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. 

Historien om Else Marie Pade, en af de væsentligste danske elektroniske komponister i efterkrigstiden, er en god historie. Så god, endda, at flere og flere er begyndt at fortælle den. Nogle med nidkær historisk indsigt i den elektroniske musiks historie, andre med et, hvad skal vi sige, mere frit fabulerende forhold til fakta.

Da Aarhus Kommune i december 2017 indviede den første strækning i byens nye letbanesystem, markerede det således ikke kun begyndelsen på en lettere færden rundt i Else Marie Pades fødeby. Det blev også en anledning til at gøre komponisten til en del af fortællingen om byen, der tidligere bar sloganet »Aarhus – Danish for progress«.

Så da Aarhus Letbane tidligere i år udgav fem korte podcasts om nogle af de historiske stop på det, der i dag udgør mere end 100 kilometer skinner, handlede en af dem om Pade. Her hører vi om hendes rebelske attitude over for den tyske besættelsesmagt: at hun spytter efter en af soldaterne, men slipper af sted med det ved at flygte i en sporvogn. Og at hun bliver modstandskvinde og ender i Gestapos fængsel, hvor hun ridser noder ind i væggen.

»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.

The fear of having to take a completely unimportant, yes, pointless, job in order to pay the rent has always been deep within me. I've always had great compassion for the people who were forced to do that.

A job in a call center stands out to me as one of the worst things I could ever imagine: a job where I was tasked with disturbing randomly selected people at work or at home to ask them to answer questions that I knew would have very little effect or benefit. I have too much respect for other people's time and chores to ever bring myself to do that. Fortunately, it has never been necessary for me to take a job in any call center.

Such jobs have existed throughout most of the late modern era in much of the world. They are partly covered by the term pseudo work, which the anthropologist Dennis Nørmark and the philosopher Anders Fogh Jensen launched in their joint debate book of the same title from 2018. The term denotes all the work that basically makes no difference, but still exists because measurability, management paradigms and evaluation culture have come so prevalent in the same era.

Jobs of this type – and several others with them – have been labeled with the unforgettable term McJob, as it happened in the American author Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X from 1991. The term denotes the optimally boring and perspective-less jobs, which are unskilled and thus poorly paid, and which have no potential whatsoever from a career perspective

Introduction: Talking about the (de)colonial

How do we talk about musical colonisation? How do we talk about this work of talking about it; that is, interrogating what we mean by colonisation and its counter-logic of decolonisation or decoloniality? What can and must we talk about in this particular moment – when talk of decolonisation is at an all-time high, yet without clear consensus and much misuse of the concept? These questions, and the insights that emerged from them, animated the two-day conference Music’s institution and the (de)colonial, convened by Sanne Krogh Groth, Phil Dodds, and Brandon Farnsworth, and hosted by the Division of Musicology at Lund University in early May 2023.

Early on in the conference, we unanimously acknowledged the necessity of decolonisation in music research and practice. We were also aware of the traps and gaps of our common discursive context, a context predominantly shaped by institutions. Some rightly pointed out how institutional talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion ultimately and problematically maintains the status quo. Others questioned the efficacy of decolonial research itself, given the systemic tendency of institutions in education, arts, and culture to reinforce the legacies of what Kofi Agawu calls musical colonisation.

The drummer and the keyboardist walk in resolutely, dressed in black. They stand, turning their backs to each other. After this brief duo introduction, other performers enter the scene. They move awkwardly, like animated figures. Looking from side to side, bodies twisted in strange positions, gestures repeated in loops or scratched out, like the vinyls on turntables at the back of the scene. 

This is a snapshot from the performance, at the 2023 Darmstadt Summer Courses, of Growing Sideways, composed by Jorge Sánchez-Chiong and choreographed by Brigitte Wilfing. In their program note, the artists write: »To step onto the side and feel forward, to grow sideways between the traces of the past and to look back with foresight at a sideways proliferating advance. Suddenly we have the future breathing down our necks. How many steps can we step back?« The two musicians at the beginning are Alfredo Ovalles (keyboards) and David Panzl (percussion), who are later accompanied by Mirjam Klebel (horn). The setting seems to have more to do with dance than music. And yet it was presented here, at a contemporary music festival.