London artist/producer Alfa Mist announces Whelan's headline gig

Acclaimed pianist, producer, MC and musician Alfa Mist has announced a headline show at Dublin's Whelan's pub on December 8th, 2021, to celebrate the release of his new album Bring Backs.

Alfa Mist is one of the driving forces behind a young and vibrant scene of UK musicians, who've taken on jazz as their musical narrative. His previous LP's include his gripping 2015 debut Nocturne, 2017 follow-up Antiphon, 2019's Structuralism and 2020's magnetic Epoch.

First teaching himself to produce beats as a schoolkid in East Ham, London, Alfa then went on to discover jazz through the sampling of hip-hop of producers like Hi-tek, Madlib and J Dilla. Delving deeper, he taught himself the piano by ear as a means to dissect these formative records’ harmonic intricacies, gradually forming his own production style of head-nodding rhythms combined with the immediacy of jazz improvisation, all tied together with a pervasive sense of melody.

His latest endeavour, 2021’s Bring Backs, sees Alpha taking on new journeys and struggles. The record marks his first release for the label Anti and is also the most detailed exploration of his upbringing in musical form. The LP's nine tracks of groove-based intricacies, lyrical solipsism and meandering fragmentations are tied together by a remarkable poem written by Hilary Thomas expressing the sensuous realities of building community in a new country.

The album’s title also refers to an aspect of a card game Alfa would play as a child, and remains a marker of his own success.

“I live in this perpetual ‘bring back’ state where I can never really be sure that I’m doing as well as I am,” he says.

“When you grow up where I did, you live in a sense of instability – you can be doing ok for a while but that can change, you know that's always a possibility.”

Alfa’s constantly explorative musical mind will no doubt continue to surprise and astonish.

Tickets for December's Whelan's gig will go on sale this Friday at 10am via Ticketmaster.

Check out his recent COLORS performance of 'Organic Rust' below: