Since 2012 I have collaborated extensively with Shackleton on a variety of live AV shows, music videos, and artworks. Each project features a unique lineup of musicians and has been commissioned by leading music festivals worldwide.
The Cell Of Dreams with Shackleton / Zimpel + Siddhartha Belmannu · Berlin Atonal · 2023
THE SILVER THREAD
Shackleton, Waclaw Zimpel, Siddhartha Belmannu, Giridhar Udupa + Pedro Maia
LIVE AV SHOW · 2026
A new collaboration between Shackleton, Wacław Zimpel, Siddhartha Belmannu, and Giridhar Udupa, The Silver Thread, merges urban-ritual electronics with live instrumentation from Hindustani and Carnatic classical traditions and outer-limits raga interpretations. Bass synthesis, clarinet, voice, and ghatam create a trance-like sound that moves between electronica, spiritual jazz, and Indian classical forms.
Shackleton is a producer whose work has moved from the UK dubstep scene of the mid-2000s into urban-ritual electronics that draw on dub, minimalism, and devotional music traditions; Zimpel is a composer, clarinetist, multi-instrumentalist whose practice spans jazz, improvisation, and folk-trance forms; Belmannu is a Hindustani classical vocalist; and Udupa is a percussionist known for his mastery of the ghatam, a clay pot instrument central to South Indian classical music.
11/04/2026 Rewire Festival, The Hague NL
DEATH BY TICKLING
Scotch Rolex & Shackleton + Pedro Maia
LIVE AV SHOW · 2023
Combining the surrealist punk ethos of Scotch Rolex and the bass-heavy psychedelia of Shackleton, this live show is an hour full of wild and unpredictable changes, incorporating odd time signatures, cosmic synth freak-outs, and dubbed-out space vibrations. At times the performance lulls the audience into a zoned-out trance, whilst at other times it startles with its ferocity. It is an hour of out-there music which will appeal to those who like it challenging and adventurous.
08/12/2023 Mutek JP, Tokyo JP
IN THE CELL OF DREAMS
Shackleton, Waclaw Zimpel & Siddhartha Belmannu
MUSIC VIDEO · LIVE AV SHOW · ARTWORK ·2023
The duo consisting of electronic music maverick Sam Shackleton and visionary avant-folk virtuoso Waclaw Zimpel engaged one of Indian Carnatic music’s most significant emerging young vocal talents, Siddhartha Belmannu, to perform a work that was equal parts meditative exercise and urge towards transcendence, thematising both the acceptance of mortality and the joyous celebration of living. It was avant-garde and forward looking music that did not rely on cynical gestures to retain attention or enhance artistic credibility, but instead engaged the audience in a direct and honest manner. The trio was joined by Pedro Maia, who contributed analogue projection and live film manipulation, unfolding a calibrated visual counterpart that operated in precise attunement with the music and extended the work into a coherent audiovisual field.
LIVE
08/09/2023 Berlin Atonal Festival
15/09/2023 WOS Festival, Spain
Berlin Atonal 2023 – Photos Helge-Mundt
WOS Festival 2023 – Photos Leo Lopez & Leticiat Blanco
DELIVER THE SOUL / DEATH BY TICKLING
Scotch Rolex & Shackleton
MUSIC VIDEO · 2023
The official video for “Deliver The Soul” serves as the visual centerpiece for the debut collaborative album “Death by Tickling”. A transoceanic meeting between the UK’s Sam Shackleton and Japan’s Shigeru Ishihara (Scotch Rolex), the project was conceived in their Berlin studio as a fusion of “shamanism and deconstructed rhythms.”
The video acts as a visual extension of the track’s “hypnotic trance and ferocity.” The visuals utilise manipulated film textures and flickering, organic imagery that mirrors the track’s intricate, non-linear percussion and “dubbed-out space vibrations. Departing from Zeke’s album artwork and creating its own unique experience with its warping and twisting visuals, it transports the audience to a strange and ultimately funny world through quirky perspectives and trippy visual effects.
BEHIND THE GLASS
Shackleton + Anika + Strawalde + Pedro Maia
LIVE AV · 2017
Behind the Glass is the unapologetically ambitious new project coming out of the overlapping creative forces of Shackleton, Anika, Strawalde and Pedro Maia. Shackleton – of Skull Disco and Honest Jon’s semi-fame – provides a vivid backdrop of infinitely detailed sonic complexity that conjures up something between devotional music and avant trance with the use non-standard time signatures often running against each other, an unusual and occasionally atonal sound palette, repetitive melodic motifs and a blatant disregard for the conventional 3 minute song format. Over this canvas Anika – perhaps best known for her self-titled debut album -narrates a tale of love, longing, fate and compulsion which stretches out in the style of a surreal fable. Her deadpan vocals and priestlike sermons meanwhile stand in direct counterpoint to the tales of unbridled lust, fury and the themes of dominance and submission in the world of love, romance and all their related afflictions. The whole is ably backed for the stage by keyboard maestro Takumi Motokawa and the human metronome Raphael Meinhart on mallets. The visual side sets Pedro Maia’s constructive and reconstructive filmic talents against the ink of legendary Berlin artist Strawalde.
Premiere at Berlin Atonal Festival 19/08/2017
BEHIND THE GLASS – Shackleton & Anika / MIRA Festival Barcelona / 2017
DEVOTIONAL SONGS
Shackleton & Ernesto Tomasini + Pedro Maia
Live AV · 2016
The live debut of Devotional Songs featured the intricate electronics of Sam Shackleton and the virtuosic vocals of Ernesto Tomasini. Moving far beyond the traditional confines of the dancefloor, the performance offered a “hallucinatory journey” into the occult, the theatrical, and the rhythmic. Drawing from their acclaimed 2016 album on Honest Jon’s Records, the duo — joined by Takumi Motokawa —fused complex, non-linear percussion with the high-drama of the post-industrial underground.
Dekmantel Festival / EYE Museum Amsterdam / 2016
Shackleton & Nisennenmondai + Pedro Maia
Live AV · 2015
Performed at the iconic Hotel Forum in Kraków, this collaboration served as a masterclass in tension and release. The show saw Shackleton team up with two-thirds of the Japanese math-rock/noise trio — guitarist Masako Takada and drummer Sayaka Himeno — to bridge the gap between human physicality and machine precision. A radical departure from Shackleton’s usual polyrhythmic dub-inflections, leaning instead into a relentless, militantly 4/4 minimalist techno. By stripping back his signature textures to their barest skeletons, Shackleton provided a dark, pulsing foundation for Nisennenmondai’s “kosmische minimalism” to thrive. The result was a “powder keg of verve,” characterised by raw guitar swings and hypnotic drum sequences that “thawed” the crowd into a collective trance. Pedro Maia’s visuals provided the perfect aesthetic counterpoint; a live-manipulated, analogue-grain style that bathed the stage in subtle shading. These flickering, distressed textures heightened the industrial and immersive atmosphere of the Hotel Forum’s brutalist architecture.
Unsound Festival Krakow (Surprise Edition) / 2015
Shackleton + Pedro Maia
Live AV · 2012
Unsound Festival Krakow (The End edition) / 2012