Dear Incubate originators,
Let me get right to the point: last weekend I embraced street lights in Tilburg, kissed a random Tilburg footpath and attempted to straddle walls. It sounds somewhat graphic, but let’s put that down to an awkward expression of the sentiment that you have triggered in me.
A festival like Incubate seriously shakes my body, soul and spirit… as if I was sucked up by a homemade Author & Punisher industrial machine.
Incubate: you are a festival with vision. A festival with audacity. A festival that dares to make choices. Fuck! There was so much musical radicality to be heard and discovered through and aside one another last weekend! Your programme expresses such programmatic boldness – something that I also see in Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? – that I am secretly seriously jealous of. It is the embodiment of what Unsound-organiser Mat Schulz recently wrote about under the title ‘Festivals in the curatorial age’ in progressive monthly mag The Wire. His point: when putting together your festival, erase all the voices in your head that were tipped by your stakeholders. Follow your own gut feeling entirely.
Incubate: I have almost obsessively studied the hundreds of unknown names, and – I confess – even bumped into musical Belgians that I had never heard of while doing so. You got me! Wonderful! And yet: those who prefer to keep it aboveground could cheerfully surf from Neneh Cherry to The Knife, amble from Surfer Blood to Unknown Mortal Orchestra. But you absolutely ‘oblige’ one to graze further. ‘No Escape’, to say it with the words of Cabaret Voltaire.
Basically: hats off, and I even kneel briefly before you – as a token of pathetic symbolism. Doing so on the Tilburg footpath that I had kissed the night before. Out of respect, because you make the difference in the landscape. Radical music induces radical love. Incubate: you won’t ever be rid of me.
Warm regards,
Kurt Overbergh
Artistic Director AB
PS. Last weekend, the acts listed below made a changed man of me:
- Revelation: King Dude or Johnny Cash meets Mark Lanegan. With a click of the fingers, he should be an instant hero in Belgium.
- Best noise: (almost shaman) Burial Hex, who flirted with black metal, and our favourite noise-maker Russell Haswell, who did it with Yasunda Tone from Japan.
- Woefully failed DJ-set that I was so looking forward to: Helena Hauff. After three broken record players, the fun was over for her too.
- Most outlandish collaboration: the contemporary dub of King Midas Sound and the abstract electronica/guitar sounds of Fennesz. But what a topper!
- Best jazz: Fire! as Absolute Highlight! And the equally genius Lean Left.
- Best punk: Fire! and Lean Left, as both sounded just as raw as they were punk. The Ex can complete the list. After 35 years, still as fresh as a spring chicken!
- New trend spotted: algorave or dancing to algorithms.
- The refugee crisis didn’t leave anyone untouched either: The Knife did it with Ful and the programme ‘Europa Europa’. Confronting, but just a little too long-winded and sometimes a bit awkward. Then the lovely Dutch, female hardcore punk band Landverraad criticized the concept of countries: ‘Nations are something that is forced upon us’ and – again – Fire! who made an emotional report on the situation at the Hungarian border.
- Unexpected surprises: Samuel Kerridge, Rob Gordon, IIVVII and Afework Nigussie.
- Best hardcore female punk: Landverraad, Snob, Vales and (new Belgian topper): Cocaine Piss who will soon be diving into the studio with Steve Albini.
- Best churchgoer: Belgium’s Monnik.
- Blew by without sticking: Surfer Blood.
- Fine female vocals: the introverted folk of Meg Baird and the patter-pop of Lady Lamb.
- Best ‘Thank you’: the posters that Incubate had hung up everywhere on the last day, saying ‘Thank You’. Respectful. After all, there’s no festival without an audience. I’m going to steal that idea sometime. And afterwards I’ll profess never to have heard of Incubate.
