SKULKESKOLEN
Alpha Maid, Dylan Kerr, Karina Sletten and Olan Monk (C.A.N.V.A.S)
21:00
Del av SKULKESKOLEN, 2–6 September 2026
Love, loss, and landscape tonight.
Founded by Olan Monk and Lugh O’Neill, C.A.N.V.A.S. is an artist-run record label and performance platform that has, since 2018, brought together a dispersed community of musicians, performers and artists through live events, recordings and long-term collaborations. Conceived as a response to geographic distance and increasingly virtual forms of cultural exchange, it creates spaces for collective experimentation, sustaining practices that move between local traditions, experimental sound and contemporary performance. For SKULKESKOLEN, C.A.N.V.A.S. presents performances by Alpha Maid, Dylan Kerr, Karina Sletten and Olan Monk.
Olan Monk will perform music from Songs for Nothing, their latest album released on AD 93 in November 2025. This fragmentary record was written upon their return to live in Conamara, on the west coast of Ireland, and veers between collaged pop, machinic rock and slow airs, imbued with the influence of sean-nós singing: Irish language songs in the ‘old style’ that often proclaim tales of love, loss and landscape. Songs for Nothing suggests a one-way transaction, an offering to the listener expecting nothing in return, but also a devotion to nothingness, and the realm of infinite possibility that springs from its well. Heavy guitar drones, voice and tin whistle entangle with recordings of drums, strings, woodwind and harp, entwining a love of song traditions with a long-standing alienation from the language and culture of the land.
Dylan Kerr presents Substratum, a 40-minute composition for voice and fixed electronics drawing inspiration from the Hindustani Dhrupad tradition. The work explores how the voice, in dialogue with sine and sawtooth waves tuned in just intonation, generates psychoacoustic effects. As the electronics gradually increase in density, the voice dissolves into a field of interference patterns and combination-tone harmonies, forming a dense, pulsating mass that recalls, in the artist’s words, the sensation of being slowly subsumed in the vibrations beneath the surface of the earth.
Karina Sletten will perform “There have been many pursuits”, a concert monologue in which she uses CDJs as tools for music production by sampling her CD collection. Her work is driven by a sensibility to listening, collaging and rearranging words, music and narratives. Sletten’s works are based on free improvisation and have an essayistic approach.
Closing out the night, Dylan Kerr, Karina Sletten and Olan Monk will be joined by South London guitarist, vocalist and producer Alpha Maid, whose guitar-centred sound moves fluidly between dub, emo and confessional songwriting.
Olan Monk is a musician, performer and writer from Cois Fharraige in Conamara, Ireland. Their practice involves experimental and popular songwriting, performing as a solo act and in collaboration with other musicians, including recordings and performances with Actress, Ashley Paul, Elvin Brandhi, James K, Maria Somerville, Michael Speers, Moin, Princ€ss and Shampain. They co-founded C.A.N.V.A.S. with Lugh O’Neill as an events series and record label, established in 2018 to give collective agency to an increasingly dispersed community of artists. Past releases include Love/Dead (2020) and Auto Life (2021) on C.A.N.V.A.S. and Dubplate 08 (2022) on AD 93. In 2025 they released Songs for Nothing, their second LP and AD 93 label debut, featuring contributions from Maria Somerville, Risteárd Ó’hAodha (of Princ€ss), Peadar Tom Mercier (of Trá Pháidín), Aindriú de Buitléir, Róisín Berkeley, Michael Speers and Dylan Kerr. Past performances include Rewire, The Hague; Aiséirí in Leisureland, Galway; National Concert Hall, Dublin; the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast; Cafe OTO, London; Barbican Hall, London; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; PAF Olomouc; and EOS Crossings, Frankfurt.
Dylan Kerr is an artist and vocalist working across performance, sound, photography, installation, moving image and composition. Their practice is deeply attuned to place and often begins with the histories and unique resonant qualities of the sites they engage with. In their compositions, they combine process-based methods, microtonality, and extended vocal techniques to explore psychoacoustic phenomena such as beating, interference patterns, and the interplay between the voice and space. Recent works include Caoineadh an Chóibh, a 24-hour durational work at the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Ireland (2025), reflecting on Cobh’s history as a departure point for those displaced by colonisation, and Solo for Breath (2025), exploring the timbral and spectral qualities of breath through extended techniques.
Karina Sletten is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sound art that is strongly influenced by social geography and landscape theories. She studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and has an MFA in art and public space. She has exhibited at the Autumn Exhibition (2025), Culture of Braga (2025), Oslo Architecture Triennale (2022), and Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art (2021). Her works are process-based and serve as outlets for concrete, socially relevant themes centred on the experience of time, place, and sound.
Alpha Maid, aka Leisha Thomas, is a guitarist, vocalist and producer from South London. Her work is centred around the guitar while remaining open to a wide range of influences — from dub, reflecting her Jamaican heritage and the history of the Windrush Generation, to more emotive, emo-inflected songwriting. On Is this a queue, released by AD 93, Alpha Maid begins from a sense of frustration with the predictable narratives and systems that shape everyday life. The album was partly inspired by particle physics and by the uncertainty that comes with recognising how little of the universe we are actually able to understand. Written over several years and in different places, the record documents journeys, encounters and moments of the present, focusing on what remains unseen, unknown and difficult to define.
Her debut EP Spy was released in 2019 by the CURL collective/label, followed by CHUCKLE EP on C.A.N.V.A.S. in 2021. Alpha Maid continues to collaborate with fellow CURL members including Coby Sey and Mica Levi, with whom she independently released the joint EP spresso in 2023.
C.A.N.V.A.S. is an event series and record label established in 2018 as an attempt to give collective agency to an increasingly dispersed community of artists. It is run in partnership by its founders Olan Monk and Lugh O’Neill as part of an ever-growing community of collaborators, and has collaborated on releases with artists including 33 (Billy Bultheel and Alexander Iezzi), Alpha Maid, Elvin Brandhi, Michael Speers and Xao, alongside two compilation releases, Cipher (2019) and Apocope (2021).
Also part of SKULKESKOLEN
Saturday 5 Sept: Dr. Memory Biwa · Kathryn Yusoff and Nolan Oswald Dennis
Credits
The first edition of SKULKESKOLEN is co-curated by Jade Meili Barget and Nora O’ Murchú and developed in partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The programme is generously supported by Culture Ireland, as part of Cultúr 2026: Sharing Ireland’s Culture, the culture programme for Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2026, Fritt Ord, KORO, Kulturrådet/Arts Council Norway, Mondriaan Fund and Sparebanken Norge.
Design: Minami Shimakage.
