Festival of Endless Gratitude – High Risk, High Reward
Festival of Endless Gratitude, 3.-5.10.2024., Kildevæld Kulturcenter
The Festival of Endless Gratitude (FOEG) doesn’t give a fuck. It opens with a lecture on an organ tone archive, followed by performances of WWII partisan resistance songs. It books a spoken-word performance of a fable in Italian. It takes a collective dinner break in the middle of the program and gives the headlining slot to absolute newcomers. There’s very little it doesn’t dare to do. Yet somehow FOEG makes it make sense – even if it might have taken a couple of weeks to digest all the impressions.
The first thing I saw on the opening night of the festival was a crowded hallway with a projection screen hanging at the end, blocking the way to the bar. Ron Schneiderman of the Sunburned Hand of the Man fame (and founder of FOEG’s original US incarnation) was presenting the Estey Field Organ Tone Archive and talking about Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening, among other things. As he invited the audience to try out the archive for themselves, the presentation ended in a polyphony of different organ sounds played simultaneously via the audience’s cell phones.
It may be two years since composer and violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker released their collaborative album Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore, but there’s no such thing as bad timing for workers’ protest songs. Drawing from a rich tradition of songs by “le mondine,” Italy’s female rice field workers, Tarozzi and Walker brought the material into a contemporary experimental folk setting. Tarozzi took time between songs to provide additional context, telling stories about the poor, lower-class women leaving Emilia-Romagna for seasonal work in Piedmont and the partisan resistance movement during World War II. The tradition continues, says Tarozzi, as groups of singers still meet and revive these songs over wine and grappa, the apparent elixirs of life in southern Europe. Their beautiful, heartwarming performance doubled as a demonstration of how to do something interesting with this kind of source material, while completely avoiding the common pitfalls of falling into pastiche or failing to properly select and (re)contextualize the material. This would remain one of the highlights of the festival.
Seth Cluett’s performance of some of Laurie Spiegel’s essential works offered a rare opportunity to hear her music played live. Split into two parts, Saturday’s opening slot perhaps made more sense than Thursday night’s prime time slot. Closing out the first night, composer and turntablist Mariam Rezaei took a little time to unravel her unique approach to performing music live, but once she was in the zone, there was no way out for anyone. Treating the turntables as an instrument at which she is a virtuoso, and blending so many genres that it’s useless to try to name them, Rezaei’s furious performance pushed the boundaries of both her sound and her equipment. It was a brutal end to the first night that literally cleansed the aural palate for the next day.
Treating the turntables as an instrument at which she is a virtuoso, and blending so many genres that it’s useless to try to name them, Rezaei’s furious performance pushed the boundaries of both her sound and her equipment.
Artist Aura Satz’s two short films helped ease the way into the second day of the festival, with the one about Argentine composer Beatriz Ferreyra being particularly interesting. Although the program description mentioned something about a fable, the Zoomachia group’s setup seemed to take everyone by surprise. Copies of the English version of the script were scattered on the floor, inviting the audience to sit down and focus on the three microphones in the center of the room. Francesco Cavaliere’s musical fable starring a mantis, a scribe ant and a ventriloquist cricket (why not?) came to life with the help of Matteo Martino and Ramona Ponzini, demonstrating the possibilities of spoken word performance combined with sound effects and electroacoustic composition. Probably the most unexpected performance of the festival, it had us invested thanks to the performers’ dedication to their roles, perfect timing, and expressive rolling of the r’s in Italian. It turns out that sound art doesn’t have to be all that serious to be engaging.
It turns out that sound art doesn’t have to be all that serious to be engaging.
While Perila’s gorgeous ambient set enveloped the room in a lush soundscape, slowly and gently filling every nook and cranny, Faramarz Amirian’s performance felt like a hard break between the chill and the party parts of the evening. Sunun brought the signature Bristol brand of wide-ranging dub to the dancefloor. If things started off on a somewhat shaky footing, feeling a little unfocused and disjointed, the set certainly ended on a very convincing note. Danish act H E X and the latest incarnation of 20_14 Assembly featuring Francesca Buratelli, Nova Varnrable and Rune Kielsgaard took the Friday program into the late hours.
Saturday’s schedule seemed to divide the crowd into those who came early and left early, and those who came late and stayed late. Wanting to see Nkisi’s festival-closing set automatically put me in the latter camp, but I still made sure to arrive in time to catch Richard Youngs, as he was another personal highlight of the lineup. With a minimal setup that required him to kick his foot on the stage floor to produce beats, the prolific yet unpredictable Youngs gave it his all in a short but intense set. At one point, not much more than half an hour in, he literally just stopped and said: “This is all I have in me.” That was fine, Richard, that was more than enough.
With a minimal setup that required him to kick his foot on the stage floor to produce beats, the prolific yet unpredictable Youngs gave it his all in a short but intense set.
Much like Youngs, drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie is one of those artists whose prolific output can be difficult to penetrate, but whose live performance can be counted on to transcend any fixed relationship to a particular record. Guthrie appeared alone and played an inspired, explosive set that could just as easily have been scheduled for the later part of the program. As it turned out, we were in for an energy dip with some of FOEG’s typically quirky programming choices.
Putting young Danish artist evee in one of the headlining slots seemed like a particularly bold choice, but they did their best to hold the crowd together. If nothing else, their sweet bedroom pop fit in perfectly with the high school party/prom night vibe of Østerbro’s Kildevæld Kulturcenter. The arrival of the US folk band/family affair Big Blood at FOEG was, as they said, a long time coming. Thanks to their two young members, who we were informed had just turned 18 and were on their first trip to Europe, the teenage vibe continued. The highlight of the dynamic but somewhat jumbled set was a powerful rendition of “Graceless Lady,” Colleen Kinsella’s song about females helping betraying females that is “a little bit for mom and a little bit for a friend who wasn’t really a friend.” Ouch!
Xenia Xamanek had the tough job of getting us back on our feet, but luckily they were the right person for the job. Increasingly confident in their live performance, Xamanek loosened our limbs with their eclectic take on experimental electronic music with reggaeton and neoperreo influences. Just in time for the festival’s climax.
Despite the unusual location for this type of festival, most of the acts ended up blending into the tidy space temporarily masquerading as a music venue, thanks in part to the festival’s efforts at VJ-ing and filling the space with large-scale artworks. By the end of the festival, I had almost forgotten that we were in an innocent neighborhood cultural center. It wasn’t until it was time to party that I wondered how the hell this was going to work.
Indeed, if anyone looked particularly funny in the context of Kildevæld Kulturcenter, it was Nkisi. Placing the triple deck on the floor in the middle of the room was a good attempt at imitating a club setting, and it didn’t take long for the audience to surround Nkisi and start dancing (in a variety of styles, mind you). Now, I’ve seen Nkisi play cool venues like cold big hangars and dungeon-like old castles, but damn if this little prom party DJ set didn’t rank right up there. Maybe it was the strange setting and the open-minded crowd that made room for experimentation and more varied sets than your average club night. In any case, Nkisi looked relaxed enough to meticulously build an expectedly powerful set, ranging from polyrhythms to dark electro.
At FOEG, it’s not just the music that’s experimental, it’s the whole approach to curating a festival, and the success of the festival is a testament to how far bold curation can go in terms of building an audience. This year’s edition in particular struck a good balance between experimenting and sticking to what works. High risk – high reward seems to have been one of the underlying principles of FOEG since its inception, and while it may not always work, it certainly ensures that the festival is never boring.
For more info on the festival, read Jon Albjerg Ravnholt’s interview with the people behind FOEG here.
