This year’s K-Music Festival opens with a ground-breaking performance featuring Korean cellist and composer Okkyung Lee, who joins UK-based multidisciplinary artist Mark Fell for a boldly experimental collaboration that merges radical improvisation with experimental electronic structures.

Okkyung Lee is renowned for her visceral cello performance, blending noise, traditional Korean music, and improvisation into immersive sonic environments. Her works have been presented at MoMA, Serpentine Galleries, GRM (Paris), and Donaueschinger Musiktage, and she has collaborated with artists including Arca, Jenny Hval, Christian Marclay, and Swans. A 2025 DAAD Artist-in-Berlin fellow, she continues to challenge the role of performer and space in contemporary music.

Mark Fell is a pivotal figure in experimental sound and digital art, whose work critiques normative structures and explores alternative systems of creation. Over the past three decades, his projects have spanned installation, composition, choreography and text, with presentations at institutions such as the ICA, Barbican, ZKM, MoMA, and Pirelli Hangar Bicocca. His 2022 book Structure and Synthesis outlines his philosophical approach to creative practice.

Together, Lee and Fell challenge the distinctions between composition and performance, analogue and digital, intuition and system. Their collaboration offers a compelling intersection of sonic materiality, political reflection, and formal experimentation — forging a new space in contemporary music that defies categorisation.

The K-Music Festival is organised by the Korean Cultural Centre UK in partnership with Serious.