When Bodies, Technologies and Whole Worlds Come Undone

MINU Festival for Expanded Music has, in the last few years, become a fixture in the Copenhagen calendar. Under the curation and organisation of Mikkel Schou, Dylan Richards and Roberto Besler, the festival has consistently put on programs full of musical performances that push the boundaries of art forms. The works on display often pose questions to the audience not only about what art can do but also the conditions of the world from which this kind of music emerges. 

MINU Festival for Expanded Music has, in the last few years, become a fixture in the Copenhagen calendar

This year’s MINU seemed tighter than earlier iterations of the festival. In a welcome way, it also seemed freer from the overt frustrations of institutional critique, which has previously been a dominant theme. Instead of being something they were compelled to react against, the problems of institutionalised art making have become the festival’s opening wager as the works explored what could come next. 

This year, it seemed that the body and relationships have been brought to the fore. That is, the focus seemed to be on the experience of having a body as a medium for relationships in a world that makes them both things ever more impossible to have and to hold on to. What follows are seven things I learned from the days I was able to attend, as only being bedridden with sickness kept me from soaking up all the patience-testing experiments.

1. Mystery is addictive

Rob Durnin’s work is relentlessly obscure without ever being obscurantist. While his compositions and performances are full of potent yet difficult to grasp symbolism, what is abidingly clear is his fascination with the worlds he builds in his work. His enthusiasm for the mysteries he presents is contagious, and it certainly stimulated my imagination. Concerning the Virtue of the Second Matter saw its performer/percussionist Jennifer Torrence, in the role of an eccentric alchemist, whispered aloud the words of a hefty ancient text on the floor. Next to her, a cross between a cyber-punk tree and a chemistry experiment fizzled and popped while minerals glowed among its branches. 

The piece subtly foregrounded the madness that awaits those so determined to know the world

Moving between the text and the tree, Torrence changed the chemical balances in the round-bottomed chemistry flasks and occasionally heats things up with a Bunsen burner. As the fumes from the reactions filled the room, the flickering of new colours in the low light and the sounds of static filled the air, the confusion of the piece’s protagonist about what they were up to also became evident. The piece subtly foregrounded the madness that awaits those so determined to know the world as they fail to notice how their endeavours are reshaping their own. Durnin and Torrence have made something that explored the insularity of obsession and the peculiar power that spilled out from it. 

2. Hearing is a miracle and a nightmare

The low-frequency throbbing that dominated the room in Marco Donnarumma’s Ex Silence transported me to a whole other plane of existence. Here I was faced by an alien creature of the inner ear engaged in a methodical but increasingly decrepit performance of gathering and reconnecting the tiny bones of the cochlear spiral cavity. The audio had us caught between the frustrating silence of the mid frequencies that are usually used to convey information, and being overwhelmed by the disconcerting rumbling of the super low and the disruptive screeches of the super high. 

In this soundscape, Donnarumma’s portrayal of the fleshy Lovecraftian custodian of hearing, being forced to assemble sound through AI protocols of bio mechanics imposed on an exhausted body, made my own hearing feel eerie. In this way, he captured the fragility of corporeal existence in a haunting and, at times, rightfully gruelling depiction of a sensory process in breakdown. 

The most interesting pieces of what could be called Anthropocene art that I have seen in a long time

3. The release we’re waiting for might be the end of everything

Shadwa Ali’s video work The Plague of Burst was one of the most interesting pieces of what could be called Anthropocene art that I have seen in a long time. With visuals gathered from the online genres of »relaxing«, »ASMR« and »satisfying« videos, which in this case were melting icebergs collapsing into the sea, erupting volcanoes, mixing dough, crumbling pigment and an industrial crusher compressing CDs, toy tanks, and coins until they burst. These visuals were set against a soundscape of manipulated ambient sound. 

Ali’s piece depicts the horrifying ecstasy of an inevitable release. It illustrates the building intensity bound to burst in the capitalist death spiral we call home. It is a work that displays the tensions that so many of us try to deny are real. Between the dissociative sounds, the visual explosions that transform recognisable things into chaotic matter, The Plague of Burst documents our historical moment with all the clarity and confusion of an audio/visual anthropologist from the future trying to figure out what happened. 

4. Friendship can turn us into cyborgs

This sounded and looked fantastic. At its heart is the mutual and longstanding admiration composer Kari Watson and percussionist Jennifer Torrence have for one another and their shared fascination with Donna Haraway’s notion of the Cyborg. The piece, for amplified and processed percussion, saw Torrence ride her virtuosity through the 90s industrial texture (a fitting time lag of theory’s influence) and audio and visual feedback of Watson’s contraption. In the lowlight, my ability to distinguish between the sounds of material surface tension and digital distortion collapsed as they circled each other in ever-tighter orbits. 

This sounded and looked fantastic

This piece, in its intensity, energy and titled attribution, serves as a case study in riding the plague depicted in Ali’s work. To quote Haraway, what Watson and Torrence demonstrated here were tactics for producing »a powerful infidel heteroglossia« for navigating the unfolding collapse of techno-capital through friendship. 

5. Male Beauty can be a painful thing to want

As we stood to applaud Sebastian Brix’s Boudoir, my friend sitting next to me whispered in my ear, »No notes«. And indeed, the execution of the piece had been fantastic. That’s before we even got into the transformationally exposing conceptual material that it elegantly unfolded. Brix built suspense by having the audience enter and be escorted to their seats in pairs. The silent wait created a tension in the room that Brix more than paid off. 

Surrounded by a string quartet, an oiled Brix, stripped down to his underwear, looking like the »strong men« of old, began adopting muscle poses as a luscious chord swelled and climaxed when the poses were struck and then held in the silence that followed.

Boudoir is a piece that dares to stare into the vanity, self-destructiveness and ephemerality of male beauty as experienced from the inside

This continued for the duration of the piece, which felt quicker than it was. Time had quickened because the entire performance – particularly the vulnerability it displayed – was mesmerising. As it went on, a female voice drifted in through the speakers, reciting in fragmented phrases of what sounded like a simple plea for an impossible acceptance, and the physical strain of the poses began to show on Brix. His breathing became laboured, his forms less sharp, the oil replaced by his sweat. 

Boudoir is a piece that dares to stare into the vanity, self-destructiveness and ephemerality of male beauty as experienced from the inside. It shows how external validation can never stand in for what is broken inside when being beautiful is the goal. And while this truism may seem easy enough to agree with, over the course of this piece, it became very clear how hard it is to accept it truly. 

6. Identity makes relationships (im)possible

A Gazing Grace should be required viewing for any of us who have at times in our lives been utterly useless men. Though I think, while more common among this gender, this designation of uselessness has a broader relatability. A Gazing Grace sees Lucatelli and composer-performer Michael Hope cast themselves as classical statues depicting lovers. However, the patriarchal relationship of agency has been flipped. In Lucatelli’s piece, the female figure she portrays is the subject who acts upon Hope’s passive and, in this case, rather pathetic, male object. 

Through a series of vignettes, each featuring hyper-stylised classical costumes designed by artist Hannah Totiki, we see Lucatelli attempting to relate, or get some kind of recognition from, a seemingly narcissistically forlorn Hope. In one such vignette, Hope does something that makes little sense for him to try to excel at. He performs an aria with technical accuracy but is held back by a lack of ability, dancing melancholically in a giant hoop skirt as Lucatelli desperately tries to connect with him, but his swinging garb keeps her at bay. In another, Hope stands on a literal pedestal playing »Ave Maria« on a melodica, before being joined from the floor by Lucatelli’s extended vocals and the piece’s sound designer, Gianluca Elia, harshly improvising on a saxophone dressed as a cherub. 

A Gazing Grace should be required viewing for any of us who have at times in our lives been utterly useless men

The piece has the humour and energy that characterise Lucatelli’s compositions and the conceptual depth one likewise expects from her work. More than a surface critique of gender roles, what Lucatelli is pointing to here is the way identity as such serves to keep us apart. She leans into this thesis in the final vignette in which both she and Hope are entirely covered in body knitted body stockings rolling all over each other, becoming an amorphous mass. They make adorable cooing noises in a mix of a light cacophony of sampled versions of »Amazing Grace« and Lucatelli’s vocals, becoming a collage of each other. The piece explores the risks of being with each other and the pleasures that await us if we open ourselves up. 

7. Driving a truck is more fun than collaborating in the culture industry

In stark contrast to the loving collaboration between Watson and Torrence, Matthew Grouse’s »egalitarian« collaboration with accordion and cello duo EKKI MINNA reveals the fractious ways in which project-funding-based commissioned compositions so often play out. While the overall effect of the piece and the subtlety of its construction are difficult to fully catch in a few words, through the use of obsessively and troublingly open documentation of the collaboration process, it catches something of a particular »art-male« insecurity that is often overlooked. 

Combining reluctantly included (according to Grouse’s voice-over) instrumental virtuosity and »Truck Simulator 2« gameplay footage with comic timing and metatextuality that stayed just on the good side of self-consciousness, the piece laid out the difficulties of doing something of real value with others in so-called professional contexts. Indeed, it opens up a burning question. What does it mean if art and music making are so much like other jobs, with all the pettiness and hard feelings that characterise office/Zoom call life, that those who do it enjoy escaping into the fantasy of driving a truck across Europe alone? 

MINU Festival for Expanded Music, Copenhagen, November 26 – 30, 2025