Join us for an immersive evening with Slowspin, blending dream-folk, ambient sound, and experimental music.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
What remains in the body after a place or a person has disappeared? Drawing from North Indian classical, matrilineal folk traditions, and migrant histories, Slowspin treats the voice as both tuning instrument and living archive, carrying stories and memories as poetry and melodies across generations, borders and time.
Together, the Slowspin quartet, with Zeerak Ahmed, Grey Mcmurray, Marlon Patton & Shahzad Ismaily, moves through dream-folk reveries, devotional trance, atmospheric remembrance, and ecstatic thrashing. Improvisation becomes a form of sound-sculpting, where inherited scores reimagine the present.
PERSONNEL
Zeerak Ahmed - vocals, samplers
Grey Mcmurray - electric guitar
Marlon Patton - drums
Shahzad Ismaily - electric bass, moog
* Featuring special guests.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Slowspin is the moniker of Pakistan-raised, New York-based sound artist Zeerak Ahmed. Grounded in North Indian classical and matrilineal vocal traditions, her work moves through dream-folk, ambient, experimental-rock and electronic music. Singing in Urdu, Purbi, and English, Ahmed explores the voice as an instrument, a vessel for inherited memory, and a living archive of love, loss, and longing.
Her debut album, TALISMAN (2023), was lauded by Pitchfork. In 2025, Ahmed sang lead alongside Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, Asha Bhosle, Willie Nelson, and Allison Russell on the Kronos Quartet’s Hard Rain, commissioned by the Nobel Prize Committee.
Alongside her music, Ahmed creates voice-based sculptures and sound installations. Her ongoing archival practice explores matrilineal folk songs and oral histories from the zenana (women’s quarters) of pre-Partition India, particularly the region of her family’s origin in Uttar Pradesh, India. Her multi-channel sound installation and live performance, Mother, I Am Compelled to Leave, was presented and acquired by the Akron Art Museum in 2024 and has since been presented at institutions and festivals including Pioneer Works, SummerStage in Central Park, the Qatar Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Her 2026 album, AFTERIMAGE, was shaped through the improvised language of Slowspin's core quartet: Zeerak Ahmed, Grey Mcmurray (John Cale, Beth Orton), Marlon Patton (Lonnie Holley, Lizz Wright), and Grammy-nominated multi-instrumentalist, Shahzad Ismaily (Love In Exile, Laurie Anderson). The album explores what persists after disappearance: sound as inheritance, memory as environment, and voice as living archive.