» Alfa Mist & Yasmina Sadiki in Sydney for Vivid LIVE – review and photos Something You Said

Alfa Mist & Yasmina Sadiki in Sydney for Vivid LIVE – review and photos

May 28, 2026

I started listening to Alfa Mist back when Nocturne released in 2015. Alfa’s albums accompanied me on many car rides, with the tops being the aforementioned Nocturne, Antiphon, Structuralism, & Variables.

The opener, Yasmina Sadiki (+ band) was unknown to me but a delightful discovery. Her voice defies any specific genre and has this deep familiarity to it, while also being exciting new territory. The band were slick too, really together, and really generous with one another. The final piece showed the range they have compositionally so I’m super excited to hear how it all sounds on their upcoming debut album Made For the Past in August.

When the Alfa Mist crew came onstage, the collective respect was evident. In his exquisite, deep East London voice, Alfa prefaced that the show would mainly be from his recent album Roulette – a story driven work “…where themes of revenge, forgiveness and redemption loom large.” Alfa & the band also played some tracks from Bring Backs alongside a couple of classics off older albums, and special features for band members who’d released their own music, some on Alfa’s label Sekito. Sometimes I closed my eyes to see the images of the cinematic stories he’d created, sometimes I watched the musicians in real-time feeling when to come into the score and add colour to the world.

From the get go, Flo Moore’s ability on bass danced deliciously between crisp and growl. Her double bass pizzicatto solo had the row of people I was sitting with responding with all sorts of facial expressions, transported to brooding ecstasy and curious adventurousness. The trumpet, played by JSPHYNX (Johnny Woodham) summoned a quality of cinematic melancholy under misty post-apocalyptic streetlights. Sydne Opera House’s refracted light beams, with infinity style gobos only added to the feel of being warped into another time and space. Jamie Leeming, one of Alfa’s OG collaborators from back in the Antiphon days, licked through weird and whacky chords and keys. I constantly wondered how he was going to resolve them, but a man of such musical mastery edged us so much that when resolve notes finally came, so did we. A rather delightful discovery was FORC3, an early 20-something-year-old UK producer – who’s music I recently came across – was not only making EDM & Bass sounds, but known in the UK Jazz scene as Nathan Shingler and; Alfa’s drummer for the show.

An absolute rhythmic beast, this guy rose to the challenge of Alfa’s curious time signatures or f*ckery with rhythm and conquered them like a nerdy jazzcat chronomancer. Alfa Mist, of course, was the world builder for the quintet to play in, conjuring stories set in his own sci-fi universe Roulette where an “…imagined near-future in which reincarnation is discovered to be a potent tool linking dreams and past lives.”

Sometimes jazz, especially in improvisation, can be a bit of a pass the baton/show-off moment. And it was that, but not in an overly flaunting way. It was a collective of cool, calm, collected experts. Every single member was outstanding and painted the story of Roulette with brushstrokes of cinematic mastery. From Alfa’s grounded composure to the quintet’s ability to glide note-to-note and tune-to-tune through compositions, with hyper-intelligent improvisational jazz transitions. Alfa is the man we all know from the album covers, but the gig showed he was so much more than that. An artist of that calibre knows the importance of giving space to all the collaborators/musicians, and he did it in a way that welcomed the audience in.

Alfa Mist combined contemplation, humour and skill with such clarity that seeing the crew live was an experience I will not forget.

Review by Amber Liberte. Photography by Mikki Gomez.