Glasgow-based composer Ailie Ormston examines intentionality and complex orders of emotion in their musical quests. A maker of electronic music as well as music for ensembles, Ormston's work hinges on timbral abstraction, temporality, assemblage and improvisation, constantly reinventing their approach to instruments and sound sources and offering new prospects in listening. They have collaborated with Tim Fraser and Still House Plant's Finlay Clark on  It Changes and Sunflowers Face respectively, and released their ambitious production Frames that lean, pictures that roam on Akashic Records last year. Deconstructed smatterings both electronic and acoustic coalesce into shattered symphonies where guitar, tapes and strings jar the senses into a disorienting and utterly liberating field of visions.

The inflatables in Anouk Kellner’s sound installation breathe air into the organ pipes that act as their voices, seeking the attention of all who can hear their shrieks. But there’s no way of comforting the Belgian composer’s choir of cushiony cones and drones. Mesmerizing how they move, those elegant coded things… Het Bos will be bursting at the seams with bittersweet feelings. If your pillows could tell you that it will all be okay, while they are the ones doing the crying. They may not be the liveliest musicians performing at KRAAK Fest this year, but they'll certainly be the most emotional! 

Hailing from South Portland Maine and originally part of the cult outfit Cerberus Shoal, Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin started Big Blood in 2006, which grew into a full-fledged family affair when their daughter Quinnisa joined the band and brought her multi-instrumental boyfriend Aiden Arel into the mix. A seemingly endless output stream of gut-punching songs steeped in heightened emotive idioms, their mix of raw folk and experimental psychedelia drives a personal and ever-evolving narrative that has garnered them a staunch cult following over the years. Their new record will be out on our much-loved Psychic Sounds, which should sufficiently attest to the power and universality that Big Blood's musical cosmos wields.

The four dudes that make up Ghent's De Regering Van Treffelijke Zaken (including KRAAK scene alums Ishtembashtok and Venediktos Tempelboom) have to basically be summoned out of their lairs in order to play together. This might explain why the music - psychedelic improvisations with a debt to the Sylvester Anfangs, the Träd, Gras Och Stenars and International Harvesters, and all the long-winded psych greats - hits with the kind of jolt that transcends preparatory mindframes. Shreddings on 12-string set aflame by electronic grooves and tied together by sinuous bass lines and primitive percussions induce an experience of temporary displacement that's deliriously blissful and - despite its reverential references - boldly refreshing.

French folk legend Emmanuelle Parrenin has been making music with her hurdy-gurdy, harp, guitar, thumb piano, and so on, for decades, and still her music sounds relentlessly timeless. Her first solo album La Maison Rose, released in 1977, was reissued in 2017. Only her mystical drones could catapult you across that forty year gap so smoothly. One minute you're peacefully enjoying your baguette and the next you’re tumbling down a cliff. Despite her continued experimentation, her albums Maison Cube (2011) and Targala — La maison qui n’en est pas une (2022) prove that her house is there to stay. Please don’t stay in the house, though. This should be enjoyed collectively!

Founded in 1997, Institut für Feinmotorik is, at its core, a multidisciplinary artist group working across borders between Germany and Switzerland. On the musical front, Daniel van den Eijkel, Florian Meyer and Marc Matter foist their collective interest in prepared turntables onto the setup known as the Octogrammoticum, which uses eight turntables and four DJ mixers as well as an array of indiscriminate objects (stickers, rubberbands, erasers, etc) liable to be considered a groove by the stylus. The ensuing musical exercises land somewhere within that odd, clunky threshold between sound art and mechanical techno, welcoming all the weird routings and trance-dance inductions that may occur. 

All forest dwellers will be kept warm this March wrapped up in the layers upon layers of Katya Shirshkova’s soft vocals. The intricate sound of her one-voice-one-looper choir is nonetheless so hauntingly beautiful, you’ll still be shivering though. The Russian artist, who is based in France, creates compositions and conceptual scores that result in highly hypnotizing polyphonic harmonies and dense performances, whether they are made for mechanical frogs or solely for the voice. For KRAAK Fest she will perform her piece “Le Héron,” which was released last year on Stellage as a split LP together with David Maranha’s A Reunião ~ squawking birds, gentle words and introspective incantatorial textures. 

Leave it to silver-tongued La Rat, aka Goya van der Heijden (1/3rd of Devon Rexi) and Tobias Jansen, to convince the biggest weirdos to leave their urban habitat and make their way to the Antwerpian forest. Having la late night meal together and then never hearing from them again… Carelessly dribbling our vulnerable hearts with their hella compelling stories, these ever-so-charming rodent troubadours from Amsterdam hip-hop their way through life, spitting funky beats while they mop up all the catchy trash they can find. Meanwhile, we’ll be stuck scavenging the pipes for any traces of these pied-piping rats.

Pablo Mirón and Juan Vacas of Miradasvacas make music suitable for something like a deranged road movie or for brushing your horse’s manes. Melancholic harmonica, violin, field recordings, guitar, crackling noise, stuff moving around… Just when you thought things lasted forever, tapes start falling apart in the saddest way possible. Yet, no distortion can keep these loops from staying in your head and heart forever. You might know the Madrid duo as being part of the collective Real No Real and from the Ediciones Fontenebro label. They released their second album En Perpetua in May last year on South of North. 

Maria Cervelló Llorca has always been deeply entrenched in the audiovisual world, working as an art director, props manufacturer and FX makeup artist before she began her journey as Polifeme in 2017. Using radio televisions, TV pattern generators, calculators and other electric paraphernalia, Polifeme blasts open portals to different manifestations of reality mapped by electromagnetic waves, warping frequencies into a pulsating, resounding creature. The visual element of the performance adds an amplitude akin to watching a mad scientist bring the impossible to life. The outcome is as much a sensory experience as an oddly existential one, where the invisible is made audible and borderline tangible, heightening our awareness of secret environments around and within.

Last spotted touring Europe in pre-pandemic times, Sugai Ken's much-awaited return to the continent has him stopping by KRAAK Fest for another inscrutable performance steeped in darkness and sound. The producer gimmickily deploys electrified renderings of folklore and nature, specializing in the replication of insect and bird sounds through purely electronic means so as to evoke the mystifying aura of the Japanese night. With several releases currently in the pipeline - including a much-anticipated collaboration with Jan Jelinek - the surreal world of Sugai Ken overflows with mystery and a reverence for the environmental factors that seep into our consciousness and color our experience, known or unbeknownst.

Listening to Zosha Warpeha’s music is like washing your body in a projection of pastoral scenes. Getting splashed by light and shadow and suddenly understanding the dialogue between her and her string instrument. Everything pauses when the Brooklyn-based composer-performer plays her Norwegian Hardanger d’amore and softly sings. Resilience spreads itself through the body and soon you’ll be twirling circles in a perpetual fog for who knows how long. Time feels differently in the countryside. All that pacing around leads to deep deep focus that brings attention to the intimate interplay between your corporal rhythm and Warpeha’s folk melodies. 

Frequently spotted either hanging or selecting tunes at Brussels' roaring Rattus nights, DJ Cœur Vert's boundless taste for the weird and the wild will set the ambient tone for the duration of the fest!

Closing the night is a man we've all seen more than once, clad in his signature black and flashing his mischievous smile while doling out delight in potent green rays. "Probably the most unpredictable DJ out there," they say, and as instigator of many 'dancefloor accidents' through the magical and maniacal manipulation of moods, DR GR33N's set will be a love-in for all the stirring souls who'll stick it out till the end!