When Bodies, Technologies and Whole Worlds Come Undone

From cyborg kinships and alchemical wonder to masculine fragility and Anthropocene ecstasy – MINU showed that art still holds space for vulnerability, ferocity and strange beauty.

ByMacon Holt

MINU Festival for Expanded Music er i de senere år blevet en fast bestanddel af Københavns kalender. Under kuratorisk ledelse og organisering af Mikkel Schou, Dylan Richards og Roberto Besler har festivalen konsekvent præsenteret programmer med musikalske opførelser, der udfordrer kunstformernes grænser. Værkerne stiller ofte spørgsmål til publikum – ikke kun om, hvad kunst kan, men også om de betingelser i verden, som denne musik udspringer af.

Årets MINU virkede strammere kurateret end tidligere udgaver. På en velkommen måde syntes den også mere frigjort fra den åbne frustration over institutionskritik, som tidligere har været et dominerende tema. I stedet for at være noget, kunstnerne var tvunget til at reagere imod, var problemerne ved institutionaliseret kunstproduktion blevet festivalens udgangspunkt – en slags indsats, som værkerne kunne udforske mulige »hvad så nu?«-scenarier ud fra.

Turn it Up!

Charlottenborgs hyldest til Mika Vainio vil være en lydbiograf, men uden ordentlig volumen, mørke eller kontekst ender installationen som en oplevelse, man hurtigt glider ud af.

ByLouise Steiwer

Man kan formentlig henføre fremkomsten af lydbiografen til den såkaldte krig mod opmærksomheden, vi hele tiden hører om. Mens techvirksomheder finjusterer deres midler til at holde os fanget i dopaminafhængighed, fjerner universiteterne lange klassiske tekster fra pensum. Ingen kan længere koncentrere sig om noget som helst, og modbevægelsen bliver disse fællesskaber, hvor man mødes for at sidde i mørket og hengive sig til en plade, berøvet muligheden for at gøre andet end lige præcis det.

Allerede i 80’erne og 90’erne, dengang vi stadig var optimistiske på teknologiens vegne, havde den finske producer og lydkunstner Mika Vainio (1963-2017) gang i noget tilsvarende. I sin lejlighed i Oslo afholdte han lytteseancer for sine venner, og blev efter sigende voldsomt irriteret, hvis nogen foretog sig noget som helst andet end at lytte i koncentreret tavshed.

Derfor er det logisk nok en lydbiograf, man har stablet på benene i Kunsthal Charlottenborg, hvor man hylder Vainio gennem seks playlister under den lidt bombastiske titel Museum of Sound. Vil man høre det hele, skal man afsætte omkring 7,5 time, hvilket nok er i overkanten for de fleste. Projektet er snarere lagt an på, at man dumper ind et tilfældigt sted og bliver hængende i mørket så længe, man lader sig indfange.

In the Hamster Wheel with Headbands

Current Resonance turned the idea of work inside out in an absurd, sweat-drenched performance that pulled the audience into a hard-pumped ritual of labour.

ByMarta Bo

It is rare that a concert engages the audience’s sense of smell. Just as rare is the sight of musicians in headbands and gym shorts performing a two-hour workout routine – not only pushing the narrative, but the smell of sweat, all the way over the edge of the stage. Current Resonance didn't stay in their lanes, and in the work Musical Workout they invited the audience onto the floor to take part in an exquisitely awkward exercise session. It was grotesque – and very funny.

Graft, a piece situated somewhere between performance art, music theatre and a PE lesson, consisted of five works, all exploring the same theme: »work«, and with a neurotic, Monty Python-esque persistence, the ensemble pushed the concept to its extremes. Graft exposed the modern human’s fetishisation of hard work – our obsession with finding meaning and purpose. At the centre of the increasingly distorted narratives stood the four composers, each in comic denial, like four modern Sisyphuses.

Nothing Will Be Livestreamed – Be Present in the Green

On the Danish island of Samsø, humans, sheep, and birds listen together to the music of nature – a journey into the ecology of sound.

ByAndreo Michaelo Mielczarek

The noise from Lilleøre – the ferry between Aarhus and Samsø – has a strange calm to it. A monotonous, metallic humming that rocks you out of the city and into another rhythm. Samsø wakes slowly. The rain lies like a thin veil over the fields. A chef makes noise in the kitchen of the Samsø Badehotel. He is from New York. He has worked at ElBulli.

The vegetable stalls stand like small islands along the roads, and on the signs, both Polynesian massage and wine from Château Alstrup are promised. Even the royal couple has been here – on Thursday, for a concert with Poul Krebs at Hotel Brundby, the legendary rock hotel. In front of the hotel stands a white artificial cow with musical notes on its body, as if the music has stuck to its skin.

»GRØN MUSIK [GREEN MUSIC] is a four-day manifestation on Samsø of sound art and music that has a close collaborative relationship with nature!« proclaimed the invitation from the festival’s initiators, the association Terraform.

That’s Why I Keep Returning To Unsound

Unsound in Kraków is still more than a festival – it’s an echo of our own search for connection in the age of noise.

ByAndreo Michaelo Mielczarek

In the old medical auditorium at ul. Kopernika 15 – where the walls still remember another kind of pain – Unsound’s Morning Glory concerts take place. Here, the French guitar deconstructor Nina Garcia pushed her instrument to the breaking point: piercing feedback, pulsing noise, and small rhythmic movements that glinted like metal in the morning light.

Afternoon Glory featured yet another guitar deconstructor, Tashi Dorji. The Bhutanese artist »peeled« his guitar apart with almost ceremonial patience, making calm gear shifts along the way and – after forty minutes – a single outburst.

During the Glory concerts, there are no visuals – only the sun pouring into the auditorium, only the noise breaking the clinical calm of the former hospital grounds. If Lars von Trier ever filmed a Polish hospital, this would be the place.

Anything Can Become Music – Even a Bunch Of Fake Frogs

At the Musica festival in Strasbourg, everything from children’s concerts to organ storms and performative string quartets turned into a playful exploration of sound, body, and community.

ByTherese Wiwe Vilmar

The 43rd edition of Musica unfolded over two full weeks (September 19 – October 5), wrapped in Strasbourg’s orange-brown autumn colors. On Friday evening during the festival’s middle weekend, I sat down in the Le Maillon theatre and immediately felt alarmingly out of place. I was there for a talk with artist Joris Lacoste before the performance of his work Nexus de l’adoration (2025), but Lacoste spoke in French for 45 minutes, and I strained to catch a sentence here and there. Not a single word of German to cling to. Just as I was about to flee, the theatre filled up with people. A remarkable crowd of both young folks in baggy jeans and older ones in colorful glasses and silk scarves. The café’s sliding doors opened, and guests bought wine and hot meals, pushed tables together, and chatted softly while the artist spoke. It turned out to be anything but exclusive.

Microtones In the Coal Mines

Ostrava Days transformed the old mining town into a laboratory of sound, where contemporary music pressed its way out between dust, drones, and Dadaist madness.<br />

ByAndreo Michaelo Mielczarek

Kazuhisa Uchihashi stood among rusty combine harvesters at the Agricultural Museum when he drew the bow across the pickup of his homemade instrument. Out came a sound that at once resembled a vegetable shredder and a groovy, mechanical monster.

She attacked reel-to-reel tape machines, letting the tapes curl freely, twisting and tearing them apart until they became both rhythm and raw noise

During the festival’s ten-hour mini-marathon of electronic music, the machines truly became collaborators: Richard Grimm and Patrik Herman transformed a 3D printer into a stubborn rhythm machine, a droning doom alternating between futuristic technology and old-fashioned threshing mill. Jean-Philippe Gross sculpted sound as if it were a physical substance – layer upon layer – until it burst into the hall like a swarm of New Year’s rockets.

The strongest experience came from Augustė Vickunaitė, who turned sound into a poetic confrontation with the past. She attacked reel-to-reel tape machines, letting the tapes curl freely, twisting and tearing them apart until they became both rhythm and raw noise – a bodily, sensuous clash where nostalgia and destruction fused together.

The underground speaks

Thirty years after Ostrava’s last coal mine closed, the biennale Ostravské dny [Ostrava Days] reopened the underground. Fittingly, several concerts took place in Futureum, a former coal works and tipping hall. Here, Miroslav Tóth’s Nemiesta – Non-Places (2023) unfolded as a poetic reflection on empty spaces, an unfinished highway, and a nuclear power plant that was never switched on. The Mivos Quartet from New York pitted lyrical sensitivity against raw, industrially colored sonorities.

The opening concert already revealed the festival’s will to let the youngest voices stand side by side with the established, which naturally resulted in a level that was at times uneven. Theo Alexander’s Auto-responsive Dream Denial Music (2025) was drawn as a musical labyrinth where the string players sat apart behind screens, each tied to their own tape recorder. Only the audience had access to the whole – a flickering tableau of organ sounds from all over Europe, synthetic imitations, and live strings. The fragments unfolded like a disorienting – and seductive – dream on the edge of dissolution.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations slid in like a ghost from the distant past

In Emma Nagy’s Refractions in My Dream (2023), time itself dissolved as accordion and saxophone shifted tones one by one. The music moved without pulse, in a flowing, meditative space where the smallest changes became slowly growing events.

James Layton’s having never known the piano (2025) was both homage to, and rebellion against, the weight of piano tradition. Notes were drawn out, folded back, repeated through electronic filters like memories one cannot quite grasp. Bach’s Goldberg Variations slid in like a ghost from the distant past.

From asceticism to explosion

An entire evening at Ostrava Days was devoted to automatic and algorithmic compositions: Ian Mikyska’s Still, not still (2025) appeared as a work of ascetic simplicity, with the quartet’s sounds balancing on the threshold between sound and silence. Yet the strict concept soon felt more like an exercise than a musical necessity, and the piece risked dissolving into its own minimalism. Milan Guštar’s Kadence v C dur (2021/2025), by contrast, emerged as both an ironic commentary and a serious meditation on the end of music: a seven-minute string cadence.

Lejaren Hiller’s Sonata no. 3 for violin and piano (1970–71) was hard-hitting, dissonant, uncompromising. Conrad Harris’ violin carved forward with raw energy, while Daan Vandewalle’s piano laid down a dark, relentless rhythmic foundation.

The recently deceased Phill Niblock and Peter Ablinger – both closely tied to Ostrava Days – had new works performed by the Ensemble of Futurist Noise Intoners, on Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori. These wooden crank-boxes, producing everything from deep rumbles to shrill screeches, were originally created as futurism’s rebellion against traditional musical aesthetics.

Tania León’s songs wove a vivid polyrhythmic portrait of Havana into the space

Unlike in previous years, there were only a few American musicians in Ostrava. Ostrava Days has close ties to New York, where festival director Petr Kotík lives. And it was his idea to stage a concert with three orchestras and three conductors on the same stage in four works: Phill Niblock’s Three Orchids (2002–03), Alvin Lucier’s Diamonds (1999), Petr Kotík’s Variations for 3 Orchestras (2003–05), and Bernhard Lang’s GAME XXII (2025). Niblock’s opening in the former industrial hall Trojhalí Karolina was a massive, vibrating sound field: the three orchestras each held to a single tone, but shifted in microtonal intervals so that a stream of overtones, different tones, and resonances emerged. Lucier traced lines of glissandi and overtone play. Kotík made the three orchestras converse in a beautifully chaotic dialogue. Finally, Lang’s unpredictable displacements turned the orchestras into a giant, living loop machine. It was a wild night in every way!

In the Cathedral of the Divine Saviour, Klaus Lang’s cantita christinae IV – past-time (2021) unfolded more austerely, while Tania León’s songs wove a vivid polyrhythmic portrait of Havana into the space.

Afterwards, at Klub Parník, New Yorker Thomas Buckner performed Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise together with music students. This was far better than Roscoe Mitchell’s failed concert some years ago on the same stage. The evening ended with hip hop and Americana – young classical musicians clearly have a broad horizon.

From mists to silence – a panorama of today’s music

Concert after concert, Ostrava Days painted a picture of contemporary music’s breadth. I will never forget how three flugelhorns, three tubas, and percussion created a deep, almost bodily resonance in a work by Petr Cígler. And I will fondly remember how 24-year-old Wei-Shiang Chang made the festival orchestra Ostravská banda whisper like mists through a Taiwanese mountain valley.

While Martin Klusák, in his Lighthouse (2025) piece, let us feel the shifting currents of the sea, Alex Mincek’s work unfolded like a filmic meditation, where rhythmic cells constantly found new constellations – like a mobile in ceaseless motion. And Robert Karpay’s Deep Summer Nocturne (2025) took its point of departure from Bartók’s night music, but ended in drones and melancholy weight with echoes of Radiohead’s Kid A.

One conductor had his hands tied while the piano unfolded in horror-like themes with clear reference to Ligeti

In that concert alone it was clear that contemporary music does not move in one direction but unfolds as a journey through sound’s many possible landscapes. Several young composers worked with simple processes and limited parameters – like Tymon Zgorzelski, who translated his fascination with astronomy into small rhythmic displacements and meetings of timbres.

The panorama drawn by the concert with six world premieres showed how composers today think of music: as nature’s fog, as the darkness of memory, as filmic image – and yes, there was no lack of cinematic imagery in Ostrava this year – as rhythmic construction, as democratic conversation, or as strictly structured architecture. Theatrical concepts also had their place: one conductor had his hands tied while the piano unfolded in horror-like themes with clear reference to Ligeti.

In Ostrava one could encounter several young composers worth following. Szymon Golec’s intense journey into layers of the psyche with small roars from four saxophones played by the Canadian quartet Quasar was marvelous. And Pennsylvania-born Matthew Huang Mailman offered a playful piece where his fascination with trains was transformed into rumbling and clattering. It was both sensuous and imaginative, and you could sense the steam in the saxophones. Incidentally, the Canadian saxophonists opened the concert with their compatriot Claude Vivier’s Pulau Dewata (1977) – a fantastical homage to Bali.

For me, the festival culminated in the kitchen of the abandoned Hotel Palace

Dadaist primal force and French drones

Christopher Butterfield knocked everyone off their feet: stiff as an undertaker, he breathed life into Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist Ursonate (1923–32), which felt astonishingly contemporary in our TikTok era. Together with pianist Daan Vandewalle he also let Satie’s Socrate (1917–18) unfold its cool beauty with rare elegance.

For me, the festival culminated in the kitchen of the abandoned Hotel Palace, where cellist Charles Curtis performed Éliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak. A single long bow stroke over the strings opened like a microscopic universe – a slowly shifting field of overtones and vibrations where the silence around the music became almost as important as the sound itself.

Ostrava, which this year marked its 13th biennale since its beginning in 2001, reaffirmed its role as both laboratory and meeting place – a space where new ideas can be tested, and where even the smallest tone can open new ways of listening.

Ostrava Days, Ostrava, Czechia, August 21–30, 2025

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek. Proofreading: Geoff Cox

When Mysticism Loses Its Magic

This year’s Rued Langgaard Festival set out to open the gate to Danish mysticism, but at times disappeared itself into a haze of filler and gimmickry – though a few concerts stood strong.

ByJeppe Rönnow

One must be cautious when people say, »now it gets really deep«. Musical, intellectual, or spiritual depth must be experienced – not proclaimed. At this year’s Langgaard Festival in Ribe, there was much talk of depth, big concepts, and spiritual directions, but without us ever really reaching the depths of depth.

Over four days in September, Ribe’s old town is transformed each year into a large festival site, where historic buildings, cafés and restaurants, the local high school, cemetery, and churches all provide venues for either concerts, lectures, or lounges where the day’s music is discussed. The festival has developed tremendously in recent years and, since its founding in 2010, has always had either a composer or an overarching theme to be set against Rued Langgaard’s multifaceted and wondrous music.

Sound Bath At the Edge Of the Headland

Lost Farm Festival transformed an abandoned farm into a global gathering point for grief, anger and creativity – where concerts, rituals and installations turned Sjællands Odde into a new center of the world.

BySanne Krogh Groth

Near the tip of Sjællands Odde lies Yderby Lyng – a small village on the outskirts of Havnebyen, known from DR3’s series Doggy Style. Here you’ll find the grill bar Tunen, a shelter site with sea swimming, and formerly the hotel restaurant Den Gyldne Hane. The series portrayed the lives of young people in an area where Copenhagen feels far away, both physically and mentally. The region is a mix of classic rural landscape with Holbæk as the nearest town and Denmark’s largest summerhouse area. In addition, old farms have begun attracting new residents who bring latte culture, organic stalls and art. And now also Lost Farm, a brand new festival on a farm in Yderby Lyng, complete with pop-up bars, pizza trucks, long tables, sculptures, installations, tent camps and three stages: The Pit, The Cave and The Barn.

On Friday afternoon, when I arrive at the Farm, I am greeted by Jude Bennett, the farm’s owner and artistic director of the festival. I missed the official opening speech, but she gives me a personal tour before the first concert.

No Dying Diva in Paris – but Glitter, Dog Life and Office Humor

Copenhagen Opera Festival 2025 turned away from opera’s classical themes of fate and instead gave space to intimate music-dramatic experiments on queer identity, domestic violence, climate crisis, and mental illness.

ByJeppe Rönnow

Opera is about transformation. Either the performers transform on stage, or the audience does – suddenly we find ourselves in a duel between friends on a plain outside St. Petersburg, or in a Parisian attic room where a young woman is dying of tuberculosis.

This year’s opera festival in Copenhagen also had transformation as its focal point, though often in more indirect forms. Here, opera was understood as music drama in intimate formats, with small one-hour performances in modest venues carrying the program.

A queen ant is born on stage

In a basement venue in Nørrebro (H20), Shlomi Moto Wagner invited the audience into his performance Salvation. Blue glitter against hopelessness and homesickness, red glitter against depression and melancholy – with a gesture almost ritual, he distributed the colors to those who wished. Like a priest at the altar, he marked our foreheads, but infused with the joyful energy and sensual delight of drag art. The transformation was both concrete and symbolic: a modern communion, where glitter carried the promise of change.