Croatia’s SHIP Festival does the navigating for you

As this is only the second edition of SHIP Festival, I guess we can’t begrudge these Croatian cats their apprehension. They’re still adjusting to the three-day window in early September in which their small mediaeval city – it is theirs – gets hijacked by We Move Music Croatia and transformed into a place whose primary goal is to move music from the Balkans and beyond into new and influential ears.

This is the weekend that their 11th-century fortress – St. Michaels, one of the city’s four fortresses – gets commandeered by bands such as CIŚNIENIE, who utterly mangle a violin bow before the end of their first post-rock noise epic. This is the weekend that their waterfront – a steep, ten-minute descent from the fortress back through town – usually a tranquil spot for licking ice cream or paws, surrenders to the wacky hyperpop of Franek Warzywa & Młody Budda. The Polish duo bemuse their Green Stage audience with potato-themed songs and graphics, incongruous against the backdrop of far-off mountains scooping their arms around bobbing boats. Needless to say, potatoes are the one thing everyone is discussing over breakfast.

But SHIP isn’t the kind of festival that permits you to stumble on these weird and wonderful acts by accident. The lineup is curated so that a maximum of two artists perform concurrently, meaning the end of each set heralds a group exodus, the party convoying from one venue to the next as we develop an all-in-this-together kind of camaraderie. If there’s one complaint, then, it’s that, unlike larger festivals, you don’t get the selfish satisfaction of curating your own lineup. SHIP makes it almost impossible to miss anything or anyone.

In addition to St. Michael’s Fortress and the waterfront Green Stage, there’s Azimut. Part basement club, part coffee shop, part bar, part exhibition space and gallery, the de facto headquarters for the festival is a place to lounge on couches or schmooze industry folks at funky tables while a giant sculpture of a parachuting soldier surveys you from the ceiling. A short bus ride away is TUNEL, built during World War Two, in which hybrid-electronic acts such as Divorce From New York hypnotise into the early hours. Its counterpoint is House of Art Arsen, an elegant indoor auditorium that hosts the slacker-surf sounds of Prague’s Island Mint as well as the first performance of the weekend – that is unless you count the lairy wedding singalong slash fireworks display at a nearby church (whose lyrics, I’m told by a native speaker, have a surprisingly far-right undertone).

Opening Thursday afternoon, the 19-piece Mimika Orchestra describe themselves as a “progressive, avant-garde, concept jazz-world ensemble.” For those with limited orchestral vernacular – e.g. me – an unsophisticated summary of their sound might be “Whiplash meets Game of Thrones.” Either way, Mimika’s compositions are beguiling, conceptual, and rhythmically complex (conductor Mak Murtić somehow gets us all clapping in 7/4 time, or perhaps it was 9/8).

The subject of the lyrics is a funeral and its accompanying feast on an imagined Mediterranean island, but because Maja Rivić sings in Croatian, English speakers are guided by her delivery – much as you would be by a particularly lyrical instrumental. Indeed, all the instrumentalists have their turn to ‘sing lead’, but the standout is Nika Bauman and her self-harmonising flute solo, as she curls her way around pitches and textures I didn’t know a flute could emit.

An hour earlier, the CFO of We Move Music sums up the concept behind SHIP: “As an islander, ‘Ship’ meant connection – we want you all to connect,” Frane Tomašić says during the introductory speeches. And although few of us have success with the antisocial cats, connection between humans – and with music – is abundant.

The daytime conference schedules – running simultaneously at Arsen and Azimut – encourage earnest conversations about the challenges facing the music industry. Maisie Woodford, label manager at Manchester’s Scruff of the Neck, poses hopeful arguments in favour of a healthy, symbiotic relationship between artists/labels and social media/streaming, opposing head-in-the-sand despair. The “Showcasing Diversity in Global Music” panel, meanwhile, touches on problematic labelling, such as pigeon-holing a festival as a “world music festival” and thus – ironically – hindering the wider exportation of its artists

No one pretends that SHIP is a world music festival: its performers, who mix freely with the punters and professionals, rarely use these kinds of redundant genre tags when describing their music. North Macedonian trio Funk Shui hand me a fake credit card for “Totally Legit Bank” featuring their band name and details – the kind of outside-the-box marketing tools that come up during the panel discussions – and offer three words to describe their sound: “energetic, chaotic, melodic.” Their raucous, ferocious, Enter Shikari-reminiscent din on Saturday night confirms as much. (There is definitely no ‘funk’ in Funk Shui.)

ERNST – who quite literally continue the earnest conversations from earlier in the day – are inspired by Virginia Woolf and feminism. “Music can be so uplifting and can be healing, but it also serves another purpose: one of protest,” says lead vocalist Nicole Salomon, dressed in a nightgown and comfortably commanding a shy, early-eve crowd. She sings in both German and English, another approach to this idea of deconstruction, and leads the band through punchy, synthy pop songs whose buoyancy keeps the impending thunderstorm at bay.

Upping the political ante is Brighton’s Lambrini Girls, the UK’s lone representative. The post-Riot Grrrl trio are unfazed as the fortress’ ramparts fail to insulate us from battering-ram winds and nosediving temperatures. “I’m sure you’re all very tired from your networking,” quips vocalist Phoebe Lunny. She’s right that the setting combined with the pat-on-the-back networking can coat proceedings with an unearned glaze of importance and profundity. We need Lambrini Girls to incite the food fight – they are the Trojan horse inside the castle, reminding us that we’re all still feral music lovers.

Embodying the audience’s collective id, Lunny ditches her guitar for most of the set and clambers into the crowd and up into the stands. “You all look like ants,” she says, collapsing into a fold-down seat, before asking the crowd, one by one, “What’s your name, and are you a queer legend?” Lily Macieira’s growling fuzz bass holds everything together while the lanyards think about slipping off and inhibitions start to relax. It’s invigorating and transcendent and that it takes place inside a literal fortress is completely absurd. (I also appreciate the irony of going all the way to Croatia to have a bit of a moment while watching a band from my hometown.)

Similarly high-octane and hair-down is Balkalar. The Zagreb-based group contorts traditional Balkan melodies into their own brand of frenetic, irregular folk-something. Their no-frills setup – acoustic guitar, violin, percussion, and upright bass – envelops the basement of Azimut, cutting into the haze of cigarette smoke. All four members contribute vocals and their instruments seamlessly dovetail with one another: staccato violin runs conclude bursts of tremolo-picked guitar, and before you know it the percussionist has swerved the song around yet another unexpected corner. It is a thrilling and interactive set greeted by a moshing, chanting crowd. “This is a showcase festival,” Irma Vicula Bulaja says in between one of her violin attacks. “For all you people that have come to find new talent, you have found it now.”

She’s not wrong. During the panel on discovering hidden gems in an oversaturated market, Pitchfork’s Jeremy D. Larson says, “You can be either the wind or weathervane.” In other words, you can point to what’s happening, or you can be the force that pushes things in a new direction – that creates the direction. The cats of Šibenik better get used to having us come to stay, because this weekend proved that SHIP is the wind.