- It's a mark of a good festival when you walk away with musical discoveries that you might otherwise not have come across. That's exactly what happened at Meakusma—I felt like I spent more time deepening my understanding and appreciation of experimental music than I did listening to artists I was already familiar with.
The event, which took place in the leafy Belgian town of Eupen, may only be in its second year, but the team behind it has a long history of bringing experimental and electronic music to Belgium, and it shows. Despite a staggering array of complex acoustic and electronic setups, everything felt relaxed and orderly across the three days and nights. This was helped by the venue, Alter Schlachthof, a renovated slaughterhouse with a steely-grey finish that housed various spaces. Its gallery-like ambience suited the predominately meditative performances, and the crowd responded attentively.
There was also a healthy portion of dance music to balance out the sonic contemplation, but even this veered more left of centre than you might usually expect. Ben UFO helped programme one of the nights, presenting sets from himself, Nina, Bruce and Electric Indigo. Elsewhere, respected selectors like Viola Klein, Whodat, Lawrence and RVDS served up quality house music, while Errorsmith's live set of mutant dancehall was fierce enough to even start a mosh pit.
These dance floor moments coexisted naturally with the abundance of more outré offerings. Lawrence, RVDS and Christian Naujoks' Sky Walking project displayed a captivating blend of undulating synth pulses, delicate vibraphone and Chinese flute. Performing at the same time but offering a very different kind of stillness was legendary saxophonist Jon Gibson, a member of The Phillip Glass Ensemble, who was playing his 1973 album, Visitations. Meanwhile, in another room, Jan Jelinek and Masayoshi Fujita were holding a séance of modular ripples and abstract chimes—one of several opportunities across the weekend to sit in silence and be entranced by graceful sounds.
In contrast to the neutral but spartan main stages, the scruffy sofas and scraggly plants of the 24-hour Heuboden stage made for a comfortable trip into some of the festival's strangest music. Live performances from Georgia and Hiele Martens Clark stood out, though Vladimir Ivkovic and ML's late-night DJ set best suited the dive bar atmosphere. Their arcane selections unfurled like smoke, all hushed soundtrack hues, dusty ambience and sonic ephemera.
Meakusma's range of performances found cohesion through a shared tendency to transcend time and space. You could hear fragments of a distant past in Philip Jeck's heart-rending performance in a 19th-century church. The music had an out-of-time quality, much like Claire M. Singer's powerful, tradition-subverting drone set on the church organ. On another tip, DJ/rupture folded cultural divides rather than temporal ones with his signature blend of global party music, having paid tribute to minimal composer Julius Eastman just hours before. He rounded the festival off with one of the Heuboden stage's few dance floor moments, a set that captured the feeling that Meakusma was fuelled by a spirit of timeless, borderless artistic expression.
Photo credit /
Caroline Lessire
These dance floor moments coexisted naturally with the abundance of more outré offerings. Lawrence, RVDS and Christian Naujoks' Sky Walking project displayed a captivating blend of undulating synth pulses, delicate vibraphone and Chinese flute. Performing at the same time but offering a very different kind of stillness was legendary saxophonist Jon Gibson, a member of The Phillip Glass Ensemble, who was playing his 1973 album, Visitations. Meanwhile, in another room, Jan Jelinek and Masayoshi Fujita were holding a séance of modular ripples and abstract chimes—one of several opportunities across the weekend to sit in silence and be entranced by graceful sounds. In contrast to the neutral but spartan main stages, the scruffy sofas and scraggly plants of the 24-hour Heuboden stage made for a comfortable trip into some of the festival's strangest music. Live performances from Georgia and Hiele Martens Clark stood out, though Vladimir Ivkovic and ML's late-night DJ set best suited the dive bar atmosphere. Their arcane selections unfurled like smoke, all hushed soundtrack hues, dusty ambience and sonic ephemera. Meakusma's range of performances found cohesion through a shared tendency to transcend time and space. You could hear fragments of a distant past in Philip Jeck's heart-rending performance in a 19th-century church. The music had an out-of-time quality, much like Claire M. Singer's powerful, tradition-subverting drone set on the church organ. On another tip, DJ/rupture folded cultural divides rather than temporal ones with his signature blend of global party music, having paid tribute to minimal composer Julius Eastman just hours before. He rounded the festival off with one of the Heuboden stage's few dance floor moments, a set that captured the feeling that Meakusma was fuelled by a spirit of timeless, borderless artistic expression. Photo credit / Caroline Lessire