, and is no more or less important than the security guard, the bartender or the cleaner. It’s a humility that translates on a global scale – and you’re included too.

In July 2023, CC:DISCO! released her debut EP on Erol Alkan’s independent imprint Phantasy Sound. Both ‘Chez Moi’ (featuring Confidence Man) and ‘Out Of Your Mind’ were instant hits, garnering impressive international streaming figures and receiving widespread DJ and radio support. The EP was played in festival sets by Shanti Celeste, Job Jobse, Palms Trax, Bradley Zero and others. Heard on Beats In Space (US), Triple J(Australia) and the BBC (UK) in shows from Sally C, Moxie and Sarah Storey, the EP was a summer hit in Europe and has also taken CC on a sold-out tour of her beloved Australia.

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