Hybrid Festival 2024: Listening Guide
On Saturday 24 February 2024 we move into our second festival in collaboration with VERA: Hybrid. Taking place across both clubs on the Oosterstraat, as well as the monumental Akerk and Forum’s multimedial Rabo Studio, Hybrid unfolds many of contemporary music’s potential trajectories. Here we detail some for every location.
Words by Tim Stienstra & Kos van Erp / Pictures by Sjoerd Knol & Willem van Oosterom
Akerk
If anything provides history to this young festival, it’s the Akerk. The monumental church in the city cenre of Groningen has stood for over 300 years, and inarguably provides the most stunning backdrop of the 2024 edition. For one night, Hybrid’s mosts ethereal location is home to ambient, drone and electro-acoustic experimentation.
Malibu (live)
Malibu is a French electronic musician whose work sails between ambient and ethereal music. Forever inspired by soft reverbed vocals and melodic chord progressions, Malibu’s sound is immersive, like a sea of synthetic strings and choirs.
For many, she first popped onto the radar with generational ambient anthem ‘Held’, part of the unrivaled opening stretch of evergreen V/A ‘Mono No Aware’ on PAN. Last year she released ‘Palaces of Pity’, an EP that saw a global reception of misty eyes and emotional solo-listening. Lush swells of strings and synths wash over, with sublime waves of reverb controlling the tide. Accentuated by fragile vocals and wanderings into world-constructing field recordings, the imagination leads the listener to a collective destination. Empty sea shores inside the Akerk, a lighthouse in the distance, the cavernous reflections of the space adding to the grandiosity; Malibu might just be the perfect, serene opening to a night that’s bound to unravel into delightful chaos.
Petra Hermanova (live) curated by Stroming
For a once in a lifetime experience, tread into the Akerk for Petra Hermanova. The producer, composer and vocalist works at the intersection of the transcendent and the earthly. Hermanova utilises autoharp, voice, and pipe organ in techniques from both folk and sacred traditions to grapple with the spiritual and earthly dimensions of devastating loss and bereavement. It all leads to a disciplined display of beauty, pain, and astute musicianship.
For her appearance at Hybrid Festival, Petra Hermanova will be accompanied by Elizaveta Suslova on the world-renowned Arp Schnitger organ of the Akerk. This organ was developed and adjusted over multiple generations by different organ makers, which makes it the only one of its nature in existence. The visceral power and immense dynamic range of this rare instrument, which was fully restored in the 2000s, will be channeled for an intrinsically unique live performance in which two fantastic musicians amalgamate their expertise in the fields of drone and neoclassical.
Forum: Rabo Studio
Forum’s Rabo Studio is a multiface gem for the city of Groningen. The venue, with its unique 270 degree panoramic projection setup, usually functions as a theatre or immersive multimedia room. For Hybrid, it services as the festival’s most technologically ingenuous hall. The pitch perfect setting for full technicolor, ultra wide live A/V shows.
Ziúr & Sander Houtkruijer (live A/V)
Ziúr is part of a new generation that’s breaking out of the techno mould and creating in a spirit of freedom and experimentation, taking seemingly incompatible influences and balancing them into a new and exciting sound. Ziúr is also the founder and resident DJ of ‘Boo-Hoo’, a night championing diverse lineups, reflecting its creative audience and bringing through the cream of the experimental dance underground.
At Hybrid, Ziúr will play their only show in the Netherlands this tour. They’re accompanied by visual artist Sander Houtkruijer, whose roots lie in Groningen, for an engulfing audiovisual rendition of their recorded material. It’s an A/V experience powered by violent bursts of glitched out noise, staggering rhythms and untraceable vocal treatments. Based on 2023’s ‘Eyeroll’ – an album that leaves the listener dumbfounded with every twist and turn – what’s in the pipeline is a violent attack at the senses. Special appearance by a secret guest included.
VIDEO BSTRDS (live A/V)
Dressed in black and armed with a ton of computer power, VIDEO BSTRDS takes you on an audiovisual journey through time and space. With compelling beats and hypnotic visuals they create a world of images and sounds, a dive into the unpredictability of life.
A likely meeting of minds – between beat contortionist Big Bstrd and video artist Videoband – results in an unlikely marriage between aesthetics. You’ll hear dub techno, acid influences and nods at the long lost remnants of distorted hiphop. The visuals evoke primal visions in black and white; psychedelic stabs at the most elemental shapes that make up the universe.
VERA
To arrive at VERA is to arrive at the core of Hybrid Festival. Home to the international pop underground and one half of the foundation on which this collaboration was built, the club and its immense base of volunteers are responsible for some of the most iconic artist appearances in Groningen of the past half a century. During Hybrid that lore is bound to be extended.
Mandy, Indiana (live)
It’s always special to catch an act right in the midst of their breakthrough moment. This tour very much feels like that for Mandy, Indiana. The four piece outfit, which splits their time between Manchester and Berlin, seems to harness both cities’ influences, as well as the noisiest winds that blew over the Atlantic ocean.
Mandy, Indiana generates a sound that is at once chaotic and precision engineered, where chance operations are manipulated into percussive geometries, and gnarled guitars sit in thickets of distortion around which vocals spin knots of lyrical repetitions. Their debut album ‘i’ve seen a way’ was recorded in caves, crypts and shopping centres, channeling the chaos that surrounds our everyday lives. The result is part noise rock, part post-punk, part industrial-spirited dance music. A project that multiplies in infectious energy during their widely beloved live performances. Catch them while you can.
Manisdron (live)
Manisdron combines fast paced, tense and focused motoric metallic drumming with manic vocals which treads the line between the sonic equivalent of futuristic sci-fi nightmares or the remains of post apocalyptic metropolis’ in flux.
A side project of Goat’s drummer, you’ll feel the disconcerting type of experimentation that so characterizes the Japanese band. Confronting audiences with a seemingly impossible straddling of both minimalism and maximalism, rhythmically complex arrangements underpin an otherwise sparsely populated sonic toolkit. Sounds are simply picked with the utmost care. To a point where the raw energy of an outright siege at a physical drum kit butts heads with raw synthesized sound that’s borrowed from genres like acid techno and electro.
Full on intensity, a bad trip in a seedy rock club, spiked drink stumbling, face hits ground glued to muck ridden floor boards, spinning out of control… eyes to the ceiling.. lights flashing as the music pounds you into an oblivion.
Truus de Groot plays Plus Instruments (live) curated by ZOT
Electronica pioneer Truus’ career started at the beginning of the punkrock craze in 1976 in The Netherlands. She started out as a vocalist and lyric writer as a member of Nasmak. Experimental electronic instruments became part of her passion. She established cult favorite Plus Instruments in 1978, which became an ongoing project to the present day, that led Truus to design her own instruments. At Hybrid, Truus will give us an array of her Plus Instruments oeuvre – from old to new to never heard!
OOST
The night in all its cultural potency; that is OOST. During Hybrid Festival, the nocturnal hours are explored in ways rarely seen in the club culture landscape. One half of the creative power behind the festival, the intimate institution for adventurous dance music presents the largest selection of acts. 9 artists operating at the bleeding edge of electronic, experimental, punk and hiphop. The cream of the crop when it comes to live shows and DJ sets.
JASSS (DJ)
Berlin-based DJ and producer JASSS has been called “fearless” in the club circuit for her uncompromising and unexpected sets, and her propensity to play things for people that they don’t yet know they want to hear. Raised in Asturias, JASSS started DJing and has been part of the electronic scene in Spain since her early twenties. She started experimenting with electronic music production by editing field recordings after moving to the Netherlands in 2010. The following year she relocated to Berlin, where she began to actively DJ in the electronic circuit. Over a decade later, her reputation precedes her wherever she appears, in the most exciting manner. It’s a reputation built upon a flawless string of releases, DJ sets, her party Vapor and close ties to iconoclastic queer party Herrensauna.
Hybrid Festival embodies the grand return of a DJ that’s well integrated OOST history. Back in 2019 she first paid visit to the club for an all night back-to-back with Oceanic, a moment that’s engraved in every single person present that night, and has been documented as a Mix of the Month. Those five and a half hours seem far removed from the LPs ‘Weightless’ and ‘A World of Service’ that solidified her as a prime voice on the experimental club circuit, but the common ground appears upon deeper dives. Take the anthemic ‘Turbo Olé’ or early standout moment ‘Es Complicado’, and you’ll hear an artist at the vanguard of distorted, trance-infused dance music. A vision that’ll be laid out right in front of you when she makes her return to the OOST main. In the words of a Soundcloud listener: ”wild ride!”
Emma DJ (live)
Parisian based Emma DJ has been building a rapidly growing catalogue of releases with 3 albums on cassette tapes as well as releases on imprints like UIQ, REIF, Collapsing Market, BFDM and L.I.E.S. A remarkable output from the Finnish native who’s been quietly forging an aesthetic of his own following a decade in electronic music across all corners of the industry. His productions display a clear penchant for harder, grittier and ever indescribable sounds translating directly into his dj sets as well as his collaborative experimental trap live show ‘g0drm’.
The latter is what’s presented at Hybrid with visceral impact. Debuting at Bourse de Commerce and coming to full fruition at Berlin Atonal with help of Rainy Miller and CXOXC, the Hybrid version of ‘g0drm’ embodies transformation into an intimate, gut-wrenching solo effort that leans heavily on voice mutations and experimental trap instrumentals. A glossy, synthesized exterior shrouds the music in a 2010s nostalgia that pushes unformed memories further back than their assumed origin. Flashbacks to manic experiences lived by your parallel self.
NZE NZE (live)
Possessed rhythms and a guttural voice, NZE NZE brings the heads behind Sacred Lodge and UVB76 together. The French project combines haunted chants, surgical production and dusky atmospheres. At the core we find the Fang warriors (Central Africa) and their stories, while all around, sounds ironed through modular patches and effects pedals swirl. It’s heavy, physical music that draws on industrial club, dub and post-punk.
Hybrid Festival 2024 takes place on Saturday February 24th across all four locations between 20:00 and 06:00 the next day. For more info, the full lineup and the timetable, visit the website. Last full festival tickets are on sale here, limited club night tickets are available at OOST from 01:00 onwards and bound to capacity.