Abrupt festival is an intriguing, unpredictable showcase of global sounds and subcultures

At Abrupt festival, you never know what musical epiphany you’ll encounter next. For the first edition, taking place across October 9 to 13 this year, the multi-venue, city-wide event in Brussels kept on shifting gears, flowing from jazz concerts to violin performances, or hurtling between techno sets, dubstep nights, singeli sounds, and more, in an intriguing, unpredictable showcase of sounds. The uniting thread across this eclectic mix of international and local musicians was their forward-facing attitude to music.

Run by the non-profit cultural organisation Arty Farty Brussels, who previously co-organised six editions of Nuits Sonores Brussels, the Belgian arm of the innovative Lyon-based festival, Abrupt is built on similar principles of celebrating contemporary music, independent scenes and topical thought-leading. But with Abrupt marking the first time Arty Farty Brussels has organised a festival of its own, it also set out to represent the distinct cultural identity of the city.

“It was time for a fully Brussels-identified festival,” says Robin Verslype, Communications Manager and Coordinator at Arty Farty Brussels. “We wanted to create a line-up that reflected global trends in electronic and contemporary music, as well as the intrinsic diversity of Brussels. Abrupt blends emerging, contemporary and unconventional music, public discourse and other disciplines, it aims to draw attention to pioneering and continually changing musical subcultures.”

Arriving in Brussels on the festival’s second night, I was thrown straight into this blend of avant-garde thinking and experimental performance, with a special one-off concert taking place at the city’s St. Michael & St. Gudula Cathedral. An impressive building known for its Gothic architecture, the cathedral made an unusual setting for a powerful listening experience. Sat on the pews of its dimly lit, tunnel-like choir hall (beneath a 26.5 metre-high ceiling and watched over by imposing statues of saints and angels) the emptiness and grandiosity of the space feels overwhelming, an effect only bolstered by the beauty of the music.

Brussels-based musician Elisabeth Klinck, a contemporary violinist, takes charge first, forging new paths in the acoustic realm with her highly textured and ambient landscapes. Aa stand-out performance from another Brussels-based musician Maxime Denuc follows, this time commanding the cathedral’s spectacular, elevated organ.

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Channelling his innovative approach to music composition, Denuc performs alongside pre-programmed robots to maximise the organ's 4,300 pipes. The inclusion of robots means that the full extent of the instrument’s musical capabilities can be used, ranging from its deep, reverberating bass notes to searing synth-like chords and high-pitched tinkling sounds – sometimes all at once.

The compositions themselves are also highly experimental, taking recognisable tropes from electronic dance music and applying them to the classical pipe organ. At times the effect is so convincing you can hardly believe it’s being produced by an instrument so ancient. Repetitive loops, rising chord progressions and droning sounds emulate techno, trance, ambient, electronica and more, making adrenaline surge within and your head nod as it does in a club-setting, but on this occasion in a cathedral.

At the same time, over at Bozar, the city’s Centre for Fine Arts, a completely different concert is taking place. Having sadly missed the Moses Yoofee Trio, a highly acclaimed jazz ensemble made up of a drummer, bassist and pianist, I arrived in time for the final hour of Chief Adjuah, an American trumpet player re-framing the traditional hierarchy of the jazz band by taking centre stage.

The five-time GRAMMY nominated instrumentalist leads a talented group of musicians with his typical charm and charisma, stopping occasionally to tell us that his electronic guitarist was bringing the “blues back to jazz”, or to enlighten us on his innovative concept of “stretch music”, a musical form that attempts to connect with the traditions that came before it.

By the end of Thursday night alone, I had already heard as many different musical variations as you might hear over the course of an entire weekend at another festival, and my excitement for Friday had been piqued.

The dance music offering at Abrupt was spread, mainly, between two nightclubs, about a 10 minute walk from one another. Reset is a large, warehouse-style space housed in a former bank (although, according to the festival organisers, they still haven’t found the safe). Designed in a circular shape, the multi-room venue allows ravers to move seamlessly between dancefloors on the same level, without sacrificing sound quality.

The second venue was C12, a club that consistently cropped up when we asked six Brussels-based DJs for their “favourite spots in the city”. Located below the Central Station, C12 is a hub for the city’s music and art scene, with an emphasis on championing creativity that is slightly left of centre – Abrupt certainly ticked that box.

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One of the ways that the festival achieved its far-reaching sonic scope was by collaborating with different organisations around the world that sit at the forefront of their respective musical cultures. One such partnership was with Nyege Nyege, the Uganda-based collective pushing new electronic sounds in Africa and beyond. Their team provided curatorial expertise for the Friday night line-up at Reset, alongside Brikabrak, a Brussels-based collective with a similar mission.

Stand out sets include DJ Anderson do Paraíso, who plays his signature funk mineiro, a sinister-sounding regional twist on baile funk from the Brazilian city Belo Horizonte. While, Malian DJ Diaki introduces many to his home country’s balani music, a high-tempo electronic style that uses traditional samples of the bafalon, a large wooden xylophone.

But it’s DJ Travella that attracts the largest crowd with his rapid-fire singeli set. An electronic interpretation of traditional Tanzanian music (such as Taarab and Bongo Flava), singeli emerged in the ghettos of Dar es Salaam around the mid-2000s and has since grown to a more mainstream status in the East African nation. Playing songs out of his laptop with an infectious energy, DJ Travella brings the uplifting swing of singeli to the industrial Brussels nightclub.

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Speaking on the festival’s experimental curation, DJ Pö (who also played at the Nyege Nyege takeover) says: “The need to challenge the audience’s ears (and bodies) is urgent in order to keep the underground, unconventional music scene alive, fresh and exhilarating. It seems like Abrupt has accepted that challenge.”

“The diversity of music genres, origins and influences makes my head spin and tickles my curiosity,” she continues. “Some names I know, but most I have yet to discover. And reading about the projects made me eager to do so. Abrupt is giving a necessary platform to the artists who are pioneering those new sounds and pushing boundaries to constantly question the concept of music and twist it into their desired shape. In a sense, Abrupt is the loudspeaker for those artists.”

This desire to position itself at the forefront of underground music from across the globe is also reflected in the festival’s carefully curated programme of talks and workshops, which focus on highlighting the most relevant and important topics of our times, adding new thoughts into important conversations.

Taking place at Reset, the Abrupt Lab was powered by European Lab, a platform launched by Arty Farty to connect creatives, activists and thinkers who share the belief that art and culture can be a tool to “transform our crisis-ridden societies”, according to its website.

In a similar vein, the conversations at Abrupt festival question specifically the role of music and club culture in the face of socio-political turbulence. Topics included ‘Politics of Curatorship: Ethics and Best Practices’, ‘Fostering Solidarity in the Electronic Music Scene’, and a conversation on how Tbilisi’s electronic music scene is mobilising against a recent ‘foreign agent’ law that threatens the existence of cultural organisations.

“It’s important that we talk about the challenges cultural actors are facing all around the world due to political instability or other geopolitical problems,” says Verslype. “If these talks and workshops helped getting the conversation started, then that’s already a win.”

Moving on to C12 as the pitch-black darkness of the night slowly fades, I was met by the darker dancefloor sounds of Varg2™, known for his experimental take on styles such as industrial techno, rap, EDM and trance. While in the other room, C11, Italian-Ivorian producer Ehua goes B2B with local DJ Mankiyan, switching between the former’s chaotic percussive canvas and the latter’s bass-heavy, grime-infused rhythms.

Other DJs on the line-up at C12 on Friday include Kuwait-based producer and DJ Van Boom, Cairo’s ZULI, known for his vigorously leftfield techno, and CCL, a respected crate digger with a vast knowledge of dubstep, bass, and 2-step, as well as more melodic and abstract sounds.

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On Saturday, the party starts even earlier, with a daytime techno rave at an industrial warehouse, Usquare. The likes of Marcel Dettmann, Dasha Rush, Herton and phanom. From there, ravers have three parties to choose from. Back at Bozar, the art gallery and event space, revered label boss Kode9 presents a live audio-visual show, immersing festivalgoers in the fictional universe of Astro-Darien, a conceptual video game thought up alongside his mind-boggling ‘Escapology’ album.

He also plays a later set at Reset, delving into the history of his Hyperdub imprint with a deep dive into its influential repertoire. This is followed in the other room by two of electronic music’s greatest minds, Skee Mask and Actress, bringing their next-level approach to DJing together for a B2B set. Other DJs include techno stalwarts Hadone, JakoJako and Marie-Julie, as well as a takeover from Colombia-based record label TraTraTrax,, who are pushing a hybrid sound blending techno, UK bass, dembow and other traditional Latin music styles from South America.

The festival eventually comes to an end on Sunday, with another daytime rave featuring the likes of Gabrielle Kwarteng, Fafi Abdel Nour, UNOSand Azo. But, as you may have gathered by now, this wasn’t any old warehouse rave, with the DJs continuously channelling the Abrupt ethos of forging new paths in electronic dance music.

Festivals should be about discovery. Especially now, with soaring ticket-prices at single headliner concerts and events making people more inclined to see tried and trusted favs over taking a chance on something new, festivals (alongside grassroots music events) are playing an ever more important role in encouraging people to find fresh sounds and scenes they may not have come across before, or ever have discovered outside that context. While there are many big names on the line-up at Abrupt, the range on offer means that, for most people, there’s plenty to scratch below the surface and open their mind to new avenues. So, if you’re looking for a festival that’s going to take you out of your comfort zone and show you the most up-to-date electronic music from all corners of the world, Abrupt is the festival for you.

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Meena Sears is Mixmag's Digital Intern, follow her on Instagram