Spanish composer/performer/teacher/researcher Carme López’s debut album Quintela, featuring melancholy and fever-dream-inducing Galician bagpipe music, was released last year on the most tender label Warm Winters Ltd. She plays the instrument in her own non-trad experimental way to separate it from its traditional, male-dominated history. Yet the album, with its four-movement structure — plus a prologue and truly sublime epilogue — and expansive drones alternating with rhythmic reed strumming and wind-like swooshing, could bring to life the neglected wooden puppets and machines in an abandoned toy factory in a way only possible in mythical folk tales ~ a captivating sonic journey down a cobbled path.

Two guys in black turtlenecks playing guitar underneath an arched window with a candle and some instruments between them. This is no description of a medieval triptych, but of De Vlaamse Primitieven live at het Van Disselhuis in Geel. Antwerp’s Freek Vreys and Jan Boudart put their love of American primitivism and British Isles folk into a coherent yet exciting mix of compositions and improvisations, whose B&W cover images nearly turn their Bandcamp into a page from an illuminated manuscript. Opening for Glenn Jones, they played their first live gig at Het Bos in 2023. This year, they’ll bring some fog back to the forest for KRAAK Festival, filling the place with music that’s perfect for practicing calligraphy.

Something else, distortion. Sometimes, faint. Everything, muffled. Giulio Erasmus doesn’t take the same route every day, but you’ll want to join him for this one. A passenger on an impossible to define post-punky/dubby/left-field trip where field recordings, percussion, poetry and obtuse vocals are playfully mixed. A sonic traffic jam, or like trying to understand whether the inaudible announcer said platform four or five. A member of the bands D.U.D.S. and Handle, the Brussels-based Mancunian artist released his debut solo album Re-Adjustment in 2021 and his Second Attempt last year. At Meakusma 2024 he played as a quintet with The End Of The Worm and at KRAAK Fest he’ll perform with Ex-Worm 3000. Let’s hope at least some birds get these weary worms.

As an improviser, composer, sound artist and experimental music scholar, there’s an aspect of research and experimentation to everything Leo Chang does. The New York-based Korean musician mainly focuses on finding untraditional ways to interact with Korean instruments and objects through electronic modification. In his compelling performances, vocals are amplified through gongs with his self-made instrument VOCALNORI, a Korean folk hat is transformed into an instrument by attaching a mic to it or the Korean double reed instruments piri and taepyungso are pushed to their limits. In this way, Chang creates beautiful, eerie sonic textures, in which sinister drones build a powerful and oddly reassuring energy, a sense of belonging. Like snow adding some brightness to an otherwise grey landscape.

After playing and composing in various bands and projects (like doudouči ensemble, ensemble šum.um, ALAWARI and Wolfskin Ensemble …), Michaela Turcerová turns to her trusty alto sax to build, in her own words, a kind of “personal hyperworld.” Using the saxophone in innovative ways, the Slovakian artist currently based in Copenhagen creates distorted, minimal rhythmic patterns that can best be described as the sound you get when a cat finds the remote control and starts flipping through the TV channels, or rather: when you press rewind (or is it fast-forward?) and watch your life pass before your eyes like in that Adam Sandler movie. Turcerová’s alene et (2024) is yet another true “sonic wandering” released on Slovakian label mappa. Things falling apart, alternate dimensions turning in on themselves short circuit-style.

“Tap dance noise” sounds like a fanciful genre even for this oddball microcosm of ours, yet here we are with the disconcerting racket of French duo Muon S. Artist and choreographer Anna Gaïotti dons a pair of mic’d up tap shoes while circuit bender extraordinaire Jean (Bender) revs up the modules to transduce movement into sound. Scrapes, scratches, clangs and bangs are just some of the elements layering up into a gritty soundscape reigned by distortion and reined in by bodies physical and aural, arching towards the magnetic and the rhythmic, too raw and too real ~ don’t trust your senses on this one, but rather subject them to the daze of this inhabited moment in disharmony.

Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies fluidly and fluently traverses the dichotomy of improvisation and composition in his own singular cadence. With a musical trajectory spanning several decades - as founding member of Cranc, Common Objects, The Sealed Knot and SLW and collaborating with an roster of avant-garde who’s whos (Jon Butcher, David Sylvan, David Toop, Derek Bailey, etc) - Rhodri deploys a radical approach to the harp and its possibilities, treating the instrument as a sculptural tool whose range extends beyond its traditional capacities while never losing love for its folk music roots. Sometimes screeching and atonal, other times incessantly repetitive, always expressive and electrifying, the effect is never lost and never one of indifference.

One thought during R. Moro’s show at Troglobatem 2023 was, “This could go on forever.” And truly, the saucy, savory tunes of the elusive Moro almost seem to magically and eternally play themselves, though the one-man band shifting seamlessly between guitar and keyboard is as real as they come. While his output can be all over the place - from ambient meanderings to funhouse desert psychedelia - the magic of improvisation permeates throughout, winding down unknown paths not just for the listener but for the player himself. An already sold-out tape on the Troglosound label provides a small taste that only deepens the mystique ~ let these tunes drive you, and your most danceable self, into the most earnest of grooves.

Seraphim Blush’s music feels something like being the only person in a large crowd getting repeatedly struck by an erratically flickering strobe light. Yorkshire-based Theia Greenaway (who is also part of the equally enthralling experimental electro duo Gullet Obvs) assembles a twisted digital version of a singing bowl meditation, alternately granting and denying the listener access to the ethereal virtual realms from which she draws her sounds. Expect abrupt transitions, celestial glitches and mind-altering melodies that require full-body immersion. To fully experience her seriously transformative cyber-collages, relinquish control and let your mind be guided by her sonic scraps from beyond.

Gabber the French way, as if drained from the swamp: lurking in Villefranche-de-Rouerge is Judith Bassuel and her demented electronic alter Shitty Shed. Constructing rhythms through mad dactylographic prowess, Shitty Shed draws you into her den of saturation with the deceptive straightforwardness of heavy drum machine distortion, which she rips through in a contagious frenzy. Demonic hardcore techno moves notwithstanding, the ingenuity with which Shitty Shed masters her gear gives way to unexpected faith in humanity, in which flesh and fingers can overcome the trappings of machinery and deliver the kind of high-energy meltdown that only living cells can bounce to.

Cagey scandos Statoil dredge out the viscous, impenetrable essence of dark capital and make it (loudly) audible. A cacophony of riffs explode into chaos somehow orchestrated within itself, representing, as per their bio, “the manifestation of the middle finger to hyper-capitalism, cynical raw material extraction and the lack of compassion for the common human”. Perhaps the best place for pessimism to thrive is in the blare of shrieking noise and blasted eardrums. A 2022 tape titled Black Gold is the main source from where this gunk can be unearthed ~ the rest will have to be experienced live, in the presence of the sole representatives of “static oil-core” while their transient existence bores into your rig.

Lo-fi luminaries The Shadow Ring were/are an undisputed influence for myriad artists of improbable persuasions. Originating in 1993 Kent, the duo-turned-trio of Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris and Tim Goss cut an enigmatic presence even within the bounds of weirdo DIY music, spouting a dozenful releases and baffling audiences with shambolic appearances throughout their decade-long tenure. Their use of uncanny instrumentation, poetic apathy and disturbed electronics renders something akin to staring into a sinkhole, instilling a foreboding, alienating and somewhat narcotic ambiance where everyday rubble proves to be a cryptic lure. Their appearance at KRAAK Festival may be the definite closure of The Shadow Ring’s tale, and perhaps an opening to new chapters in this discordian saga

One half Capelo and a full Elfo Van De Velde and founding member of the Brussels collective Poxcat, Eve Decampo dons some headphones on her pointy ears to bring the night to a head as DJ Hyppocampo. Thanks to her time as keeper of the Brussels mediatheque, Hyppocampo’s digger brain is a bountiful source of rare and forgotten gems that beef up her mixes, which can range from dungeon synth ballads to carnivalesque funfair times to rager party mode in a switch of the fader. There’s a high probability that you’ll end up doing the conga ~ fear not, we’ll be first in that line!