Xam Duo (Wrong Speed Records) / Marlene Ribeiro / Domes

Sat 19th December 2026

ADRA Promotions present...

Xam Duo (Wrong Speed Records / Sonic Cathedral)

Hometown album launch for blissed electronica synth and sax duo feat. members of Holodrum, Yard Act, James Holden

Marlene Ribeiro

Hypnotic psychedelic dream-pop made of looping acoustic instruments and electronics on Rocket Recordings

Domes

Tasteful first wave post rock trio a la Tortoise / 5ive Style feat. members of Cowtown, Beards, Chrononautz

PLUS DJs before / between / after

Fire & Water

Hollins Mill Lane, Sowerby Bridge HX6 2QG

7:30pm doors. Live music finished by 10pm.

£10 / PAYF Entry. Proceeds to good causes.

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Formed by friends Matthew Benn (Hookworms, Holodrum) and Christopher Duffin (Virginia Wing, Holodrum, James Holden, Yard Act), Xam Duo have spent over ten years developing a unique musical language that is part improvisation and part sonic obsession.

The last decade has seen two albums and a remix record for Sonic Cathedral, a collaboration with Virginia Wing on Fire Records and numerous limited-run tapes, as well as sharing stages with everyone from Stereolab to The Necks.

2016’s Xam Duo was built from spontaneous improvisation, the duo developing their own shared language in the room together in real time. In contrast, 2022’s Xam Duo II was made almost entirely remotely, the two members continuing their conversation virtually in the gaps in time permitted by parenthood and lockdown.

New album 53-74 Music lands somewhere between the two albums that preceded it, a natural mix of the careful and considered with the instinctive and free.

Those familiar with the duo will notice the change in sonic palette on 53-74 Music. Benn and Duffin have embraced the bold sounds of 80s pop: the Yamaha DX7, Roland D50, Oberheim and Juno 106 paired with drum machines, electric piano and saxophone.

However, this is no period piece. Sounds are manipulated and processed, dragging them away from the time and space of their source and placing them in alien worlds real and tangible to the listener. 53-74 Music is a warped, hazy love letter to a past time that somehow feels like the future and is one of the most singular and engaging records you’ll hear this year. 

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Formerly a long standing member of Manchester noise experimentalists Gnod, artist and musician Marlene Ribeiro works within a dream-like sphere of exotic psychedelia.

Stemming from her original solo project under the moniker of Negra Branca, Ribeiro utilises an eclectic range of acoustic instruments, various field recordings, electronics and voice, to create a phantasmagorical and intoxicating blend of hypnagogic-folk pop.

A travelogue that unites physical and inner space, a series of trance states rendered in vivid colour, a delirious portal into the ether. Marlene Ribeiro’s debut for Rocket Recordings and first album under her own name is all of this and much more. Toquei No Sol is a fresh new chapter for this unique artist, by far the most melodic and transcendent outing yet for her hypnotic dreampop.

This is only the latest release in a long history of sonic experimentation for Marlene, which includes her previous work as Negra Branca across a series of releases on labels such as Tesla Tapes and Zamzam and a long period as a member of audial iconoclasts and Rocket mainstays GNOD, not to mention collaborations with the like of Valentina Magaletti and Thurston Moore.

Toquei No Sol is also a record with a very distinctive and potent sense of place, paradoxically despite having been woven together from recordings made in Ireland, Wales, Portugal, Madeira and Salford. Its genesis came via a visit to Marlene’s maternal grandmother Emilia, whose influence as well as the sounds of her kitchen in Portugal.

“Emilia ended up getting excited about me being able to record things there and then and - total news to me - told me she used to sing a lot when she was younger to the point of getting offered studio time but refusing it as she was fearful of what that could imply in those times” relates Marlene “From that point I planned to include her in this record as sort of the chance she never had of getting her voice out there.”

Elsewhere, a disarmingly catchy and irresistible grace is married to a utilitarian approach to sound and texture. The ritualistic “Sangue De Lua de Lobo” (first released on a Sofia records compilation Songs Of The Lunar Eclipse) contains random objects from Marlene’s then-garden in Ireland, whereas on the drifting, beatific ‘Forever’ the percussion tracks are constructed from the sounds of pots and pans in her own Salford kitchen.

Yet at all times her fleet-footed approach to melody rings through even as the tracks conjure visions of heat-hazes, meditative spaces and late-night epiphanies. Although listeners may hear echoes of the loop-driven psychedelia of Panda Bear’s Person Pitch or the incantatory ululations of Pocahaunted in these beguiling soundscapes and magick-strewn mantras, the truth is that the aesthetic here is very much Marlene’s alone.

“It’s all a big misty haze of nostalgia, playfulness, self-reflection and hopefulness” is what Marlene reckons herself. Yet Toquei No Sol is also a transporting vision from an artist both returning to her roots and looking out to new celestial horizons.