Sound Bath At the Edge Of the Headland

Near the tip of Sjællands Odde lies Yderby Lyng – a small village on the outskirts of Havnebyen, known from DR3’s series Doggy Style. Here you’ll find the grill bar Tunen, a shelter site with sea swimming, and formerly the hotel restaurant Den Gyldne Hane. The series portrayed the lives of young people in an area where Copenhagen feels far away, both physically and mentally. The region is a mix of classic rural landscape with Holbæk as the nearest town and Denmark’s largest summerhouse area.

I drift away. Sound baths should be human right no. 31

In addition, old farms have begun attracting new residents who bring latte culture, organic stalls and art. And now also Lost Farm, a brand new festival on a farm in Yderby Lyng, complete with pop-up bars, pizza trucks, long tables, sculptures, installations, tent camps and three stages: The Pit, The Cave and The Barn.

On Friday afternoon, when I arrive at the Farm, I am greeted by Jude Bennett, the farm’s owner and artistic director of the festival. I missed the official opening speech, but she gives me a personal tour before the first concert. I’m a kind of local myself – part of the summerhouse crowd – and after weeks of hammering, sawing and painting, the prospect of a »sound bath« in the Cave stage feels especially appealing. Cave, a black box that might once have been a barn or stable, faces a horse pasture where a black fabric sculpture shaped like a musk ox now stands. You can crawl inside it. On exposed roots in the gravel stand remnants of candles in small clay sculptures, and further down smoke drifts from a sauna.

We pass a workshop with wool and sheepskins, a nail bar, and a garden with old fruit trees

On the way, Bennett also shows me the Pit stage with professional light and sound, and we peek into the Barn, where a presentation by Ukrainian art students from the bombed Mykhailo Boichuk Kyiv State Academy is taking place – a visit organized by co-founder of Lost Farm and festival producer Steen Andersen from the Copenhagen art collective PB43. We pass a workshop with wool and sheepskins, a nail bar, and a garden with old fruit trees.

I’ve forgotten my yoga mat but luckily get one handed out, and settle in comfortably. Composer and musician Anders Rhedin introduces the session and slowly guides us into the bath with meditation instructions. His gentle voice is accompanied by gong strikes behind him. Gradually the soundscape is expanded with subtle electronic layers. I let myself arrive at the Farm. I drift away. Sound baths should be human right no. 31.

Music against the military site

Later in the afternoon, the Swedish-Iranian electronic musician Tehran plays facing Gniben beach on the north side of the Odde. Here one can follow naval ships carrying out exercises in the Kattegat and see the tip of the Odde where the Naval Artillery School is located. The concert takes place on the »cement wreck«, a so-called lægter (a cargo vessel without its own engine built of reinforced concrete) that ran aground in 1947 and has lain visible in the water ever since.

Loudspeakers and electronics are installed on the wreck so that Tehran can perform directly out on it, facing the military installation. Tehran’s latest album HUSQVARNA from 2024, which also has a visual dimension, stages the musician’s hometown Jönköping as a center of industry and weapons production – making it perfectly suited for this setting. The concert begins with a noisy but gentle soundscape before Tehran enters with vocals mixing laughter, crying, singing, recitation and shouts like »det är bara en dröm.«

Danish and international military history is made present on this summer day at the Odde through auditory tenderness and desperation

The music blends subdued noise and heavy doom, enriched with electronic processing. Alongside a guitarist, Tehran sings a ballad. It is a curatorial gesture to have Tehran perform against the military site. The contrasts between distorted and acoustic guitar, electronic noise, sitar playing, screams, campfire songs, shipwreck, military base, sea and beach create a reverent atmosphere among the audience, both those in the water and those seated in the dunes. In a subtle way, Danish and international military history is made present on this summer day at the Odde through auditory tenderness and desperation – not forcing us to think or feel anything specific, but still leaving us with a renewed sense of place, and of reality.

From tuna fishing to refugee rescue

Before the concert I speak more with Jude Bennett who, when not creating Lost Farm, leads Roskilde Festival’s Art & Activism program. She came to moved to Denmark from Lesvos in Greece in 2017, where she was living since she co-initiated Refugee Rescue (Mo Chara)  in 2015. At the same time she was also working as a curator. Sidefact artist Jake Chapman of Chapman Brothers bought the boat Mo Chara through their connection, the boat which now sits in the harbour after nearly a decade of service. 

The purpose of Lost Farm, she explains, is to gather artists from all over the world who, like herself, share a deep concern for the state of the world. Instead of resignation, she wants to bring together their collective energies, their anger and sorrow, and see what happens when they merge. She wants them to contemplate together, but also to turn hopelessness outward in concerts and performances. During the festival, the farm hosts 150 artists and volunteers, as well as the 150 audience members who have also shown up.

Bennett explains that the local history of tuna fishing in Havnebyen in the first half of the 20th century has been replaced with the exhibition If this boat could speak, organized by the Danish-Northern Irish MoChara / Refugee Rescue Art Collective. With sound, artifacts, images and video, the exhibition documents the rescue boat Mo Chara’s achievements in the Mediterranean over the past decade, where it has helped save more than 25,000 boat refugees off the Greek island of Lesbos.

Instead of resignation, she wants to bring together their collective energies, their anger and sorrow, and see what happens when they merge

The installation includes an art documentary film with collages and clips from the region, showing the hopeless situation atmospherically and in glimpses. In the room, ocean sounds are played through a small speaker, blending with the film’s sound, while the central placement of a »real« life jacket lends immediacy to the mediated representations. Mo Chara itself is exhibited outside the old wooden house, accompanied by the words: »In 2015 the situation [in the Mediterranean] was called one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time. Since then the coverage has faded, but the life-threatening situation for people fleeing has not. The crisis continues, and so should the rescue work. But after a decade in service I am no longer seaworthy. I am stranded on land. I now stand here – as witness, as question, as opportunity for reflection.«

Mythical concert in the fisherman’s house

The same day as the exhibition visit, Havnebyen’s popular Mackerel Festival also takes place – with fishing competition, draft beer, stalls and music. Lost Farm contributes, among other things, with a concert in an abandoned fisherman’s house where singer and electronic musician Julie Hjetland performs the work Konkylie in dialogue with Anna Bak’s installation Fatal Waves. Hjetland, dressed in Norwegian national costume in contrast to her long dreadlocks, makes the voice the core of the concert: recording live, looping and manipulating into pulsing soundscapes.

She also sings a folk song almost a cappella, accompanied only by discreet samples from Bak’s silver conch sculpture. On the floor lies a metallic blue lobster-mermaid, which together with music, a stylized shipwreck and a faith-hope-love symbol transforms the fisherman’s house into a mythical and melancholic cyberspace, where the visibility of electronics itself becomes central. The concert ends with Hjetland, while the loops continue, leaving the room in serene calm and walking down toward the sea – as if to reunite.

Before I finally return to the Farm for two concerts on the main stage The Pit, we stop in the small birch forest at the start of the side road leading in. Here the Latvian artist and anthropologist Liene Jurgelane and the silver birch trees have co-created (!) a sound work that can be experienced on small chairs, with headphones, placed under selected birches. Again, we must slow down, sense body and mind, before being drawn into a weaving sound narrative that, with myths, facts, personal stories and Slavic songs, revolves around the birch tree as theme. Particularly the brutal stories from the period of Russian occupation in Latvia make a strong impression, and once again a familiar place is transformed through new sensory narratives.

Particularly the brutal stories from the period of Russian occupation in Latvia make a strong impression

During a Friday performance, the American Dis Fig (Felicia Chen) spans a wide range of genres. Dis Fig is known for her acrobatic vocals, bathed in electronics, here joined by Spooky-J’s (Nihiloxica) drumming, a welcome variation on the increasingly common »solo-with-electronics« concept. The concert begins at sunset with noisy electronics, electric guitar samples, and Dis Fig’s expressive voice.

The drumming adds energy, but also recedes appropriately during a dramatic solo vocal section, where the voice stands out through manipulations, doublings and »reverse effect« – only underpinned by a dark electronic drone.

As darkness falls, the light effects, volume and intensity increase dramatically. Dis Fig jumps into the audience and, with heavy metal guitar blasting from the speakers, starts a round of collective head-banging. Who would have thought twilight on a summer evening in the countryside could sound like this?

Get lost – and get a grip

The festival rounds off Sunday evening in a brighter but no less energetic register with the Indonesian band Lair from Java’s north coast. The name means »birth«, and the group is distinctive in playing instruments made of clay: guitars, basses and drums whose bodies are formed from the same material as the region’s old craft traditions of brick and ceramics. Not as imitations, but as a double gesture – a tribute to their homeland and a commentary on the destructive industrialization that now marks the coast.

At Lost Farm Festival it makes sense to get lost – at least for a while – in order to regain one’s footing

In the program, the music is described as psych-soul/funk with roots in Panturan Tarling. »Panturan« signals its origin in the north coast, while »Tarling« refers to a hybrid genre from the 1960s, played on guitar and the Indonesian bamboo flute suling – blending Javanese and Sundanese music with dangdut, keroncong and pop. With Lair these layers are woven together with funk’s drive and psychedelic colors. Especially in the final numbers, carried by dangdut’s swaying rhythms, the audience lets go and dances along – as if the concert releases both the farm’s anger and its sorrow.

At Lost Farm Festival it makes sense to get lost – at least for a while – in order to regain one’s footing. Get lost – and get a grip, as Odsherred’s post-apocalyptic neo-farmers might say while they continue working on their vision of moving the center of art to Sjællands Odde.

Lost Farm Festival, Sjællands Odde, August 8–10, 2025

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielzcarek