Acousmo: Aya Metwalli, Tapiwa Svosve, Rohan Zhou-Lee

Doors: 21:00
Concerts: 21:30

Address: Allmendstrasse 93, 8041 Zürich , Halle D, First Floor

Acousmo is a concert and sound art series focused on intentional listening. It offers a space for concentrated engagement with live sound and aims to counter the fast and superficial consumption of music. In this cycle, Acousmo introduces a new format: each evening begins with two solo performances by musicians or sound artists that are curated by the community. These are followed by an improvised set where both artists perform together.

Aya Metwalli (BE)

Aya Metwalli (b. 1988) is a vocalist who spits the anguish out. A cat with a broken tail born of Cairo’s heat and smog. She grew up in noise that gnaws at your bones. Car horns punch like brass knuckles. Shouting vendors wake the dead. Busted loudspeakers burst out discordant calls to prayer like orchestras that never tune. The piano offered her a different kind of melody, but the guitar taught her how to bleed and write for the loners and the lost. Then she traded strings for static, turning melancholic musings into gut-wrenching lament. The Guardian called her “something of a musical enigma”. Pitchfork praised her “spellbinding brand of anti-pop”. What you hear is a woman who stitched herself back together with her teeth. She takes the stage, and it’s a spine-reveal spectacle that might disturb you a little, but damn if it doesn’t leave you mesmerised.

Tapiwa Svosve (ZH)

(born 1995) is a saxophonist and electroacoustic musician living and working in Zurich and London. He has released work through Graham Dunning’s Open Sound Group net label and Raw Tonk Records, and was part of “The Tomorrow People“ exhibition at the Elevator Gallery in 2013. He is especially interested in the relations between sound and space and the electronic and/or physical manipulation and abstraction of acoustic sounds, creating different overlapping layers of small electroacoustic systems. 

Poems by Rohan Zhou-Lee, gender identity Firebird, is an international award-winning Black Asian dancer, trumpeter, writer, and public speaker, with publications, performances, and presentations delivered in The United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Japan. In 2023, they became the first mixed race Black Asian Open City fellow for journalism at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Publications can be read on Hyperallergic, Reckon News, Newsweek, and more. They published, performed, and received commissions for poetry at Luya Chicago, Soar Over Hate, Anathema Magazine (Canada), The 2024 Asian Asian American Research Institute at CUNY, and the 2022 Unite Festival (Zürich, Switzerland,) and recently premiered their ballet poem Sandra | Song at the 2025 Aktionstage enough Festival. They are the founder of the Blasian March, a Black-Asian-Blasian solidarity organization, which began during the Black and Asian political upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through protests, free book fairs, and performing arts, Blasian March has earned several awards, including a certificate from New York City’s Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Zhou-Lee has spoken on human rights at Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, Oberlin College, the 2022 Enough Festival in Zürich, Switzerland, The University of Tokyo, as a keynote speaker at Yale University, and more.