What does nostalgia sound like? Is it a fragment of a childhood melody, a dusty cassette tape in a basement – or something more elusive that appears only in fleeting glimpses? In the genre of dungeon synth, it is neither old instruments nor authentic recordings that awaken the longing for what once was. Here nostalgia emerges in the noise, in the decay, and in the analogue shadows of a past that has long since vanished, yet still feels strangely familiar. In many ways, one might call it a nostalgic music. But is that really how it is experienced?

The forgotten ghosts

Dungeon synth began in the early 2010s as an attempt to recall the more obscure solo projects from the margins of black metal, where musicians such as Mortiis, Wongraven, Depressive Silence, and Burzum once reigned. As often happens with revival movements, however, the return soon became something different from its point of departure.

Where else would Bára Gísladóttir premiere her new orchestral work DÆGRIN than on the luxury liner of a music house, Harpa – of course, during Dark Music Days, in the middle of þorri, the darkest phase of the year in the old Nordic calendar, where the fourth month of winter begins on a Friday between January 19 and 26? Hardly anywhere.

Gísladóttir is shaped by this country’s basalt, wind and winter light, and although she is now based in Copenhagen, she has for many become the very sound of Iceland. Of course, the darkness was massive in her new work – deep, vibrating undercurrents – but there were new elements too: the Iceland Symphony Orchestra unfolded a more spacious, panoramic sound field than in her earlier, more compressed works. Screeching violins carved sharp lines through the orchestral mass, while subtle displacements slowly undermined any sense of stability. The piece took on the character of a pent-up hiss: one long, almost immobile tone was held like a strained breath, and around it arose a teeming world of rustling, friction and microscopic string movements. And listen – were there not glimmers of light here and there? Yes, there were. Still, a perfect opening to Dark Music Days.

In Country, Niels Rønsholdt brings two voices together in an acoustic chamber-music setting. One is Jakob Kullberg’s – recognizable, embodied, raw. The other is also his, but not entirely: a manipulated, filtered, and displaced voice that drifts through the work like an alien echo. Within an otherwise organic universe of cello, chamber orchestra, and song, this voice appears detached, almost homeless. It sounds – but it has no visible body.

What does it mean to hear a voice without a human being? And what does it do to our experience of presence, credibility, and identity when the same singer is both present and absent in his own music?

Another year, another brand-new, full-scale opera set in Bergen. Sure, Norway’s former capital has a certain magic at the best of times but in the 666-pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star things reach a whole new level. A priest presides over the funeral of a man who’s been dead for a week, even though he was on a flight with her the previous day. A carer for psychiatric patients ventures into the woods adjacent to her clinic where she encounters a large bird with reptilian scales and a human face. Most significantly, all nine narrators in Knausgaard’s novel become aware of a huge new celestial entity in the sky. All this apparently allows them to see the dreadful truths that are corroding their private lives and ask themselves why they even exist. 

To call a festival Sacrum Profanum is to invite extremes. Kraków’s international festival of new music, founded in 2003, lived up to that promise from the outset, presenting a programmatic range that stretched from Cat Roberts’ organic electronica to Mariam Rezaei’s industrial turntable scratching, produced on her fiercely percussive decks.

Yet the festival’s most striking gesture took place far from the concert halls. The Swiss ensemble Alponom performed Stephen O’Malley’s You Origin four times: twice at sunrise and twice at sunset. First, the musicians were positioned in five pairs on a mountain outside the city. The distant roar of traffic slipped between the tones as alpine horns built deep, cyclical resonances. Passing dog walkers – and their dogs – stopped and listened.

For a long time, we measured the vitality of the Danish composing scene by its ability to present the newest of the new. I’ve stood talking to concert programmers who laughed indulgently when I mentioned a young composer by referring to a work that was three or four years old: »That’s an eternity ago«, they said. »He doesn’t write like that anymore – now it’s much better; he thinks so himself too!« And then the look that says: You’re a dinosaur, mate. I actually rather liked that arrogance.

But recently something has shifted. At the genre organization Art Music Denmark, the project »GENSTART« (RESTART] has been launched to help artists get works revived that are no longer brand new. And all around, this return of old acquaintances is flourishing: when the otherwise forward-looking SPOR Festival celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, it did so in part with works by Simon Løffler, Sandra Boss, and Ea Borre that had already been performed at the festival before. Why buy new when you can reuse?

On the Faroe Islands, opera is a contemporary art form and an intensely national one – more inextricably bound up in ideas of nationhood than anything happening right now at La scala. You can write that unequivocally, when there are only two Faroese operas to discuss. 

The second of them has just been born. Regin smiður arrived amid the deep snow of a Klaksvík Christmas in the final days of 2024. Its predecessor, also composed by Sunleif Rasmussen, dates from 2006. Í Óðamangarður adapted a story by the nation’s bard, William Heinesen. It was deemed »a work of haunting originality and beauty« by a critic dispatched to the North Atlantic review it, all the way from The Times in London.

Two decades later, music stands with knitwear and candle-smoke waterfalls as one of the Faroe Islands’s most recognized commodities. Eivør’s voice unfurls itself over film and gaming soundtracks and Rasmussen’s scores are broadcast by BBC orchestras. Also new – very new – is Varpið, the Faroese answer to Reykjavík’s Harpa: a hybrid of proscenium theatre and shoebox concert hall whose metal-box housing leers at an angle over Klaksvík’s main street, like part of a satellite fallen from space.

When I asked a range of people who, in their view, is the »founding figure« of Ukrainian sound art, I received a wide variety of names and pseudonyms ranging from individuals tied to new media art to those primarily active within the quasi-academic sphere of contemporary music. Different environments, different circuits, different forms of institutional anchoring – the genealogies of Ukrainian sound art are as diverse and heterogeneous as anywhere else.

What do we even mean when we talk about »Ukrainian sound art«? How do we define each part of this phrase? How do we outline the field and grasp the essence of sound art – is it closer to the Anglo-Saxon British tradition of sound art, or perhaps more aligned with the German Klangkunst tradition?