“Unravelling Le Guess Who?, Utrecht 6–9 November 2025”, Cyclic Defrost

Le Guess Who? Festival 2025. Foto: Tim van Veen

 

Now into it’s 19th year, Le Guess Who? (LGW?) is a major international music and arts festival occuring annually in Utrecht, a metropolitan hub of the Netherlands with a picturesque walled city at its core.

From the outset, surveying the festival program was mind boggling. With too many artists to count performing over twenty venues and programmed across overlapping streams—when planning my visit I was already flummoxed! A founding premise of LGW? is that each night features a mystery concert from an unannounced artist, so I planned to at least attend these. Another feature of the festival is that it invites artists to curate a stream. This year’s guest curators were visual artist and musician Lonnie Holley; jazz drummer and scholar Asher Gamedze; percussionist and composer Valentina Magaletti; performance and multimedia artist Tianzhuo Chen; musician, broadcaster and community organiser Amirtha Kidambi; DJ and curator Edna Martinez; dance music producer gyrofield and experimental club music producer and performer Zíur. The festival also invited three “Community Curators” to devise its U? stream that foregrounds local artists, spaces an issues: Aslıhan, Luna van der Laan and Al-Shaheen Falcon. Needless to say, it was impossible to cover the whole festival and while preparing to submit this review some weeks after the festival, I was still combing through the program, listening and learning about artists I missed.

 Read the review at Cyclic Defrost. 

Imaginal Soundtracking 3: The Wound Where The Light Enters (Phantom Limb), Cyclic Defrost

 

Imaginal Soundtracking 3: The Wound Where The Light Enters (Phantom Limb, 2025)

Somayeh is a writer, photographer and film director based in London. She is part of a new generation of Iranian filmmakers blending the poetic sensibilities of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi with “surreal Western influences” citing directors Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Joachim Trier.

Read the review at Cyclic Defrost. 

 

Abstracting authoritarianism: dj sniff “Turntable Solos”, Cyclic Defrost

“Turntable Solos”, dj sniffed (Discrepant, 2025)
Cover art: “Return The Eye” (2020), Tekkhean Lee.

 

 Initial impressions: vinyl scratches in, insects, kids going aah, muffled voices, a drone, static/white noise, a thunderstorm, machine sounds…a spliffed-out beat, jazz drum breaks, dissonant guitar licks, more scratching exploding into cut-up shouts…field recordings, devices feedback…collagist, beat-juggling, scratching and glitching— restless and fidgety. Turntable Solos shifts through a wide palette of sounds, textures and tempos. It is an intriguing document compiling live recordings made in the second half of 2024. Lasting a little over thirty minutes, these improvisational performances are rendered as a single continuous piece for its digital release and split over two sides on vinyl. Read at Cyclic Defrost.

KUKII + Howie Lee at Laure Prouvost “WE FELT A STAR DYING”, Cyclic Defrost

KUKII & Howie Lee: Finissage Performance for Laure Prouvost’s WE FELT A STAR DYING at Kraftwerk Berlin, 2025. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Photo: Milena Wegner

 

On a grey drizzly evening in early Spring, punters queued up for a finissage performance at Kraftwerk Berlin, a massive multi-use space in a former powerhouse. It is part of an art and events complex in the centre of the city that includes the iconic club Tresor
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This finissage event was an unpredictable activation or intervention in the exhibition space. An interactive happening with aspects of a concert, it was put together by artists known for their inquisitive experimentation and questioning of conventions. 

Read at Cyclic Defrost.

“GUANG: Ariel William Orah & Bilawa Ade Respati”, 20 Seconds

GUANG, 20 Seconds, Issue 9: The Archive

I was very happy to prompt a conversation between Ariel William Orah and  Bilawa Ade Respati about their recent “concert–lecture” GUANG commissioned by Ballhaus Naunynstraße. It’s published in 20 Seconds, Issue 9: The Archive — print only, so get your copy here!

GAUNG, a “concert-lecture” devised and performed by Ariel William Orah and Bilawa Ade Respati, was commissioned by Berlin post-migrant theatre Ballhaus Naunynstrasse for its Decolonial Frequencies (2021–22) program and was recently revived in February. In it, the artists perform alongside archival texts, films, and images, notably bringing two collections of instruments and their associations to bear on each other. Gamelan borrowed from Rumah Budaya Indonesia Berlin (the House of Indonesian Cultures) are juxtaposed with numerous electronic instruments the artists have personally acquired. While gamelan has long fascinated musicians trained in European traditions, from Claude Debussy to Philip Glass, it is also a sign of Indonesian identity and culture; a courtly “instrument of power.” In recent years, Indonesian artists have made a significant impact in Europe, at times upsetting German sensibilities. GAUNG negotiates these tropes, recalling mythology, history, and national politics.

Art in Critical Condition: A Review of BAK & Jonas Staal’s ‘Climate Propagandas Congregation’, NO-NIIN

Jonas Staal, Climate Propagandas Congregation (2024), BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Photo: Ruben Hamelink

Over two days, Climate Propagandas Congregation brought together theorists, artists and organisers involved in struggles around the world to present on ideas raised in artist Jonas Staal’s recent book, Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (2024). In it, Staal identifies and analyses competing climate propaganda, grouped according to their ideological attributes: “Liberal”, “Libertarian”, “Conspiracist”, “Ecofascist” and “Transformative”. Climate Propagandas was co-published by MIT Press and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, an organisation in Utrecht that triangulates politics, activism and aesthetics across a range of practices, including visual and performing arts, theory, publishing and pedagogy. 

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Continuing Staal’s practice of staging political assemblies, Climate Propagandas Congregation occurred in BAK’s auditorium among a diorama of “ancestors”; large cut-out chimeras propped up on wooden stands. Based on paintings made by Staal, these fantastic characters featured the heads of leftist icons, including Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Ho Chi Minh, grafted onto the bodies of complex organisms that were dominant in the Ediacaran period (635 million to 541 million years ago). 

Read at NO–NIIN.

“Noise and Catharsis…and Novelty?”: SUMAC & Moor Mother + Pharaoh Overlord”, Cyclic Defrost

SUMAC & Moor Mother, Bi Nuu, Berlin. Foto: Goze.One, 2025.

So, while we are all experiencing this for the first time together, I cannot say that it is unexpected—we came for something heavy and loud: noise and catharsis. Both Moor Mother and SUMAC have developed their distinct sounds, stage personas and reputations over numerous releases and performances. It’s not difficult to imagine what they would be like together—something in the vicinity of doom and dread, with an emphasis on the bludgeoning riffs of the former rather than the spliffed-out dub of the latter. So while I can’t tell if what they are playing tonight departs significantly from their album, I’m aware that what makes them so compelling live is their presence. I’m unlikely to listen to The Film at home, but it’s an undeniably visceral experience live.

 Read at Cyclic Defrost