Located in the beautiful Danish port city of Aarhus, SPOT Festival has emerged as an ace way to explore new talent from the Nordics and beyond…
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One of the recurring conversations in the music industry right now is how hard it is to gain traction for new artists. With radio stumbling, the press (hello!) whittled down to a core brigade of a handful of titles, and the almighty algorithm serving out the same four mega-stars, breaching these walls and tasting success has all the attendant difficulties of Medieval warfare – it’s not pretty, it’s not fun, and it takes a bloody long time.
SPOT Festival, however, does things differently. Denmark’s pre-eminent showcase, it takes place over 30 venues around central Aarhus, a ridiculously pretty and mind-bogglingly well laid out city. Packed to the gunnels with students, the faint air of academic bohemia gives the place a palpably creative feel – the ARoS Art Gallery dominates the skyline with its rainbow installation, while a nexus of coffee shops, record emporiums, and venues dot the impeccably clean streets.
Clash opens its Aarhus odyssey in the Institute Of X, a kind of ad hoc creative area beside some old disused train tracks. The post-industrial to creative pipeline is something that adorns cities the world over, but – as ever – the Danes do it a little better, and this square mile of bars, DJ booths, and outdoor venues is an exceptional place to stumble across your new favourite act. Sille Trolle gets things rolling with a cute set of varnished indie pop – there’s a slight bossa nova tinge to her yacht rock indebted songwriting, stylistic traits that put us in mind of those early TOPS singles. As wholesome as a bottle of OJ, and no less satisfying.
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The Aarhus Congress Centre is given over to music for the weekend, a thorough-fare of impossibly dashing Danish twenty-somethings racing past Clash as it attempts to cover its greying Millennial hair and cynical British expression. There’s nothing cynical about Downtown July, whose earnest indie pop resonates with subtle joy, pleasing the crowd with peppy vocals and no end of killer choruses.
After a brush with a small-scale orchestra conducted by the crowd – a risky manoeuvre in this age, we reckon – we head back to Institute For X to catch Bison Rouge. An artist for whom words simply fail, she’s a kind of barefoot yodelling cello player, someone who can leap octaves and tell your fortune, all while covering you in glitter. Remarkable.
The heart-swooning tale of Ah Buster catch our attention outside, the Aalborg talent performing in the shadow of a single-decker bus recalibrated as a music venue. There’s time to absorb the funky afrobeat driven sounds of Familele in the main park before a hot tip takes Clash back to Institute For X to catch Icelandic popsters Inspector Spacetime. Word is clearly out on the Reykjavik group, and a huge crowd greets them as evening draws close around us. The results are simply joyous: like a kind of wholesome version of Confidence Man, the group melt together club tropes – think DNB beats and UKG bass lines – with utterly perfect pop songs, the kind of choruses that hit you once, and never leave your cerebral cortex. It’s fantastic – trust us, Inspector Spacetime are your new favourite band.
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With the warm spring evening bringing yet more fans to the centre of Aarhus, bicycle after bicycle is left (unlocked) against the deepening shadows. Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is one of Denmark’s most potent exports, and his set in Musikhuset’s beautiful Store Sal is an imposing highlight. Last year’s solo record ‘Heavy Glory’ largely passed this writer by, but his scorched Americana evocations make for a thrilling dose of feedback-strewn introspection – backed by a lightning-quick free jazz drummer and a bass who (with apologies) looks about 12 years old, this is riveting, mercurial stuff delivered with raw guts and palpable charisma.
J Ludwig III attracts a colossal crowd, and while the noises emanating from within show how deeply impactful his art truly is, Clash opts to explore some more accessible points. Outside in the park, we find Mekdes – a kind of poppy alt-soul maven, you could loosely ascribe her to be the Danish Mabel, should such a thing pique your attention. The space outside Radar is dominated by kids dancing to heavy duty Danish techno, an unsubtle but brutally effective four-to-the-floor variant. Inside, however, the brooding Krautrock-adjacent Drongo are entirely in-sync – fascinating math-leaning electronics, their clipped sonic structures match laboratory accuracy to a surreal, definitively Nordic sense of fun.
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The second day of festivities brings a change of weather, a reminder that Aarhus stares into the same North Sea that causes the UK so much precipitation. We’ve been handed a flyer to a special lunch-time event organised by Crunchy Frog – one of Denmark’s key labels, they’re just turned 31 and have some special new signings to show off. In a pizzeria, no less. Suffice to say, they didn’t have to ask twice.
Crammed into the corner, Nive and the Deer Children are an impressive opener – pared back Americana delivered with steeling minimalism, the band’s scorched songwriting takes on an aura of Southern gothic. Sung entirely in Greenlandic – vocalist Nive Nielsen is an Inuk – it’s an impressive blast of scarcely constrained noise.
100% Wet are new to us – but thankfully not for long. Dubbed hypergaze by the core duo Jakob Birch and Casper Munns, their shoegaze-meets-electronic hybrid is utterly fantastic, moving from opaque pop ambience to blistering DNB breaks in a matter of seconds. Cut ‘n’ paste song structures give their music a raw, punk-adjacent appeal, reminiscent of everyone from Sleigh Bells to (early) Grimes in the process. Joined by female vocalist whose angelic approach offers an anchor of light amid the noise, it’s hands-down one of the most impressive live sets we’ve seen this year. And it was in a pizzeria.
Picking up the bumper festival edition of local music sheet Gaffa – gotta support our music press cousins, don’t we! – Clash heads back to the main batch of Spot venues to get caught up on the day’s proceedings. Clovis fuse together aspects of afrobeat and hip-hop, amapiano and rap, and make for an entertaining experience. There’s time for a brief burst of gothic-pop conjured by the intense – and slightly misnamed – Merry before the rain starts to assert itself.
With so many fans thronging to indoor or covered spaces, the queues get slightly longer. It serves to push attention to some of the off-site programming – icy synth-punk in an Irish bar, for instance; post-punk thrown together in the side alley of a kebab house – before the clouds begin to dissipate.
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There’s time to soak up Iceland’s glacially cool ex.girls back at our familiar stomping ground Institute Of X, before watching some hardy Danish rave kids splashing their limbs in the DJ space outside radar.
In the Aarhus Congress Center a huge crowd of fans race to the crash barrier, eagerly awaiting a set from Mille. Still only 18-years-old, there’s a massive sense of anticipation in the air, and she definitely has a certain magic – drawing from the same transportive pop well as Griff, say, or the Japanese house, the twinkling trop-pop melodies take on an other-worldly charm.
We close out our Spot Festival experience by splashing our way across the railway tracks to our friends at Institute Of X – there’s the explicit femme rap of TT to uncover, fusing the wisdom of Rapsody with the cuss-tastic fun of Azealia Banks. The line-up’s subtle Malian flair offers a recurring flavour this year, and our evening finishes with Modou Traore, and the crack team of musicians that surround him – a set filled with light, he seems to dare the evening to fold back against itself, and for the clouds to disappear.
An established powerhouse in its native Denmark, Spot Festival feels a little slept-on for international audiences. There’s no real reason for this – a short hop from London, Aarhus is a quite ludicrously welcoming city, and the event’s lay out (and innate eclecticism) makes discovery easy. Emerging with more fresh tips for new artists that can we can feasibly stack into a playlist, SPOT Festival is the left-of-centre shake-up the algorithm has been crying out for.
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Words: Robin Murray
Photography: Alexander Stagis, Sol Byager, Kibie Kaspersen, Tricia Yourkevich
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