Toulip Wonder

Toulip Wonder is the moniker of Sri Lankan British artist Cassie Layton. As a performer & musician Cassie has played worldwide at venues like the Barbican, Cafe OTO, Tate, London ICA, Young Vic, Royal Court & the Hollywood Bowl. She has also voiced a number of leading video game roles including Lady De Sardet in Greedfall, Ashera in Xenoblade Chronicles III & Zero in Final Fantasy XIV. Toulip Wonder was born out of a desire for autonomy after years of collaboration. Rediscovering an old keyboard from when she was 4, a small FM synth, she was drawn back towards early mac software & sounds, video game animations & sax improvisations. Some sketches emerged. After recording, Cassie started bringing her years of theatre devising & performance to live music settings, culminating in a MOTH Club show called Magna Mater, featuring food, music & clothes from Sri Lanka, interviews with her Mother, arpeggiators & space grooves. Her album Fortune Baby is an amalgamation of early synth experiments, pieces from past site-specific performances & songs informed by times of personal recovery, Buddhism, 18th century portraiture & her encounters as a mixed race womxn navigating & reclaiming a Sri Lankan heritage. She was recently awarded an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the National Archives & RNCM called Sounds & Silences. The project will embed her as a composer & multimedia artist at the National Archives to decolonise Colonial Office records through sound.