For the first episode in our mini series The London Open Live Podcast, we present "My First Live Art" - a conversation between Martin O’Brien, Gigi Brathwaite, and Pianka Parna (host). Diving into our first experiences of live art, the episode speaks to childhood memories, nostalgia, and routes to live art practices, as well as access to and the state of performance and live art education in the UK.

The London Open Live Podcast: Ep 1 - My First Live Art

Evan Ifekoya shares an origin story from the Yorùbá cosmology of Ifá. CALABASH is a sonic invocation that brings together Indigenous traditions across the world. This piece honours the calabash, part of the gourd family, as a symbol of creation, balance, and ancestral memory. Blending drum, voice, and elemental rhythm, it is Ifekoya’s invitation to listen, remember and return to the source.

CALABASH

The album’s only short story, The Alien Mother by Michel Nieva, weaves together many of its central themes through the lens of a mother’s love for her son in a society where cruelty and bureaucracy are inseparable. Set in a future where humanity has colonised Mars and dehumanisation is routine and unremarkable; the story’s sci-fi surface reveals deep parallels with the lived experiences of many migrant communities today. Despite its otherworldly setting, Nieva’s narrative is grounded in urgent, familiar truths. The Alien Mother is read in English and presented in Spanish as a bonus track.

The Alien Mother

Max Cooper explores how easily we take sound for granted by composing a piece with extraterrestrial listeners in mind. How might aliens hear — if they hear at all — what we do? Beginning with finger clicks and handclaps, Cooper layers electronic textures that build into a soundscape fit for the climax of a sci-fi epic. At its core, the piece reflects a deeply human impulse: the empathetic attempt to imagine another being’s experience of a reality we assume as given.

Rhythm of Harmony (A Representation of Music)

La madre alien (Bonus Track, ES)

Archived Love, the first poem on the album by Nayomi Apsara, is a triptych that spans personal, political and philosophical terrain, offering a meditation on longing, memory and emotional aftermath. Rooted in the tension between love and melancholy, desire and ideology, each poem explores a facet of love’s persistence: the mourning caused by a lover’s renunciation (Tree of Verses), the residue left by a lover who chooses revolution over relationship (Comrade, You Left Me for Us!), and the quiet reclamation of self in the wake of accepting impermanence (Periphery of Love). Together, they form a living archive where love transcends nostalgia, and becomes a force for transformation and radical vulnerability. The “Tree of Verses” stands as both metaphor and monument: a space where poetry bears witness to the lives and loves we’ve known, and the questions we still carry.

Archived Love

Emilia Álvarez propels us into a planetary-cosmic future with Neon Hyperglossia, an audiovisual work where creation and transformation intertwine. The piece begins by erasing the words of selected authors, leaving only punctuation in place. These stripped-down marks expose the texts’ underlying rhythms, becoming the basis for a new musical score. Each symbol is interpreted sonically, assigned its own tone and tempo—on screen, they shimmer like distant stars. 

Borrowing its name from the medical term for an oversized tongue, Neon Hyperglossia reimagines language as expansive, unstable, and mutating. Álvarez draws on thinkers like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway, and Fabio Zerpa to explore language as a contested site—where power, identity and meaning collide. The result is a constellation of voices, codes, and impossible signs, which Álvarez describes as ‘a cosmic rave of resistance and reinvention’.

Neon Hyperglossia

Ideology and its casualties take centre stage in Boston’s former Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola’s searing piece. A scathing indictment of events that occured on US soil from August 2022 to today, the poem names and honours those who bear the cost of extreme ideology. While the poet draws a sharp line between victims and perpetrators, her final line — rich with double meaning — leaves us questioning how any of us might be swayed, or corrupted, under pressure.

(Dedication)
After June Jordan, After Audre Lorde

In Alignment with the Women before me

Ofem Ubi’s Family Tree weaves a powerful meditation on love, grief and defiance. Opening with heartfelt declarations of love, the poem quickly shifts to a boy’s death and a mother’s profound sorrow. In Ubi’s poem love is investigated as predictable and precarious, given freely and demanded, tender and haunting. Through repetition, invocation and pause, Ubi explores the weight of love, mourning, healing and justice.

Family Tree

The final track comes from musician, composer, and vocalist Plumm, who crafts an evocative journey using the sound of her voice, but without words. At times solo, at times layered, the piece showcases the raw power and range of the human voice — both literal and metaphorical. 

Recorded in varied states — after running, meditating, upon waking, and before sleep — the work captures the voice in moments of vulnerability, relaxation and transition. The only word to arrive at the very end signals surrender and triumph at once. 

The London Open Live Podcast: Ep 1 - My First Live Art

Whitechapel Gallery