Diasporas Now x Sounding Futures,
RIEKO By Furmaan Ahmed.
RIEKO By Furmaan Ahmed.
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Are you a musician or artist currently navigating your career and funding structures? Join us for MIXER, an information-sharing and networking event that brings together artists working across sound and music with representatives from some of the UK’s most prominent arts and culture funding bodies.
MIXER interrogates how funders and institutions can better resource musicians working across disciplines, industries and cultural silos – helping to reimagine a grassroots music ecosystem that is diverse and community-centred.
Programme
The event kicks off with a panel talk with funders from PRS Foundation, Arts Council England and Youth Music alongside funded artists Gaika, Hinako Omori, and Diasporas Now’s RIEKO (Rieko Whitfield). Together they will share practical advice on how to pitch successful projects. Following the panel, attendees will take part in breakout sessions where they are encouraged to prepare and present short 'elevator pitches' for their own projects, receiving real-time feedback from the panel speakers.
The evening conclude with a DJ set from Michael Diamond of the Youth Music NextGen Community, creating space for informal networking and conversation.
Diasporas Now x PRS Foundation: MIXER is part of ICA Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now – co-programmed by the ICA’s collective-in-residence, live art platform Diasporas Now.
MIXER interrogates how funders and institutions can better resource musicians working across disciplines, industries and cultural silos – helping to reimagine a grassroots music ecosystem that is diverse and community-centred.
Programme
The event kicks off with a panel talk with funders from PRS Foundation, Arts Council England and Youth Music alongside funded artists Gaika, Hinako Omori, and Diasporas Now’s RIEKO (Rieko Whitfield). Together they will share practical advice on how to pitch successful projects. Following the panel, attendees will take part in breakout sessions where they are encouraged to prepare and present short 'elevator pitches' for their own projects, receiving real-time feedback from the panel speakers.
The evening conclude with a DJ set from Michael Diamond of the Youth Music NextGen Community, creating space for informal networking and conversation.
Diasporas Now x PRS Foundation: MIXER is part of ICA Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now – co-programmed by the ICA’s collective-in-residence, live art platform Diasporas Now.
Bios
Diasporas Now is a live art platform founded by RIEKO, Lulu Wang, and Paola Estrella in 2021 at the Royal College of Art. As the ICA’s current collective in residence, they are collaborating on the Speaking Futures programme – a yearlong series of talks, workshops and performances exploring artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.
GAIKA is a multidisciplinary artist working across sound, installation, performance, sculpture, and text. Emerging from London’s electronic underground, his practice explores the politics of urbanisation, diaspora, surveillance, and memory.
Blending experimental music, spatial installation, and audiovisual storytelling, GAIKA constructs immersive environments he calls underworld architecture — multisensory systems that engage with Western aesthetics of control, technology, and cultural inheritance. His work considers psychogeography, postcolonial identity, and emotional states not through explanation, but through atmosphere, structure, and sound.
Hinako Omori is a Japanese artist based in London. Her music offers immersive sonic architectures and environments in which to process and access emotional states through binaural recording or multi-channel installation, across ambient synthesizer and vocal music, classical arrangement and composition. Her textures and many-layered approach to composition have garnered her critical acclaim – debut album “a journey…” was called “remarkable” by Pitchfork and “blissfully restorative” by Loud and Quiet, and “stillness, softness…” was credited as a “deeply enchanting patchwork” by Electronic Sound magazine.
Internationally she has performed in venues such as Southbank Centre, The National Gallery, St Paul’s Cathedral, ICA, Kings Place, Volksbühne, Bishopsgate Institute, at festivals including Le Guess Who, ADE, Pitchfork (London), SXSW (Houndstooth / MUTEK) and Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ More Ohr Less Festival, and DJ sets at Tate Modern and POLA Museum.
RIEKO is a Japanese-born artist and composer whose multidisciplinary practice is part of an ongoing mythological world-building project. Weaving ritual performance, experimental music, and collective healing workshops with curation and community building, her work prototypes alternative futures and cultural systems through oracular, artist-led intuition.
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03:00 pm
Sun, 29 Mar 2026
Stage
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
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RIEKO by Ning Zhou.
Gaika by Sven Harambasic.
Hinako Omori by Celia Croft.
no. 236848.