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. 

»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.