Something has happened to the Copenhagen club scene in recent years. After several years in which the city gained significant international awareness for its melodic and fast-paced techno scene, more and more promoters have decided to cultivate other aesthetic expressions and ways of going out, rather than what was often associated with the high peak in local trance-infused techno.

This year's edition of Malmö's Intonal marks the festival's tenth anniversary. From its early days as a collaboration with Berlin's CTM and Krakow's famed Unsound festival, Intonal has grown into a thing completely of its own. Rather than trying to copy the successful but heavily international scene-driven formulas of other European festivals, it focused on cultivating a close relationship with the local audience – from the festival's intimate setting to the lineup, designed to both reflect the interests of the Malmö scene and showcase its talent. Some of the reasons for this are beautifully explained in the festival manifesto in the words of none other than the great Shania Twain.

Italian percussionist Irene Bianco's debut album Kronblade, released in October 2024 via Valentina Magaletti and Fanny Chiarello's wxmen-focused label Permanent Draft, garnered attention for its imaginative and subtly genre-bending approach to percussion.

Xenia Xamanek – “Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay]” (Scorpio Red Records, 2025) – review by Macon Holt Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay] is the latest album from multidisciplinary, Honduran-Danish artist Xenia Xamanek. In a career that has developed from experimental electronica to dance music and sparse ballads, this record is a conceptual, if not stylistic, follow-up to 2021’s DELIRIO ...

MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen – “Opening Night” (Awe, 2025) – review by Juliette Thouin. Pictures by MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen. This February, the Danes MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen released their first collaborative project Opening Night on American DJ and producer Laurel Halo’s label Awe. Velsorf, a composer, guitarist, and one third of TLF Trio, and ...

Erik Klinga – Elusive Shimmer (Thanatosis Produktion, 2025) – Review by Ivna Franić Erik Klinga’s solo debut Elusive Shimmer finds the seasoned drummer in the warm embrace of modular synthesis, building on the analog synth foundation with field recordings, organ, and rhythm machine. The first in a trilogy of albums by the Malmö & Copenhagen-based musician ...

Gianluca Elia & Lorenzo Colocci – LSWR. Photo: Tobias Nicolai. By Macon Holt MINU is an annual festival for what it terms “expanded music”. That is music that simultaneously rejects the necessity of the conventions of the “Western musical tradition” and the commitment to vanguardist or inscent progressivism of a label like Avant Grade while pursuing new ways of ...

Photo: Jan Høgh Stricker Interview with Jan Høgh Stricker, curator of Organ Sound Art Festival, by Ivna Franić Having settled comfortably into its mid-December slot, the Organ Sound Art Festival has come to present Copenhagen’s experimental music heads’ favorite way to close out the concert and festival year. First started in 2016, the festival takes place at Nørrebro’s KoncertKirken, ...

Photo: Bureau for Listening By Bureau for Listening Today, Passive/Aggressive shares a guest post by the Danish artist and research group Bureau for Listening, in which they consider which resources can be derived from failure when listening to others, ourselves and the world we inhabit. At Bureau for Listening, we would like to propose, practice and continue to reformulate failure ...