As ESNS draws to a close, here are five of the most exciting acts we found from the musical showcase festival.
From psychedelic Japanese folk music to industrial post-rock techno, Expo music festival Eurosonic Noorderslag (ESNS) has proven once again it’s a fertile spot for discovering exciting new music talent. As the latest edition draws to a close in Groningen, Netherlands, here are the top five acts Euronews Culture saw at ESNS.
Daniela Pes
With perhaps the most spellbinding performance of the entire festival, Italian musician Daniela Pes brought the entirety of the Stadsschouwburg into a silent awe – an impressive feat among the chatty ESNS crowds. Performing from her 2023 album ‘SPIRA’, electronic beats loop and spiral around each other as sparse percussion drags us into a meditative state. Over and through this cuts Pes’ haunting vocal melodies, harmonised with herself. Only slight in stature, her voice rips through the concert hall. Songs like ‘Illa Sera’ hypnotise with their serpentine structure building to intense catastrophic cacophonies.
Speaking to Euronews Culture, Pes explained that although she often writes her lyrics in her Gallurese dialect, a northeastern Sardinian dialect that most Italians can’t parse, the words aren’t meant to have meaning in the traditional sense. “I had to find a way to escape and to free myself and to free my expression,” she says. It’s an effective tool to make Pes one of the most beguiling acts of the festival.
Mitsune
Decked in kimonos, bedazzled and made-up, Mitsune immediately strike a chord in a line-up filled to the brim with indie bands. Based in Berlin, Mitsune are one of ESNS’s most intercontinental bands this year with members hailing from Australia, Greece and Japan. At the centre of the band is a duo of shamisen players. The traditional Japanese folk instrument is something like an Asian banjo with percussive qualities alongside its distinctive stringed twang.
The two shamisen players are flanked by a double bassist and a percussionist, bringing the traditional melodies of Japan into jazz-infused psychedelic modernity. Beyond just dressing the part, Mitsune live is a highly theatrical experience. Members wail in agony, seemingly at random. Rituals are performed between songs. At one point, the percussionist has a solo that has the audience questioning if he’s on the verge of a breakdown as he stacks his drums into a tower and allows random objects to cascade down. Instantly transfixing, unique, and totally fun, Mitsune is a live act you need to see to believe.
Ruthven
Rich as treacle, English artist Ruthven has the most boldly sonorous voice of anyone at ESNS this year. Ruthven, real name Sean Nelson, brings his 2024 debut album ‘Rough & Ready’ to life with all the vigour the future-funk tracks had on record. Singing as he plays a keyboard with a bassist and drummer by his side, Ruthven is a bashful character, quietly enjoying the grooves of earworms like ‘Cautious’. Switching back and forth between his grin-inducing falsetto and lower registers, his songs are quietly confident in their swagger. It’s impossible not to groove along with the band.
Carving out slick synth lines as he sings, Ruthven’s songwriting skills are evident. His intimate approach to funk speaks for itself. At some points though, jumping between the mic and the keys became slightly awkward. I wonder if trying to pass over the instrument to another band member and tackling the mic alone could give Ruthven the chance to shine even brighter as a future star.
MAQUINA.
On the final night of Eurosonic, in the early hours of the morning, Portuguese band MAQUINA. transformed the Vera club into a den of bacchanalian bliss. The Krautrock-inspired trio perform with minimal electronic interference, creating their repetitive swirling beats that entice audiences entirely through the crunchy heft of guitars and drums. Almost wordlessly, MAQUINA. create soundscapes through epic tracks that embody the electronic body music (EBM) moniker that Kraftwerk coined to bring post-punk to the dancefloor.
The result is the perfect nightcap. A tonic for the end of the festival that doesn’t soothe but grabs you by the lapel and forces you to dance in spasmodic rhythm. Treating the guitar almost as a percussion instrument, MAQUINA. has mastered a rare thing, to create music with a snarl that you can dance to.
Sunna Margrét
A dense fog descended over the Netherlands on the opening day of ESNS, cancelling many of the flights in and out of Schiphol. As a result, many of the international attendees were heavily delayed, Euronews Culture included. While I took my train from Amsterdam to Groningen, many hours after originally planned, I watched the clock painfully knowing I was missing Icelandic artist Sunna Margrét’s set.
Confirmed by those who were there, it feels unfair to miss out one of our biggest discoveries of the festival because of a cancelled flight. Creating some of the most complex musical tapestries, Margrét sings and speaks in ethereal tones, mostly in English with occasional tracks in Icelandic. Influences abound from trip-hop to Krautrock, Margrét recreates her enigmatic sound with heavy lashings of atmosphere.
