Image credit: Self portrait, by Lee Adams, November 2025. Taken outside Parajanov’s childhood home in Tbilisi.

For over two decades, artist, curator and DJ Lee Adams has channelled a deep current of ritual, resistance and sonic experimentation through KAOS – London’s long-running underground sanctuary for those drawn to the ecstatic and the strange. Now, marking xxii years of KAOS × vii years of altar, Adams brings his community together for a singular night at IKLECTIK, Peckham Levels – an immersive four-part concert featuring Becoming Animal, Rangelova, Rotten Sun, Samuel Kerridge and Vanity Productions.

From London to Athens, Tbilisi to Berlin, Adams’s world is bound by shared creative intensity and defiant spirit – a belief in art as transformation, collectivity and freedom. As he tells us, the underground still thrives “in the cracks and crevices of the corporate monolith,” where London’s feral energy continues to dance, dream, and evolve.

What first pulled you toward this world of performance, ritual, and sonic experimentation? Was there a particular moment or experience that made you think, this is what I want to do – this is the kind of energy I want to create?

I guess I have been working across these realms all my life, when I was in my early 20’s I made installations of dead forests in flooded rooms and performed intuitive, alchemical rituals with lead, fire, and desiccated birds wings. I studied with performance/installation artists Brian Catling, Jac Leirner, Mona Hatoum, Helen Chadwick and conceptual artist John Latham and I worked as a sculptor, installation artist, experimental film-maker and performance artist for 15 years before I event started working with music and sound professionally. Some of my earliest influences were the films of Tarkovsky, Derek Jarman, Kenneth Anger and Sergei Parajanov; devoured during late night screenings at The Penultimate Picture Palace, reading Genet’s Our Lady of The Flowers in a delirium of fever and being haunted by the images in a battered, dog-eared book of Japanese Butoh photography, a gift from the first man I fell in love with.

At 16 I saw Julian Cope play live, a centrifugal portal. That night opened me to the frequencies of England’s Hidden reverse, Coil, Current 93 Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle, a few of years later I heard the psychedelic dub of African Head Charge which created another seismic rupture in my sonic consciousness. Seeing COIL play live twice in London at Conway Hall for the closing of the Megalithomania conference and then finally at Ocean in Hackney was also a gateway into these realms.

Fast forward to the early 2000’s I trained in traditional Japanese martial arts for six years, studied and performed with Fakir Musafar, the Father of the Modern Primitives and with the Japanese Butoh artist Katsura Kan. I attended and documented the Vegetarian Festival in Phuket, Thailand I met and became friends with performance artists Ernst Fischer, Franko B, Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis, another deep dive that led to us to collaborate on a series of seminal events including Visions of Excess for Fierce and Spill Festivals, The Monster In The Night of The Labyrinth for the Hayward Gallery and A History of Ecstasy at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples.

Image credit: Photo of Rotten Sun (Lee Adams & Mia Zabelka)

This 22-year anniversary event feels like a real departure – an immersive four-part concert that reads more like a ceremonial act than a club night. What inspired the format – and what kind of journey do you want the audience to go on at Peckham Levels?

To a certain extent this event is a radical departure for us, but in other ways I would say the different formats have the same intensity, the same intention, it is like trying a different ritual to create a similar kind of magical effect.

You’ve curated a formidable line-up – Becoming Animal, Rangelova, Rotten Sun, Samuel Kerridge, Vanity Productions. What connects these artists for you – is there a shared emotional or spiritual current running through the programme?

There is a shared solemnity, an extreme emotional intensity and a quixotic, unpredictability to all the artists, even as they work across a broad range of frequencies, emotional registers and tempos.

Over the past few years KAOS has expanded beyond London – to Athens, Tbilisi, Berlin. What are the shared energies or values that link your London crowd with your international community? And how do different cities feed the creative ecosystem you’re building?

There seems to be a current running through the underground music/art scenes of these four cities. When I travel between them I feel that the people I meet are part of a shared reality, the pressures faced in these various urban centres seem to overlap and mirror each other. Creativity as a form of resistance is a common thread and each of them bring unique creative visions alive within their communities.

Image credit: Photo of Rangelova

London’s nightlife is constantly mutating, sometimes under pressure, sometimes in bloom. Which spaces, collectives or communities are keeping the underground alive for you right now – the places where you feel that spark of genuine risk and wonder?

Cafe Oto, Ormside Projects, Boundary Condition, Ikclectik, The Judgement Hall, Impulse Control, Future Shock, October Gallery, The Horse Hospital, The Mosaic Rooms, Reference Point, The Rio Cinema and Gash are some of the places, spaces and collectives that I have found most inspiring, authentic and creatively fertile recently, though I am spending less time in London these days and I’m sure there are many other examples, even during the worst of times London always nurtures a feral and febrile undercurrent.

Two decades in, KAOS still feels radical – not nostalgic. What’s been the secret to sustaining that edge, especially as the city and the culture around it have changed so dramatically?

Our vision has always been focussed, curious and sincere we have never dwelt in nostalgia or followed fleeting trends but rather we have tried to maintain authenticity as we have navigated the changing sonic and cultural landscape of the city over the past 22 years.

Image credit: Photo of Samuel Kerridge

The partnership with altar agency seems key – a creative and spiritual alliance as much as a professional one. How did that relationship begin, and what does “altar” mean to you in the wider constellation of KAOS and your own practice?

My relationship with altar began in June 2022, I was looking for an agency to represent Kaos. Barkosina from Years of Denial recommended that I speak with Antonia from altar. Our first phone call lasted over 4 hours during which time we realised a myriad of shared obsessions across music and visual culture. Our aesthetic sensibilities are so closely aligned that it made sense to begin collaborating and co-curating events. The roster of artists that altar represents now includes various friends and people we have worked with for many years such as Samuel Kerridge and Oliver Ho. I also love the name altar with its suggestion of offerings, ritual, consecration and the sacred.

Image credit: Photo of Vanity Productions

If you could conjure one vision of the future – for London, for club culture, for how we gather – what would it look like? What kind of world do you still believe we can dance into being?

I have always believed in the DIY punk approach, independent thought and action, collectivity, alliances of heart and intellect. The creative strategy which Kembra Pfahler famously called Availabilism, the Trickster energy. London has been radically optimised over the past 20 years, but the underground spirit still exists and thrives in the cracks and crevices of the corporate monolith and it continues to plant seeds that detonate in fertile minds and hearts. I can vividly imagine a future where the feral children dance in the ruins of this hubris. Freedom is visceral, embodied, and inherited.

Find Lee at leeadams.net

xxii years of KAOS x vii years of altar
IKLECTIK
Peckham Levels,
95a Rye Lane
London SE15 4ST

Tickets: ra.co