»Are you Simon Steen-Andersen?« A high school teacher from the Danish city Køge has spotted the composer's name in the festival program. But Simon Steen-Andersen has not been seen in Warsaw yet. Inside Polish Radio's fine Lutosławski hall the youth from Køge enjoyed in a very deep listening-manner the organic pulse of Magdalena Gorwas Four Roots of All Matter (2024) which alternated inspirations from sun, water, fire and air into a lush meditation garden. The high school class came across the Warsaw Autumn Festival somewhat by accident and missed both the festival opening, Christian Winther Christensen's Piano Concert (2018) and a work for orchestra and record players by Mariam Rezaei and Matthew Shlomowitz. Nor did they hear the young Ukrainian Yurii Pikushs Domi Res Militaris (2024) about the day in 2022 when his home was attacked. The same concert featured a work by the experienced Russian living in Berlin, Sergej Newski. People will be talking about this confrontation for a long time.

Andreo:

Jennifer, at this year's Venice Biennial war, refugees, and destruction were inescapable. Has the biennial ever been this filled with sound? The experience felt all-encompassing – I heard wrenching, unfamiliar sounds everywhere. Even Björk sailed into Venice to give a secret DJ set in a palazzo. 

All the chaos there felt right for a year that has been an annus horribilis. Do chaotic times call for chaotic music – has any been on your mind this year?

Jennifer:

Wide-ranging horror on a global scale, in addition to a lot of unsavoriness in my own personal life, induced in me a yearlong craving for sensory obliteration that I mostly addressed by blasting Brat. Not a few other chaotic records also made a dent in me: Icelandic composer Bára Gísladottír and flutist Björg Brjánsdóttir’s GROWL POWER (Smekkleysa), whose title track concludes with Brjánsdóttir simultaneously flute-ing and woofing at the top of her lungs, a cathartic listen for humans and hounds alike. Another find for me was the supermassive guitar choruses of Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, who has a record from this year (Estrella Por Estrella), though I was more taken by 2023’s more eclectic Profundo Amor (Puro Fantasia Music). The mere existence of the deliriously polymathic Australian violinist Jon Rose fills me with joy, and I found many rewards in his record Band Width (Relative Pitch Records), an improvisation with bassist Mark Dresser that manages to be both vigorous and lackadaisical at once.

When the big lizard and the little E.T.-like figure sing loving arias in autotune, you forget they're not real. Two performers from the Oslo duo Only Slimes move in front of the screen and add body to the lizard and E.T., which is not brown, but in fresh bright colors, like the fantastic palm beach they sit on while they talk about existence. This absurd avatar-hyperpop-computer game-opera bears the title Afterlife. 

Meanwhile, composers from all over the Nordics are landing in Glasgow. One has traveled for two days from Lofoten, another has traveled by train for 27 hours from Copenhagen, a third asks in the Danes’ group on Facebook where he should give his presentation. Nordic Music Days is packed with conferences, concerts, workshops and sound walks. Here at the world's oldest festival for Nordic contemporary music, once called Nordiske Musikdage, has since 1888 taken turns in the Nordic countries with detours to Paris and London. This year the composers chose Glasgow.

When the big lizard and the little E.T.-like figure sing loving arias in autotune, you forget they're not real. Two performers from the Oslo duo Only Slimes move in front of the screen and add body to the lizard and E.T., which is not brown, but in fresh bright colors, like the fantastic palm beach they sit on while they talk about existence. This absurd avatar-hyperpop-computer game-opera bears the title Afterlife. 

Meanwhile, composers from all over the Nordics are landing in Glasgow. One has traveled for two days from Lofoten, another has traveled by train for 27 hours from Copenhagen, a third asks in the Danes’ group on Facebook where he should give his presentation. Nordic Music Days is packed with conferences, concerts, workshops and sound walks. Here at the world's oldest festival for Nordic contemporary music, once called Nordiske Musikdage, has since 1888 taken turns in the Nordic countries with detours to Paris and London. This year the composers chose Glasgow.

The French Pavilion smells of lavender. Visitors slowly move through an organic sculptural installation accompanied by fashion-show-like electronic music. It feels like walking through a chic boutique. Poet, composer, and performer Julien Creuzet’s aesthetic, with a Caribbean touch, feels completely immersive and familiar. And with this privileged gaze, hearing, and sense of smell, you enter the many multisensory spaces at the 60th Venice Biennale.

With the theme Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curator Adriano Pedrosa gives a voice to the marginalized, the colonized, refugees, outsider artists, and folk artists from the Global South. You can feel it, tactilely, in the many textile works from Colombia and Chile – the works scratch. Though Chinese artist Xiyadie’s erotic paper cuttings seem innocent, they stand in sharp contrast to the war, refugees, and destruction that have become an unavoidable reality in 2024.

But there are also numerous immersive spaces with scents and sound in the national pavilions: 16 perfumes play as important a role as the solitary sculpture in the South Korean Pavilion. The Neighbours in the Bulgarian Pavilion is a multimedia installation reflecting on forgetfulness and memory during Bulgaria’s socialist era from 1945-1989.

The French Pavilion smells of lavender. Visitors slowly move through an organic sculptural installation accompanied by fashion-show-like electronic music. It feels like walking through a chic boutique. Poet, composer, and performer Julien Creuzet’s aesthetic, with a Caribbean touch, feels completely immersive and familiar. And with this privileged gaze, hearing, and sense of smell, you enter the many multisensory spaces at the 60th Venice Biennale.

With the theme Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curator Adriano Pedrosa gives a voice to the marginalized, the colonized, refugees, outsider artists, and folk artists from the Global South. You can feel it, tactilely, in the many textile works from Colombia and Chile – the works scratch. Though Chinese artist Xiyadie’s erotic paper cuttings seem innocent, they stand in sharp contrast to the war, refugees, and destruction that have become an unavoidable reality in 2024.

But there are also numerous immersive spaces with scents and sound in the national pavilions: 16 perfumes play as important a role as the solitary sculpture in the South Korean Pavilion. The Neighbours in the Bulgarian Pavilion is a multimedia installation reflecting on forgetfulness and memory during Bulgaria’s socialist era from 1945-1989.

Glasgow is tough. Near the art venue Tramway, a former streetcar depot, in the South Side neighborhood is both Asian Wedding Events and P. Lipton Memorial Centre with the city's largest stock clearance sale of tombstones. Extremes are also what an enthusiastic spectator heard during the concert with France Jobin and Markus Heckmann: »What kind of brutal reality was that?« 

Heckmann, or the Wüstenarchitekten, as he goes by the name when he makes techno, created a black-and-white cave of graphic, coarse-grained images of tissue and stray threads that met in an opaque pattern. A secret immersive space that French soundmaker Jobin kept expanding with sounds that were, yes, brutal, but also delicate and just sense-expanding and space-shaking. We traveled into this huge space with our tiny human bodies. It could be physically felt that the project Entanglement is inspired by quantum physics and the multiverse. 

»Playing the drums is not modest. It’s not quiet. A drum kit takes up space and doesn’t apologize. Essentially, it’s a strong precondition for a ‘It’s not a woman’s thing’ (‘Ist nix für Frauen’)«, percussionist Katharina Ernst told the German newspaper Taz at the dawn of her opening concert for the Heroines of Sound Festival in Berlin. 

Since its inception in 2014, Heroines of Sound has actively worked to shift male-dominated narratives in the music scene, significantly enhancing the visibility of FLINTA* (women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender) musicians not only by featuring 350 artists from more than 30 countries over the years, but also by fostering feminist and non-binary movements in music, engaging globally with a network of artists and festivals. Held on July 11-13, the 2024 edition collaborated with local and international organisations like Copenhagen KLANG festival and Zeitgeist Ireland 24, promising a vibrant blend of events and dialogues featuring pioneers and contemporary heroines of music genres ranging from classical contemporary music to progressive pop, with a special focus on voice, electronics and percussion. Artistic Director Bettina Wackernagel, along with co-curators Julia Mihály, Helen Heß, and Sabine Sanio implemented a diverse program of ambitious scope: panels on music and gender-cultural politics, workshops on improvisation with radio bodies and somatic rhythms, a Soundbar and a Filmbar showcasing documentaries and artist interviews that encapsulate the evolution of the festival's themes from 2021 to 2023.

You can't hear the trams when Mary Halvorson plays her electric guitar in the Cracow Philharmonic. The trams have otherwise always been a problem during concerts, because the music house is located on a central corner of the Polish city. Or perhaps the trams simply follow the fun rocking rhythm of the American composer and guitarist Halvorsen's work Belladonna: Sometimes small electric vibrations are felt, distorted guitar tones, driven through distortion pedals that sound as if they are running at different speeds, at least in different moods, than the four strings of the Mivos Quartet. You don't quite know who is pulling on whom; whether it is the guitar that is the soloist or the strings that lead the way. From time to time, the jazzified guitar rams into the elongated string sounds. The shocks and twists of the guitar are gentle, for the most part – but in the last piece Halvorson cuts in.

On the same evening The Sinfonietta Cracovia and conductor Lilianna Krych also performs Pure Voices (2021-2023) for string ensemble and electronics by the young Polish composer Aleksandra Słyż. All scratchy tones are eliminated; clean, long sound surfaces change and flutter.