Dreams, Noise and Apple Crunch in Stavanger 

At Stavanger Camping – a mini-golf center in the middle of the city – a half-naked man sits wrapped in plastic. In front of him lies a pile of branches, into which he thrusts a microphone as if searching for something hidden. The rattling sounds he produces (the performer Owen Weaver) resemble an animal rooting for food – hungry, restless.

At Stavanger Camping, you can also settle into a 1950s dental chair. A corrugated metal sheet with six speakers is strapped over the body, making me the centerpiece of my own intimate concert: The sounds in the piece Den elektriske tannlegestolen (The electric dental chair) are felt in the body before they are heard by the ears. Transducers embedded in the chair make the experience physical, unsettling, and ticklish. Nearby, the artist duo Ibsen_Minothi control the sound universe – my private session – from a converted pump organ.

»Because Stavanger has the madness«, says festival director Bjørnar Habbestad at Stavanger Camping as his reason why the traveling contemporary music festival Only Connect now also wants to take root in Norway’s fourth largest municipality – a city that already has more festivals per capita than anywhere else in the country. However, the festival’s »ambition goes far beyond merely showcasing good taste«.

The cultural scene swings between oil money – it’s the city with the most Teslas – and punk experimentation

Cacophony with his back to the audience

Stavanger is full of contrasts. The cultural scene swings between oil money – it’s the city with the most Teslas – and punk experimentation. Glass, steel, and old industrial buildings rise side by side with fjords and mountains.

Several concerts at Only Connect took place at the cultural center Toi. Wearing a light blue terry cloth jacket and with the microphone close to his mouth, Helge Thorne from the trio Hebbex D’expectatio Expectata performed his verses with dry, detached diction – in Norwegian, Spanish, and English. He rapped about Taliban Angels, tried to rhyme Club Nada with Dada, and amid the linguistic collisions, contours of a world in decay – or perhaps simply in despair – emerged.

Behind him, Thore Warland (percussion) and Kjetil Brandsdal (turntables) created a fragmented but persistent groove shifting between dub and industrial noise. It sounded like a Norwegian Cabaret Voltaire on speed – a cacophonous collage of language, noise, and attitudes, with Stavanger as the new home base for the post-industrial underground.

It sounded like a Norwegian Cabaret Voltaire on speed – a cacophonous collage of language, noise, and attitudes

But the muddy mix swallowed nuances and weakened the concert’s impact. The words were delivered bluntly, but the countercultural sermon for the lost and the thinking never truly lifted. Maybe because it lacked humor. Maybe because Thorne stood with his back to the audience throughout the concert.

Afterwards, Berlin musician Jules Reidy shifted the mood with songs from the album Ghost/Spirit. The guitar’s fractal figures curled through the room like growth patterns, full of microtonal shifts and organic ripples. The subtly distorted voice hovered like steam over the soundscape – weightless yet present. When Reidy switched to acoustic guitar, the music became almost folkloric. Like futuristic campfire songs from a twilight zone – with the voice as a ghost of something old and something yet unborn.

While Reidy worked with intimacy and spatiality in real time, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Agape (2021) traced threads to a more cinematic and contemplative form of spatiality. In an installation with four screens, projected musicians – on harp, percussion, cello, and saxophone – were filmed in an empty industrial hall in Bergen. They slid in and out of each other’s silhouettes, and the same moment was shown several times in different variations – simultaneously. The music moved slowly and hesitant, as if eternally on the verge of dissolving itself.

The dictionary tells us that »agape« is Greek for love – a special form of selfless devotion. Snæbjörnsdóttir’s work became a meditative investigation of consonance and difference, dissolution and union – a slowly enveloping flow of sonic displacements and visual reflections that invited the audience into a space where both time and body seemed to dissolve in a loving embrace.

The small sounds – crunching, crispness, sucking noises – were transformed into an almost absurd but deeply focused sonic choreography

Cathy van Eck’s In Paradisum (2019) also circled around the everyday and the expanded sensory field. On stage at Stavanger Concert Hall, she stood alone eating an apple in front of a microphone. The small sounds – crunching, crispness, sucking noises – were transformed into an almost absurd but deeply focused sonic choreography. Suddenly, what we know so well became strange and fascinating. I have started chewing apples very mindfully.

Impossible operas, endless possibilities

Øyvind Torvund’s Plans for Future Operas (2023) is not an opera in the traditional sense but a meditation on opera as an idea. Together with pianist Mark Knoop, soprano Juliet Fraser stages the very thought of operas that never come to be: one where the audience floats freely in the air. One where a soprano sings a duet with birds and car alarms. These impossible performances are presented as simple drawings and text projections.

Plans for Future Operas could easily have ended as an ironic meta-play, but Torvund balances the humorous and philosophical in a sound laboratory for new ways of thinking about music drama. The core of the work is the Unfinished as an aesthetic principle. The audience is left in a dreamy space of imagined operas that will never be performed but never completely disappear.

During her concert, Greek Zoe Efstathiou explored the possibilities of the piano. She summoned the piano’s overtones through microscopic movements and complex resonances. Time unfolded in layers in her music with pieces from the album Edge of Chaos. The sounds were both raw and refined as she stuck mikado-like sticks into the piano strings and stroked them. It looked – and at times sounded like – a root canal treatment. But a truly loving one.

Echoes of a collective dream

On the festival’s last day, Pat Thomas performed the piece Madad with the Stavanger-based acrobats of Kitchen Orchestra. In line with the Arabic word »madad«, which encompasses meanings such as support, expansion, and movement, the concert appeared as a sonic kaleidoscope of transformation. Using his distinctive ABJAD notation system as a navigation tool, Thomas shaped the orchestra into an organic whole where improvisation and structure balanced with impressive precision.

When Kitchen accelerated in rhythmic sequences, it sounded like a train effortlessly gaining speed without losing course

When Kitchen accelerated in rhythmic sequences, it sounded like a train effortlessly gaining speed without losing course. Individual musicians stepped forward with their own voices and then disappeared again into the whole in a constant, musical exchange. From his piano, Thomas conducted it all with gestures both poetic and controlled.

Only Connect ended with a performance where an equally wild sound universe was shaped by a single artist. Lebanese Raed Yassin performed a live version of his project Phantom Orchestra, which consists of solo recordings by improvising musicians created alone in closed homes during the pandemic. Surrounded by turntables, he played the sounds on vinyls in a kind of »turntable orchestra«. The fragmented sounds wove around each other like echoes of something both present and long gone – like shadows from a collective dream. A perfect way to conclude this year’s Only Connect festival – and a wise reminder that anything can become music if we dare to listen.

Only Connect, Stavanger, Norway, April 3–5, 2025

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mierlczarek. Proofreading: Seb Dobinsky