playlist

We are MEEJAH x HIRAKI – would you like to see our playlist?

»Music is the pre-linguistic and pre-logical art form that allows us to access parts of consciousness that have not yet been thought about. You can sometimes become aware of what a song means several months later and have an inner problem resolve itself. Music is also collaboration and community. The Danish hard music scene is a fantastic place these years, where artists support each other and collaborate in all directions. In this way, music does not become a competition, but a community to constantly move forward.«

Two forces on the Danish underground scene, MEEJAH x HIRAKI, have joined forces on their release INTERWOVEN (Pelagic Records). The two bands belong to the Danish metal underground with common references such as The Body, The Armed, Chelsea Wolfe & Converge's Bloodmoon and Death Engine. HIRAKI released their debut album Stumbling Through The Walls in 2021 (Nefarious Industries]. Followed by ALTERER – Stumbling Through The Walls REWORKED in 2022. HIRAKI has toured Norway, supported The Armed in Germany and collaborated with Kh Marie. Danish-Korean MEEJAH released Queen of Spring in 2021, which was nominated for a Steppeulv, and recorded a KEXP Live Session during the Lunar New Year in 2024. Meejah has toured South Korea and supported Blonde Redhead and Jambinai. MEEJAH and HIRAKI have both played at A Colossal Weekend and have also crossed paths in the doom-rave collective John Cxnnor.

in brieflive

28.09

Steel Forks and Silken Script

George Benjamin & Martin Crimp: »Written on Skin«

Det Kongelige Teater, 14.09-04.10

Henrik Marstal

The first time I heard the title of this opera, I was reminded of Franz Kafka’s grotesque short story In the Penal Colony (1914–19), in which a prisoner is sentenced to have his punishment – a moral admonition – engraved into his skin, after which he is meant to feel what it says. In Written on Skin, which premiered in 2012 and has quickly become something of a modern classic in opera houses around the world, the writing on the skin is instead the caress of a young illustrator, who in reality (!) is an angel. The story is set in the 13th century and appeared in Boccaccio’s collective narrative The Decameron in the following century, but it could just as well take place in a dystopian future.

In a land ravaged by war, violence, and terror, the illustrator is hired to create a book for a tyrannical and ultra-violent lord who, among other things, regards his wife’s body as his own private property. The illustrator/angel, however, enters into a passionate relationship with this wife, and all hell breaks loose. Naturally, they both die, and the lord is left alone with his bitter, useless victory, while the angel is resurrected and thus becomes the true victor – and perhaps a queer figure, as the voice type (countertenor) might suggest.

The Royal Danish Theatre’s production is highly convincing. Benjamin’s music roars and crashes, yet is at the same time curiously hushed in its markedly economical use of means. It is as hard as steel forks magically bent again and again, while the often very powerful volume inscribes itself onto the skin of the eardrums in silken script.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek

playlist

10.09

My name is Mads Emil Dreyer – would you like to see my playlist?

Mads Emil Dreyer

»Music to me is – having spent a lot of time listening, composing, and thinking about it – still, essentially, a mystery.«

Mads Emil Dreyer is a Danish composer working within the field of electroacoustic music.

playlist

07.09

My name is Jan Janczy – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music for me is a universal tool for opening myself for feelings. It may be anger. It may be happiness or sadness. Music may make you wanna dance or cry. But it never leaves you indifferent to the emotional load it brings. Good music, at least. Music may tell stories. It may as well be a background, or a soundtrack for the moment, for the day, for life. That being said, music for me is a company for everyday. And I’m quite lucky that it’s my company at work as well, I guess.«

Jan Janczy is a Polish journalist and radio host at Radio Nowy Świat. His main fields of professional interest are Northern Europe, international affairs and music. He interviewed among others 3x Grammy Awards winner Fantastic Negrito, Röyksopp, Alabaster DePlume, Archive, Trentemøller and Mogwai. In 2024 together with JazzDanmark, Kultur(a) and Radio Nowy Świat he released a podcast series devoted to the history of Polish-Danish jazz connections. He is a Swedish philologist by education.

playlist

30.08

My name is Simon Cummings – would you like to see my playlist?

»Music is inseparable from listening: a close, attentive act. It’s not about beauty, truth or even intelligibility, but connection. This intense, focused intimacy is where meaning and everything else begins.«

Simon Cummings is a composer, writer, and researcher based in England. His music centres on two areas, both of which blur abstract and emotional impulses. The first, explored in instrumental work, involves highly intricate algorithmic processes rooted in carefully-defined behaviours, in a bespoke approach that combines stochastic and intuitive methods to realise large-scale behavioural transformations. His electronic music typically begins with visual stimuli, used to sculpt time-frequency structures investigating the boundary between noise and pitch, reappraising what defines each and their boundaries. He is currently working on a song cycle for voice and electronics for Icelandic soprano Heiða Árnadóttir, to be premièred in 2026. His research is primarily long-form critical writing on contemporary music, published on his website 5:4, as well as in assorted online and print publications.

in briefrelease

16.08

The Symphonic Statement of the Year

Søs Gunver Ryberg: »Coexistence«

Platoon, 09.08

Sune Anderberg

My experience of Coexistence, Søs Gunver Ryberg’s ten-minute work for orchestra and electronics, unfolds in two stages.

At first, I am stunned. By the natural ease with which she handles the symphonic material, turning the orchestra into a potent hybrid of acoustics and synthesis. Such bite in the sound, such a sandstorm of granular texture churning on behind the instruments.

Here, I think enthusiastically, the sonic potential of the twenty-first-century orchestra is realised. But then doubt sets in during the second stage. For does something essentially similar happen here as in Swedish composer Jesper Nordin’s hour-long Emerging from Currents and Waves (2018): a technological quantum leap in symphonic sound that nevertheless freezes compositionally into a stop-and-go between thunder and silence?

The supply of drama in Coexistence is almost vulgar: unstable Icelandic dark drones, harsh brass blasts, trembling strings, thunderous timpani, abrupt brakes like those in Hollywood action trailers – and much more besides. It is a heavenly chaos. The contrast: muted alarms of bowed metal, collected noise and extended tones, like a fragile iron framework still shuddering after the storm.

The two temperaments alternate, and it sounds phenomenal under Dalia Stasevska’s direction of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The work’s core is catastrophe – collapse and aftermath – and seen in that light, the black-and-white extremes make sense. The music is brutal, relentless. But could it have been more: more in colour, beyond the duel? Perhaps. Judge for yourself – Coexistence is without doubt the most striking symphonic statement of the year.