Season Opening ’23: Listening Guide
We’re not easing in; our opening weekender of the 2023-2024 season features a broad cast of musical wonder. Hi-tek punk, distorted techno, rattling bass, loopy tekno or noise rock; every artist is worth a highlight. Here’s your prelistening rundown.
Words by Kos van Erp / Pictures by Sjoerd Knol
Friday 01.09.2023
Parrish Smith
Parrish Smith’s ‘hi-tek punk’ fuses hard-cast techno and industrial with shredding guitar music. His own productions and live sets saw a new hallmark with last year’s off-the-rocker show at The Arcade and his debut LP ‘Light, Cruel & Vain’ on the Dekmantel imprint. Both take his extensive line of creative output to new conceptual highs through grinding, stuttering, body-moving electronics, charged with vocals that navigate both the delicate and the deafening. This Friday he’s back for a much anticipated two hour closing set. Listen to his Hör set to get your body in line for some proper contortion.
Diamin
Lazercut vinyl mixing meets a merciless selection of acid, techno, electro and industrial. That describes your experience of dance floor hours helmed by Diamin. The Chilean Berlin resident polished their practice in the city’s many revered clubs. Ruthless notion of timing go hand in hand with the ability to maintain a rocksteady pulse across different beat structures. Gnarly, layered and relentlessly body-moving.
Swerve
Swerve bands it loud. Sometimes all you need to know is captured in a simple IG bio. This local duo forges deafening riffs from towering amp stacks, structured by pounding blasts of kickdrum and snare. For 30 minutes we’ll be living on the intersection of sludge metal, hardcore and noise rock, and we’ll be living loud.
Morrigan
Three youngsters that have their sound pinned down with just one single out. The local post-punkers, slowcore-ists, artpoppers of Morrigan tug at your hearstrings with bleak, layered arrangements. With just bass, guitar and drums the instrumentarium might be simple, but the emotions conveyed become oh-so complex.
Kirril
The enigmatic Kirril has an astounding backlog of releases to his name. A quick run to his Bandcamp reveals extensive experiments in techno, industrial, noise, acid and so much more. A rich cast of vocalists has lent their name to his tracks but for our Season Opening, Kirril will perform the purest of hardware-based live sets. About time for some paranoid dancing.
Cosmogen
Behind the Cosmogen monniker hides one of Groningen’s most expert Electro selectors. A long-present, regularly recurring face in the city’s electronic music scene, this head found his true calling some years ago. Electro was always Gerard’s true love and now, when stepping into the booth, it’s his only love. In all its classic, emotive, spacey or distorted iterations.
Saturday 02.09.2023
Simo Cell
Among the upper eschalon of party-escalating DJs is vested the musically elusive Simo Cell. The Frenchman holds a stellar reputation of activating every last person on the packed dance floors in front of him. All corners of bass are touched upon, fusing an intercontinental approach to club music with the ability to revive a trap hit, launch a dubstep anthem into the stratosphere or barge into the smoothest sequence of percussive techno under the moon. Last year he inaugurated The Nest at Dekmantel and barely left its construction whole. Right now Simon is in the middle of a tour that precedes the release of his latest album and this Saturday he has a go at OOST. Expect some dance floor premieres and be sure to bring your own helmet.
Verity
Groningen’s produced its very own lineage of world-touring DJs and yes, the next one has come knocking. Loudly. Since closing after Batu during that one reopening we all still think so fondly of, the Scottish-American DJ has presented her expert nose for combustive bass craze in The Netherland’s most renomated booths. Garage Noord, Dekmantel Selectors, ZeeZout and of course; every couple of weeks at OOST. Expect only the finest cuts from her collection when closing after Simo Cell on Saturday.
Sacre
Red wine and rare sonics. Operating on his own unique plane within Groningen, none have challenged the kinds, contexts and ways for transmitting sound in this city quite like Sacre. Whether it’s throwing one-off events in unique spaces(a church for example) or running editorial pieces dripping with passion for Plor, or whether it’s playing DJ sets that manage to recontextualize dance music within mere hours at Future Intel or our upstairs room during RAYA 003; this kind soul walks his own path, knowing that those who share his zeal are gonna follow.
Spacetim
Hard-fought mysticism and carefully crafted hypnosis ooze out of anything Spacetim lays his hand on. This Groningen best-kept-secret represents some of the most adventurous renditions of techno the city has to offer. Sparse, trancey, fast; it’s all one big blur for hours on end when the man consistently dressed in black steps into the booth.
RDVSK
RDVSK stands for bright yet understated trance, fast BPMs and dubby sound palettes. Not literally of course; the abbreviation that is his name we’ll leave up for guesses. With David spearheading the dance floor, sounds become pulsating, cascading, hypnotizing. Masterfully built for an extensive back-to-back with Spacetim. For a room that seems to vibrate, mutate and shiver with life.