Aida was at the Rewire Festival in The Hague at the weekend. Switching off properly given the world situation – is that even possible? And is it desirable?
The world dissolved around me on Saturday. I was in the crowd at a performance by poet and experimental jazz artist Moor Mother and metal supergroup Sumac at the Rewire Festival in The Hague. It was one of the hardest and most intense shows I’ve seen in quite some time. “Does anyone in this room have hope?” she shouted to the crowd at one point, and a few people cheered. “What’s wrong with you guys? The rest of us think we’re fucked,” she replied. And she’s not wrong.
There is even research on this: While personal life satisfaction is still relatively high in the global north, according to various studies, the situation is different when it comes to social satisfaction and hope. People worry that future generations will have a lower quality of life. Hope for a solution to the climate crisis is dwindling. Wars, conflicts and politicians who act beyond logic and humanity contribute the rest.
Caught in the in-between world
I also notice it in myself: As a child of Iranian parents, the last few months have been pretty bitter. I’m not alone – around a quarter of Germany’s residents have some form of family migration background. Not everyone in a country that is currently in the middle of a completely insane war and is simultaneously murdering its own population – but in many other places in the world it is hardly better. And at the same time, here in Central Europe, which is still relatively safe, people continue to live their normal lives, or what they think they are. It feels like you’re caught in an in-between world: At the weekend I stood on a gallery in the large Amare concert hall in The Hague and saw the fantastic Kim Gordon – and at the same time wanted to dig out my cell phone and scan the messages every five seconds. What the hell am I doing here?
Hedonism has a bad reputation: it is considered headless, thoughtless, self-centered. And what’s more hedonistic than a music festival? Four or five days somewhere else, cut out from the real world. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Because art is not a mindless escape, but a space in which we negotiate our view of the world.
Howling in the artificial fog
On Thursday, Berlin-based Italian composer and experimental artist Caterina Barbieri opened the Rewire with an anthemic performance – first with, then without an orchestra, with synths, choirs and lots of smoke machines. And me? I cried. Cried because it was so angular and so beautiful. Cried because the music at that moment was like a hole through which all the sadness and anxiety about the world came pouring out of me. Precisely because it was a performance that was not intended for hedonism, but rather felt like a response to the pain of the times. The same applies to the performance of the Belgian accordion player Suzan Peeters, who pressed experimental Goth out of the accordion and crossed it with samples critical of capitalism and consumerism. Or Laurel Halo, who set a film by the Swiss video artist Julian Charrière to music – about deep-sea mining and brutal interventions in our ecosystem.
So there was no running away from reality at the weekend. Cross-border music can show us a way to cope with this world – a way that doesn’t involve repression or sticking to the news, as I tend to do. At least I firmly believe that the way out of the doom spiral consists of a balance: knowledge of what is happening out in the world, sadness about it – and at the same time release. This release could be a metal show like Moor Mother and Sumac or a performance like the Balinese digital hardcore duo Gabber Modus Operandi, which had me jumping across the room from the first second.
“Music is medicine”
It could be the disturbing images in the background of the noise-pop band Xiu Xiu’s performance, the prickly, ambiguous show of the Danish band Smerz, the loving nihilism of Einstreichen Neuhäusern or the internet noise of the hype of the moment: Tracey, they sound like kids who, with far too much cornflake sugar in their blood, first idolized Aaliyah and Destiny’s Child on the television in the noughties and then at some point started Hear Witch House from Salem. It can also sound like the ethereal singing of the jazz artist Ganavya, who sang a text by the wrongfully executed poet Marcellus Williams together with the audience in a church shortly before midnight.
Editorial recommendations
The images from Budapest that have been floating around the internet since the election results were announced on Sunday show it: dancing, singing, celebrating – we need that. We need the physical experience of joy and our own will to live, as cheesy as that sounds. We need to remind ourselves from time to time why it’s worth fighting for a better world. “Music is medicine,” said jazz musician Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland during her and her husband, legendary singer-songwriter Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s performance. Music is medicine – despite everything, despite an industry that protects perpetrators, despite the exploitation structures of streaming services, despite scandals like the current one involving the influencer agency Chaotic Good and its use of fake fans. Music remains medicine. And my weekend in The Hague was exactly what I needed.
