Le Guess Who? Festival kills fascists

As the multi-venue festival commandeers the Dutch city, lining the canals and “coffee” shops with die-hard music geeks, a seismic electoral upset out of the US lingers in the air like a sour old-man fart, as will its consequences for generations. Closer to home, football hooligans in Amsterdam burn Palestinian flags and chant hate speech after a match between AFC Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. That’s how Nicolas Jaar of Darkside relays it partway through the New York duo’s Friday night set, which is otherwise characterised by entrancing electronics and harsh lighting that casts Jaar, drowning in a huge trench coat, and his songwriting partner Dave Harrington as silhouettes; they’re greeted enthusiastically by a crowd of floppy hand dancers (you know the move) and chants of “Free Palestine.”

“When Geert Wilders is still… alive, you can’t take spaces like this for granted,” Jaar continues, alluding to the Dutch far-right politician’s disdain for just about everything Le Guess Who? (LGW) prioritises and promotes: acceptance, cultural assimilation, experimentation, moving forward. As leaders worldwide seem dead set on shoving square societies into uncompromisingly round holes, punishing the masses with binary, backwards thinking, LGW is an antidote. It’s right there in the motto: “Listening is the way forward.”

That’s how we end up with Cecilia Morgan and her project Afromerm. The London composer pairs up with flautist YUIS to unravel her nebulous soundscapes of piano, birdsong, wind chimes, and ASMR-like vocal parts in Jacobikerk (St. James’ Church) – one of two church venues that draw crowds away from the main LGW site, guided out into the crisp November chill by prudent Christmas lights. It’s a soothing way to ease into four days of music, and there are many special, one-off collabs to come: the aforementioned Mexico City-based cellist Mabe Fratti and her band are another highlight, joined by the UK choir Shards who augment Fratti’s latest batch of orchestral-prog.

Elsewhere, Peruvian instrumentalist Ale Hop (Alejandra Cardenas; nothing to do with beer, sorry) sits with a guitar flat on her lap and attempts to redesign it, a sound collage of creaks and spurts and rumbles giving the feeling that we’re watching her take a blowtorch to convention in some kind of pop-up workshop. It’s a vulnerable performance, but as she intones during one spoken-word passage, “Sacrifice demands a body.”

Starkly different are the campfire lullabies of French-Canadian songwriter Myriam Gendron – “Go to sleep, you little baby,” she even sings at one point – but the performance is likewise vulnerable, especially given the setting. Pieterskerk (St. Peter’s Church), “a spiritual home for people with diverse backgrounds,” is 975 years old and noted by chamber choirs and experimental acts alike for its acoustics. Though barely above a murmur, the Montreal songwriter’s beautiful, cathartic lilt subsumes an audience sitting shoulder to shoulder on creaky wooden chairs, wrapped tightly in winter coats, lost in sepia flashbacks of uncomplicated childhoods (just me? Okay).

Gendron’s 2024 album Mayday is about withdrawing, she says, and while it does make you want to pull a blanket over yourself and disappear into the bardo, the set has its moments of sacrifice: lyrics that can be read in the context of collective suffering, pledges of quiet resistance. “Lips that taste of tears they say are the best for kissing” and “Arms held out to darkness are usually whiter” are a few choice lines from “Threnody,” twirling around a warm acoustic guitar that makes your eyes close and chest hurt just right.

James Brandon Lewis and the Messthetics occupy the other end of the volume spectrum. This team-up of the acclaimed saxophonist and members of the legendary post-hardcore band Fugazi – both from Washington, D.C. – unfolds on the ninth floor of TivoliVredenburg. The complex is more like a museum or sports arena than a concert venue. A labyrinth of escalators, bars, pop-up DJ decks and merch stands, and towering plants lit up green and red, LGW’s headquarters can host up to seven concurrent concerts under one roof.

Dressed in all black, JBL and co are unsmiling and stoic at first, a sense of mourning telegraphed by their playing, as though having followed them from the US capital. But cracks start to show and fun sneaks in. Pensive faces twist into ‘stink’ faces – the look of orgasmic outrage prompted by a death-defying run of squawking sax or red-hot guitar solo. Fugazi’s rhythmic DNA is very much alive too: unapologetically groovy, but still with that lockstep punk snap. (Even Canty’s famous farmer’s bell remains on his drum kit.)

A punk band who haven’t been around the block yet are local youths Spurn, an onomatopoeic name that derives from ‘spurning’ – to sprint. Their fast-as-you-can, two-minute ‘eggpunk’ songs are overlaid with synthesiser melodies that are almost parodical in their wiggly, theremin-esque, funfair-core tones, lolloped out by the most cheerful organ player ever. This goes down in Kapitaal, the LGW Hangout space. A fully operational screen printing factory above a pizza joint, the anachronistic all-in-one hosts parties, gigs, live analogue printing collabs, and even has its own record label. Vying for space among oversized house plants are pieces of large, clunky machinery – one of which is emblazoned with the label ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’, while Zines, prints, and cassettes are for sale. There’s also a zine-making station so that you can kill fascists even if you don’t know how to operate an analogue four-colour carousel press.

LGW allows for all kinds of approaches to activism. You’ve got a grassroots DIY space like this one, and the scrappy punk bands and primitive (though powerful) craft tables within, but back at base, you can experience ambitious, high-concept performance art. As though playing on the concept of doppelgangers, or their stage bisected by a mirror, Montreal’s FYEAR is four sets of ‘twins’: two violinists face each other, etching out distorted, distraught recriminations. Two drummers tumble over one another like bickering brothers. There are two keyboardists (one plays a baritone sax too). But it’s the duelling vocalists who steal the show with their haunting incantations, jumbled spoken-word scrabble spillage, and animalistic mouth sounds akin to bewitched chipmunks.

The set is overwhelming and engaging, asking difficult questions of its audience: “Who on earth gets to pass? Who on earth gets to sleep? Who on earth gets to exist?”. After a panic-attack crescendo, Kaie Kellough erupts into a new kind of vocal solo, reciting text easily twice the length of this article. It is so fast that you only catch certain words – future, present, planet, ameliorate – but the delivery is flawless, breathtaking for everyone involved. The collective receives a standing ovation as the words “end the genocide” flicker on screen.

How do you follow that? Today, but also every day.

The only way is with Arooj Aftab. Under her watch, LGW’s final night submits to joyful bliss – to her playful wit and the “absolute failure of love,” as the New York-based singer admits her songs tend to focus on. A feeling of calm and safety descends as we’re reminded to be silly and hapless amid the despair, just as Aftab does when she asks her team to round up 1,200 whiskey shots for the crowd, who fill every seat in the old-school auditorium downstairs – the venue upon which the nine-floor complex was extended. Aftab hands out six cups before abandoning her mission, swept up in the dreamy, navy-blue ambience of “Whiskey,” a standout from her new album that basks in the heady pleasure of nascent love. “Your head gets heavy and rests on my shoulder,” she coos.

There’s plenty of that to go around TivoliVredenburg. The previous night, a couple sits down across from us in one of the bar areas. I ask if they can see the fight: the two men wrestling in an office building opposite. The couple have just got engaged, down by the canal, they beam, sliding a ringed finger across the table. The Earth spins on its axis – if you never take a breath (or a whiskey shot) and turn your attention from conflict, change will seem insurmountable. Everything may be a bit shit, but Le Guess Who? suggests that sometimes hope is only one question away.