From 7 to 10 November, TIMES was in Utrecht for Le Guess Who? 2024.
The Dutch festival pushed again the boundaries of sound and performance, including co-curations from reworks, Semibreve and Unsound.
We experienced Raphael Rogiński & Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, blending jazz and blues traditions with folk music form around the world; Kevin Richard Martin (aka The Bug)’s deep-trawling dub in collaboration with KMRU’s poetry, voice, and ambient spatial sensibility; bela’s visceral performance that fuses Korean folk with metal-inspired vocals, enhanced by Theresa Baumgartner’s visuals; a collaboration between producer Abul Mogard and master engineer Rafael Anton Irisarri, offering expansive drone landscapes; and experimental musician Rafael Toral, whose soundscapes that sound both natural and otherworldly.
Co-curated with reworks:
Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri
Something was afoot at last year’s SOUNDSET series in Madrid; so much so that, when Roman Abul Mogard (AKA Guido Zen) and New York-based composer, record producer, and mastering engineer Rafael Anton Irisarri serendipitously played together, something began blooming. Now, the artists’ partnership blossomed into ‘Impossibly distant, impossibly close’. Their work’s title captures their landscapes’ paradoxical nature.
Co-curated with reworks at Le Guess Who? 2024.
At once, they feel extremely intimate, but they possess the faraway, soothing quality of the best of drone; it’s right here, but also fully around us.
Co-curated with Semibreve:
Rafael Toral
Kevin Richard Martin & KMRU
Since his teenage years growing up in Portugal, Rafael Toral has felt enticed by the potential of sound. Rising to prominence via his nineties guitar work, the experimental musician set the instrument aside and started honing, at the start of the century, Space Program, a thirteen-year investigation of the performance possibilities of an ever-expanding assembly of unique electronic instruments. In 2024, a new phase comes about with Spectral Evolution, Toral’s “most difficult and ambitious record”, in his own words. Informed by drone music and vintage jazz, the new ambient suite draws a deep line in the sand between Toral and his past works.
Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug) and KMRU (Joseph Kamaru) are proposing something new. The two electronic music heavyweights come from different worlds; Kevin Richard Martin’s is dark, deep, and gritty, whereas KMRU’s soundscapes are sparser, more open, and often more akin to the natural world. The British and Kenyan artists’ universes come together in Disconnect. Their debut collaboration sees them chart unexplored territory in a powerful study of dread, hope, and what it means to be made other.
It marries Martin’s deep-trawling dub with Kamaru’s poetry, voice, and ambient spatial sensibility.
Co-curated with Unsound:
Raphael Rogiński & Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė
bela & Theresa Baumgartner
German guitarist, composer, and musicologist Raphael Rogiński meshes jazz and blues traditions with folk music from around the world. His practice is strongly rooted in Jewish culture but he is just as enthused with the vital experimental sounds of outsiders from the United States such as Harry Partch and Henry Cowell.
At Le Guess Who? 2024, he appeared alongside Lithuanian musician Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė of the ambient folk band Merope. Jurgelevičiūtė is just as multifaceted in her playing, skilfully blending the Baltic plucked string instrument kanklės with vocals.
bela presented at Le Guess Who? their work in collaboration with visual artist Theresa Baumgartner who added her idiosyncratic touch to this visceral live performance. Baumgartner is known for her work that blurs the lines between A/V performance and installation art, using experimental filming techniques and an approach to stage design that is rooted in fine art and sculpture.
