review10.07.2025
Between Skin and Noise in Berlin
From digital melancholy and ritual noise assaults to pure silence – MaerzMusik explored the tactile forces of sound and the boundaries of the body.
Archive
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review30.06.2025
Dreams, Noise and Apple Crunch in Stavanger
The Only Connect festival in Stavanger transformed the city into a landscape of noise, poetry and bodily vibrations.
review29.06.2025
Disappearing Acts: The Resurrection of Tsujimura
Katsuko Tsujimura sought to dissolve the body in postwar Japan. Now, new voices are gently piecing it back together.
review24.06.2025
»Oops, We Walked Past the Artwork« – the Hidden Presences of Sound Art in Moss
The MOMENTUM biennial in Moss, Norway lets sound art speak, guiding the audience into the borderlands of the senses – where even a toilet resonates like an echo chamber.
review18.06.2025
Klang has Come of Age – and Dares to Be Solemn
This year’s edition of Copenhagen’s festival for new music embraced sonic rituals, cultural encounters, and performances with loops, bodies, and cassette tapes – and featured French musicians playing as if sound itself could change the world.
review15.06.2025
The World is Leaking – and Art Picks Up the Drops
At the Bergen International Festival, William Kentridge and Ryoji Ikeda let art capture what can no longer be said – only felt.
review07.06.2025
When the Past Begins to Make Noise Again
At Geneva’s Archipel Festival, lost instruments and occult soundscapes are brought to life in a journey through speculative rituals and experimental music.
review04.06.2025
The Hunt for Sound Installations in Nuremberg
From seductive echoes in an abandoned yeast factory to allergy-inducing angel wings in a baroque church – Musik Installationen Nürnberg put the body in motion, but left the question of what a music installation truly is unanswered.
review01.06.2025
Spor Festival at Twenty: the Eternal Play of Sound
From giant flutes to performative rituals – the anniversary edition of the Aarhus-based festival unfolded the materiality of sound and musical collaboration in new forms.
review31.05.2025
Estonians Can Truly Compose – Especially for Voice
Estonian Music Days revealed how a young, vocally attuned community of composers in the small country between Finland and Russia combines historical depth with freedom, resonance, and intimacy.
review26.05.2025
An Operatic Vision Lost in Translation
Bent Sørensen’s new operatic collaboration with Jon Fosse falls short of what it might have been.
review24.05.2025
The City that made Noise into History
At the Copenhagen Museum, the city’s forgotten soundscapes are brought to life – from street cries and gongs to nervous night sirens – in an exhibition that lets the echoes of the past resonate in present-day ears.
review02.04.2025
Punk is Dead and Opera is Not Feeling Well Either
Damon Albarn’s Mozart spin-off »The Magic Flute II« is replete with synths and spectacle, but does it truly capture opera’s essence – or merely its aesthetics?
review01.04.2025
From Factory Floor to Operatic Frustration
Jenny Wilson’s first opera – an adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s »Women as Lovers« – delivers sharp theatricality and biting satire but struggles to find its musical voice.
review26.03.2025
Who said that simplicity should be simple?
Three albums with music for string quartet – and the likes – by Jürg Frey, Simon Christensen, and Anders Lauge Meldgaard each approach musical simplicity in their own way. But they aim for entirely different things with it.
review25.03.2025
When Sound Becomes Body and Struggle
»Bodies of Sound« gathers reflections from women and non-binary individuals on sound as experience, strategy, and resistance. This book should be read by anyone interested in sound as something beyond just music.
review18.10.2024
Head to Venice and Hear Foreign Songs Everywhere
War, refugees, and destruction are inescapable at the Venice Biennale. You can feel it, see it, hear it – it's all-encompassing. Has Venice ever been this filled with sound?
review18.10.2024
Head to Venice and Hear Foreign Songs Everywhere
War, refugees, and destruction are inescapable at the Venice Biennale. You can feel it, see it, hear it – it's all-encompassing. Has Venice ever been this filled with sound?
review06.08.2024
»Ist nix für Frauen«
Powerful Rhythms and Empowered Voices dominated at the opening night of Heroines of Sound Festival in Berlin.
review24.09.2023
This book asks you to breathe and resonate without words
Salomé Voegelin’s book about our uncurating sound is her most personal and also most difficult to read – however, succeeding with her project, despite almost all odds.
review11.12.2021
It is impressed in the body
After a long hiatus due to the covid-19 pandemic, Berlin Atonal has opened the gates of Kraftwerk to the public for the first time. As limitations to collective events endure, the new project Metabolic Rift includes, in addition to the live performances, an exhibition aiming to elicit individual experience with intense stimuli. The exposition presents a convincing curatorial approach to sound, exalting its sensorial qualities and proposing an inspiring model to work with the aural and its (im-)materiality in the context of art exhibitions.
review08.12.2020
Beyond the ASMR phenomenon
At the Academy for Open Listening, Sofie Birch and My Lambertsen set out a new direction for the ASMR genre.
review26.10.2020
One man, one mission
Mathias Monrad Møller showed us an exciting creative vision at his official debut concert as singer and composer – a vision overshadowing dull questions of mere skill.
review31.03.2020
The system needs to change
Pulsar Festival 2020 took place under the shadow of Marcela Lucatelli’s ‘RGBW’. It’s time for a critical look at the systems of power.
review25.02.2020
A difficult beast to tame
With ‘Víddir’, a 60-minute composition of light and darkness, the Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir demonstrated the breadth of her imagination.