»Did you see Björk just walk past? She’s here often – she loves new music.« Someone in red has indeed just passed us on the way to the escalator in Harpa, Reykjavík’s iconic concert hall. Because this is Myrkir músíkdagar, also known as Dark Music Days.

The festival (January 26-31) opened with a group of teenagers from The Vesturbær School Orchestra, founded in 1954, followed by an opera singer with bare feet who ended her performance in a yoga pose. Now we descend into the parking basement, where Masaya Ozaki spins cymbals against the concrete floor, strikes a snare drum forcefully, and pulls noise from his guitar. When the young Japanese composer first came to Iceland to record the sounds of a glacier, he found – deep inside an ice cave – the sound of melting ice. It transformed him as a composer.

There’s something about Spot Festival that continues to haunt me. It’s not just the throbbing bass in your gut or the endless marathon between venues – the musical experience is never linear, but rhizomatic: unpredictable, without a center, always in motion. And then there’s that feeling of witnessing something unfinished, something potent. For one weekend, Aarhus is transformed into a sonic lab where the voices of the future are tested in the acoustics of the present. Here are six insights I took with me from Spot 2025.

1. Bowling alleys and death drive: when the noise spills off the record

Nausia – a Copenhagen-based quintet, and Latin for »noise« – created a mesmerizing groove with two saxophones at the helm, swirling tones, howls and minor-key fanfares into each other. The concert took place in Aarhus Bowling Alley (touché!) and was a 30-minute journey of dissonance, collapse and repetition.

»I’ve never felt better.«

Warren Ellis is in top form. From the moment I walk into the backstage room at Bremen Teater, the Australian bundle of energy is intensely present—constantly talking, eyes shining, his body language hyperactive. Along with his characteristic massive beard and sharp suit, he’s wearing rings and bracelets, and often waves his arms so enthusiastically that the jingling of jewelry makes it sound like he’s playing a tambourine.

Ellis is in Copenhagen to promote the film Ellis Park, which premiered at CPH:DOX and is currently touring film festivals around the world. While Ellis is best known as a musician – Nick Cave’s closest collaborator in The Bad Seeds and as part of the instrumental trio Dirty Three, which last year released its first album in 12 years, Love Changes Everything – Ellis Park shows him in a new light.

»Have you really never been here before? I’ve played here many times. First time was in 1998. I was still a student at the conservatory,« says Danish drummer Kresten Osgood as he continues swimming in the rooftop pool on the eighth floor, overlooking Tallinn’s church spires, orthodox domes, and smokestacks. The city, one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, smells of Estonian cedar from the saunas and bursts with music festivals.

Last night, the Estonian-Danish composer and saxophonist Maria Faust performed a concert version of the theatre piece Rahamaa, or Moneyland – the talk of the town, though impossible to get tickets for. Faust’s group The Economics – consisting of a drummer and three horns – moved like a procession through the dark: marching drums, wailing saxophone, and a trumpet sounding like an open wound, while two actors in stiff suits recited lines about Danske Bank, collapse, and the moral downfall at the altar of the stock exchange.

Peter Ablinger is dead, and no metaphor suffices. Writing a eulogy for Ablinger cannot be »like« anything. To do justice to his invaluable work – his contribution to music, visual art, and philosophy – one must write with clarity and precision: fine lines on white paper. Canvases in the wind. A window through which we glimpse the blue sky.

To remember Ablinger himself is an impossible task. What fascinated him most, »the greatest of all questions, the greatest of all riddles,« was the wonder and the question of what another person sees/hears/thinks when I see/hear/think something. It was »the impossibility of thinking (feeling) the other.« To fully understand how he experienced the world, how he was able to turn it upside down, to turn it inside out and reveal the construction of reality itself to our ears and eyes – our astonished minds – is impossible. But because he conducted fundamental research into perception, because he persistently showed us the difference between how we thought the world was and how the world really is, he also showed us that something in human perception connects us all as sentient beings.

Until recently, Le Lido on Paris’ Champs-Élysées was a sister venue to the Moulin Rouge, historically known for its revue-style shows culminating in the traditional cancan number, best enjoyed as a dîner-spectacle experience with table service. For decades it had endured the inevitable pressure of conforming to the expectations of the tourists (both French and international) to which it catered, delivering a certain dated postcard image of Parisian nightlife entertainment. After its purchase by a multinational hospitality company and the ensuing makeover and change of staff, the venue reopened in 2022 as Lido2, thus explicitly aiming at a rebirth, with a new offering of Broadway and West End musicals performed in the original English, including Cabaret, The Rocky Horror Show, and Hello, Dolly!.

This new Lido’s Artistic Director, Mr. Jean-Luc Choplin, has had an eclectic career as a manager and curator from the Paris Opera Ballet to Disneyland to Sadler’s Well to the Théâtre du Châtelet and beyond, blurring the borders between so-called high culture and entertainment. Next to more conventional fare (in both fields) Mr. Choplin has honed an aesthetics of crossover, including for instance Pop’pea – Monteverdi performed by a mix of pop and opera singers – or Mozart’s Requiem staged by the famous equestrian artist Bartabas. Such bridges could be argued to be naturally at home at the Lido, where from the 1940s onwards ballet dancers have contributed their training and high-brow touch to music-hall shows. The most paradigmatic and interesting intersection between this history and Mr. Choplin’s trademark is The Magic Flute II: The Curse, An Electro Opera, which premiered on March 27, 2025 at the Champs-Élysées venue, with which it shares the telling feature of being named a classic’s »part 2«.

Elfriede Jelinek’s pre-feminist take on feminism doesn’t mince words. In the Austrian writer’s potent novella Women as Lovers, her own gender become »solid piles of hate«, »deformed bones« and »a necessary evil«. The text autopsies the sickening hopelessness of life without a penis in 1970s Alpine Europe in a linguistically sparse, brutally indifferent manner. The conversation may have sprawled into complication and obfuscation in the intervening years but Jelinek’s assessment of the problem – that female progress is hindered by a world controlled by men and money – still gets to the nub of things.

The narrator of Women as Lovers presents readers with two factory workers driven by an urge to find men who might lift them out of the drudgery of life. The »good example«, Birgitte, fights off an educated, bourgeois rival to win the electrician Heinz, enjoying a degree of emancipation via his money but enduring a marriage deficient in affection. The »bad example«, Paula – the more imaginative and poetic of the two – gets pregnant on her first night with the lumberjack Erich but her mistaking of romance for love eventually drives her to prostitution. 

When pianist Nikolaus von Bemberg made his debut last year at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, several surprising things happened during his graduation concert.

One was that his colleague James Black – the leader of Klang Festival and also a composer used to experimenting with different media – suddenly appeared on video as a murder victim in a satire of Nordic crime series. Another, more sensitive surprise came from actor Bless Amada, who, while chaotic sine tones seeped through in von Bemberg’s own work A Day in the Life (2024), portrayed stress in a way  that many could probably relate to.

Since then I have been thinking about what Amada did when the anxiety and mental turmoil set in. Not only did he sit down and read Rilke on stage, but he also started playing a vinyl record: the now 71-year-old Swiss composer Jürg Frey’s 4th string quartet (2018-20), which had been released a few months earlier in a recording by the Canadian Quatuor Bozzini.

Sound as a political-feminist, historical, aesthetic, and performative phenomenon is at the center of the rich, thought-provoking, and refreshing anthology Bodies of Sound, which was published last November by the small feminist London-based publisher Silver Press. One of the two editors of the anthology is a co-owner of the publisher, and it is clear that careful thought has been given to the approach to the subject matter. The anthology is not only feminist in its foundation but is also exclusively written by women and non-binary people (judging by the names) – meaning that there are presumably no contributions from male authors.

The book consists of more than 50 contributions spread across nearly 400 pages, making it a thoroughly charming and weird jumble of interviews, fables, poems, text scores, and quote mosaics, alongside suggestions on how to describe music, advice on spreading feminism by speaking publicly about inspiring women, considerations on worry as grief, and reflections on the nymph Echo in relation to the concept of echo as an acoustic phenomenon. Regarding the latter, the book’s editors describe it as »a book of echoes« and note in their introduction that recurring metaphors in the texts include »mirrors, bells, tongues, doors, clocks, radios, archives, alarms, and ears.«

When a few thousand people clap their thick mittens in minus 30 degrees, it sounds like the softest techno. The arctic cold in Kirkenes, 400 km north of the Arctic Circle and a stone's throw from the border with Russia and Finland, steals all sounds. We are standing by an inland lake on the outskirts of the small northern Norwegian town and looking down on a makeshift stage out on the ice, where performers in white suits are building a kite. Local horn musicians play, and actors from Russia, Ukraine and Hungary slam poles into the floor and sing ritualistic chants.

Is this a prelude to something? Who are they calling to? Are they warning anyone? During the opening of the cultural festival Barents Spectacle (15th-18th February 2024) – the 20th edition – the ears are flared like the down jackets that everyone here in Kirkenes wears as protection against the harsh nature. 

The scratchy soundscapes – created by the composer and sound artist Mattia Bassi, Italian but living in Finland – are sent out onto the ice. It sounds like a mashup of many worlds at once. Musicians at all times and in all parts of the world have sent out signals so that some could seize them. The land on the other side of the frozen lake has once again become a hostile land. But a little boy in a massive thermal jacket smiles as a snowmobile drives out onto the ice with a white kite on a long string behind it, and the kite rises into the sky.