review25.03.2026
The Comfort of Art
At Borealis in Bergen, community is everywhere. But when everything is filtered through safety and intimacy, the music risks losing its necessity – and its bite.
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review18.03.2026
We’ve Never Needed Pulsar Festival More
The major Danish composer festivals are starting to resemble each other more and more, but Pulsar Festival stands apart. Here, there is still more string quartet than performance art, making Pulsar an important alternative platform for new music – if only the festival itself would fully realize it.
review15.03.2026
What Happens When the Mainstream Falls Short?
Marina Abramović lets herself be murdered, burned, and thrown to her death in »Seven Deaths« at the Cisterns – but the operatic canon voiced by Maria Callas tempers the radicality that has otherwise carried her art through an entire lifetime.
review10.03.2026
When the World Trembles, Kirkenes Listens
At the Barents Spektakel art festival, war, borders and vibrations are transformed into sound, conversation and art at Europe’s northernmost edge.
review18.02.2026
A Country Built of Sound
Dark Music Days in Reykjavík offered everything from Bára Gísladóttir’s orchestral darkness to noise, seaweed and quiet song in Harpa – in a music scene where community matters as much as the export adventure.
review04.02.2026
Knausgård’s Apocalypse as Opera
Sebastian Fagerlund’s »Morgonstjärnan« transforms the novel’s existential unease into a powerful, collective musical drama.
review26.01.2026
Sacred, Profane, and Unsettlingly Alive
Sacrum Profanum in Kraków offered intense sonic experiences and musical battles – but also performances where the idea outweighed the music.
review24.01.2026
Matias Vestergård revisited
Revivals have moved onto the agenda among Danish composers, and this month two violent operas by Matias Vestergård benefited from the trend. What is it that makes him so good at writing precisely that kind of work?
review23.01.2026
Universal Music with Local Truths
Local traditions play a central role in the second-ever Faroese opera, in which Sunleif Rasmussen reclaims a local story made famous by Wagner.
review12.12.2025
When Bodies, Technologies and Whole Worlds Come Undone
From cyborg kinships and alchemical wonder to masculine fragility and Anthropocene ecstasy – MINU showed that art still holds space for vulnerability, ferocity and strange beauty.
review19.11.2025
Turn it Up!
Charlottenborgs hyldest til Mika Vainio vil være en lydbiograf, men uden ordentlig volumen, mørke eller kontekst ender installationen som en oplevelse, man hurtigt glider ud af.
review15.11.2025
In the Hamster Wheel with Headbands
Current Resonance turned the idea of work inside out in an absurd, sweat-drenched performance that pulled the audience into a hard-pumped ritual of labour.
review24.10.2025
That’s Why I Keep Returning To Unsound
Unsound in Kraków is still more than a festival – it’s an echo of our own search for connection in the age of noise.
review07.10.2025
Anything Can Become Music – Even a Bunch Of Fake Frogs
At the Musica festival in Strasbourg, everything from children’s concerts to organ storms and performative string quartets turned into a playful exploration of sound, body, and community.
review03.10.2025
Microtones In the Coal Mines
Ostrava Days transformed the old mining town into a laboratory of sound, where contemporary music pressed its way out between dust, drones, and Dadaist madness.<br />
review18.09.2025
When Mysticism Loses Its Magic
This year’s Rued Langgaard Festival set out to open the gate to Danish mysticism, but at times disappeared itself into a haze of filler and gimmickry – though a few concerts stood strong.
review07.09.2025
No Dying Diva in Paris – but Glitter, Dog Life and Office Humor
Copenhagen Opera Festival 2025 turned away from opera’s classical themes of fate and instead gave space to intimate music-dramatic experiments on queer identity, domestic violence, climate crisis, and mental illness.
review27.08.2025
The Myth Of the Sound City By the Limfjord
Struer Tracks showed that even municipal branding can open new worlds when sound art gets involved – from glitching rat voices in the basement of the music school to subwoofers that shook the harbor.
review22.08.2025
Opera’s Darkness Finds a Home in Savonlinna
Savonlinna’s castle festival lets Finnish national opera resonate between stone, lake, and summer night – and shows how dark dramas can mirror the soul of a people.
review15.08.2025
Walking Blind
At its best, the ambitious sound art walk »Witness Stand« at Refshaleøen pierces right into Copenhagen’s gentrification of the old industrial area. But does it realise that it is itself part of the problem?
review29.07.2025
A Festival For Experiments – But Only When It Dares
Borealis in Bergen promises experimental music but falls short when it comes to traditional concert formats. Instead, magic emerges when the audience is invited out into the forest or into floating sound saunas.
review10.07.2025
Between Skin and Noise in Berlin
From digital melancholy and ritual noise assaults to pure silence – MaerzMusik explored the tactile forces of sound and the boundaries of the body.
review30.06.2025
Dreams, Noise and Apple Crunch in Stavanger
The Only Connect festival in Stavanger transformed the city into a landscape of noise, poetry and bodily vibrations.
review29.06.2025
Disappearing Acts: The Resurrection of Tsujimura
Katsuko Tsujimura sought to dissolve the body in postwar Japan. Now, new voices are gently piecing it back together.
review24.06.2025
»Oops, We Walked Past the Artwork« – the Hidden Presences of Sound Art in Moss
The MOMENTUM biennial in Moss, Norway lets sound art speak, guiding the audience into the borderlands of the senses – where even a toilet resonates like an echo chamber.