Entry: €15
Doors: 21:00, Start: 22:00

ANIMISTIC BELIEFS live

Animistic Beliefs are inventing a new, creole musical language. The Rotterdam-based duo repurposes forms from techno and electro to create exhilarating hybrids, applying a fresh perspective that is both deeply personal and political.

‘Animism’ is the idea found in indigenous belief systems that all objects, creatures and places possess a spiritual essence. Pre-colonial thought, traditions and music connected with Marvin’s Moluccan and Linh’s Vietnamese-Chinese heritage are key inspirations and tools through which the duo explore their experience as queer POC living in the Netherlands.

Shared introductions to dance music as underage attendees of Rotterdam’s club scenes and a passion for analogue equipment were the initial catalysts to Linh and Marvin’s collaboration. Early on they would meet regularly at a group for hardware enthusiasts, where they’d solder together their own hardware from scratch. Techno, electro, gabber and punk formed the initial backbone of their sound, but as the duo rediscovered traces of cultures that conventional history had erased, South-East Asian tonality, tribal rhythms and texts and poetry have become central components.

Parallel but distinct from their releases, the duo has honed a fast-paced and ritualistic live sound. In a dimly lit room behind a web of cables, they become a powerful force. Layering Linh’s punk vocals beneath detailed, tightly wound metallic loops and pneumatic kicks, these imposing metallic structures give way only fleetingly to passages of brooding, choral melancholy – moments of emotional release made even more intense by their transience. As performers, Animistic Beliefs have been able to transcend the club circuit, and are as comfortable sharing the bill with techno mainstays like DJ Stingray and Helena Hauff, as they are alongside artists like Lotic, Nazar and Jlin.

Increasingly, sights are set beyond music, as Linh and Marvin broaden their output to new media art and alternative fashion. Their avant-garde audiovisual project ‘CACHE/SPIRIT’ with Jeisson Drenth, is the most recent product of their expansive artistic direction, which has included an AV performance for Dekmantel Festival in Amsterdam and Traumabar und Kino in Berlin, an online residency for virtual arts collective DGTL FMNSM and a large-scale installation at an exhibition in Rotterdam’s TENT museum and Dresden’s Cynetart festival.

Driven by tireless technical, historical and emotional research, Animistic Beliefs is a constantly evolving art project. By celebrating and unifying a diverse set of countercultural influences, the duo is challenging the expectations of European techno to make the kind of art that leaves a mark, whether in a gallery or behind a wall of haze and strobes.

AUTHENTICALLY PLASTIC dj-set

‘Authentically Plastic’ is an Artist, DJ & Producer based in Kampala, Uganda. Their genre-bending sets, at once dark and playful, use Gqom, Vogue & Techno as a base for exploring other unknown sounds. Their music is influenced by anything from quasi-electronic Northern Ugandan rhythms, to early acid experiments, and live noise/industrial shows. They got their start playing at secretive queer parties in the city (Kampala); which eventually led to their first festival gig at ‘Nyege Nyege’. Since then, they have played in several venues around the city for parties like Malkia (Queen) & Boutiq Electroniq, continuously exploring and reinventing their style. Authentically Plastic also curates a bi-monthly club night in Kampala called ANTI-MASS; which prioritises femme, queer & experimental DJ’s/artists. They describe ANTI-MASS as a “nomadic, femme, dance machine”. The party attracts a diverse, dedicated crowd, and aims to be a propulsive space for sonic & cultural experimentation.

Authentically Plastic’s forthcoming debut solo album is to be released in May 2022.

JUNG AN TAGEN live

Jung An Tagen invites us to reflect on the diffuse but persistent term “experimental” not as deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy, but as the design and implementation of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results; “electronic” as an annulment of the previous instrumental tradition, and as a simultaneous reversion towards aesthetic openness; as the fragmentation of a theoretical or mythical musical syntax by obsessive repetition, sequential motivic mutations, aleatoric arrays, pareidolic illusions and moiré effects; “electronic” as the ultimate split, dehumanization, mechanic strangeness.

Backed up by 2 decades of discographic activity under diverse pseudonyms and multiple collaborations on labels such as Editions Mego and Diagonal, Stefan Juster performs tirelessly at Festivals like Unsound or Sonic Acts, researching the boundaries of techno and dissociative computer music. Testing strategies of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena, encouraging minds and bodies to calculate and intuit their own place in spacetime. It’s addictive music. Music in constant explosion.

In 2020 Jung founded the netlabel label ETAT.xyz. Setting aside any hint of expressionist gestures, one is left with form and abstract sound, emotional alienation: “dissociative, psychoacoustic, computer music”.

AUGSBURGER MESSER live

FOREVER TRAXX dj-set

YUZU dj-set