Experience a rare live AV performance by acclaimed pianist, producer, and composer Kelly Moran, an artist known for conjuring hypnotic textures and charting unconventional sonic pathways through classical, avant-garde, and electronic sound. Renowned for her explorations and manipulations of acoustic sounds, Moran has released a number of highly regarded albums and collaborated with notable contemporaries — FKA twigs, Yves Tumor, Kelsey Lu, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the Avalanches among them. For this unique VIFF Live presentation, she performs material from her celebrated 2025 album Don’t Trust Mirrors, released on Warp Records, which has been called a “sterling achievement … of commanding beauty” (Treble Zine).
Opening the evening is Vancouver electronic musician and composer Bahar Khazei, who presents a special live set in collaboration with visual artist XEL.
Early bird tickets are available for this event until August 27
Oct 4
7:30 pm
8:00 pm
Book Tickets
Sunday October 04
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Artists
Kelly Moran
Kelly Moran is a New York-based composer and pianist who has spent her career excavating the sonic possibilities of the piano. In the past decade, Moran has released numerous acclaimed albums that have challenged the piano’s traditional, classically imposed school of thought with a more contemporary approach. Her unique strand of experimental piano compositions, which conjure hypnotizing textures and dramatic compositional arcs, have been included on year-end lists across classical, avant-garde, and metal genres. An accomplished and highly sought-after composer, Moran has collaborated with visionary contemporaries including FKA Twigs, Yves Tumor, The Avalanches, Kelsey Lu, Oneohtrix Point Never, and classical musician Margaret Leng Tan.
Bahar Khazei
Bahar Khazei is a sound artist, performer, and composer living in so-called Vancouver. Her work spans electroacoustic music, free improvisation, ambient noise, and synthesis. Originally from Tehran, she draws on themes of language, migration, othering, and belonging. Often using modular synthesis, prepared piano, collected sounds, field recordings, speech, and original compositions, she creates work that reaches liminal spaces where the familiar and unfamiliar meet. As an active member of Vancouver’s experimental music community, she regularly performs in the city’s free improvisation and underground noise scenes.
Fard (XEL)
Hadis Fard, aka XEL, is an Iranian-Canadian expansive human being from Lur ancestral lineage based out of so-called Vancouver. She is a multidisciplinary audio-visual artist who uses sound, visual art, data, code, and poetry to bridge art × tech × eco, creating multi-sensory performances and immersive installations. Hadis’s muses and explorations are rooted in the eco-feminine, mythology, decolonization, interspecies dialogue, and collective consciousness; her compositions are a melding of organic and synthetic textures, field recordings, analog synthesis, polyrhythmic density, and sub-bass frequencies that shift between dense visceral intensity and intentional organic minimalism. She has performed and exhibited in various festivals and venues locally and internationally and welcomes co-creation and collaboration in sound, visual arts, creative technology, and envisioning social change. She finds community in diversity.
Photo by Diane Smithers
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