It’s been a curious experience attending the Borealis festival in Bergen in recent years. i first went in 2019, and have been on a handful of occasions since, each time recalibrating my understanding of, and relationship with, everything that Borealis has tried to do and be. This year’s was of particular interest as it was the last hurrah from outgoing artistic director Peter Meanwell, following a 12-year tenure. There are times when i’ve been impressed by the attitudes and outlook that Meanwell has sought to promulgate. Borealis is certainly welcoming, helpful, and informative – way more than many festivals i attend – but as the years have passed it’s struck me more and more that the effects of this are decidedly mixed.
For example, the performance that began the festival, Vedøya – Laments to the birdmountain who lost their voice, overseen by composer Elin Már Øyen Vister was not really a ‘work’ in any meaningful sense but effectively a community project. Its loosely-assembled mish-mash of reflections and quasi-poetic ramblings about the island of Vedøya, and the effects time and change have wrought upon it, was simply tortuous to sit through (all the more so as none of it was in English). Music was relegated in importance behind the sharing of stories and eating fish soup. Likewise the performance at the other end of the festival, Franz (Purgatorio XXVII–XXXIII) by Spreafico Eckly and Matteo Fargion. Just as lengthy as Vedøya but way more stupid, it amounted to nothing more than an 80-minute skit, the cast larking about within the weakest of notional narratives about trying to dramatise Dante, the only presence of music here being random snippets of well-known pieces sporadically incorporated for no obvious reason.
The rampant safety of the proceedings was perfectly exemplified by a pair of works performed by ensemble Tøyen Fil og Klafferi. The first, Martin Taxt‘s A Decade Dancing in the Eternal Echo was a banal exercise in pseudo-profundity: endless chords, pointless chords, worthless chords, un-musical, non-musical, anti-musical, wretched in extremis. This was followed by Sister of simple song by the duo Propan (vocalists Natali Garner and Ina Sagstuen), akin to a collection of songs for children, by turns simple, quirky and cloying, but above all very, very tame. These works genuinely – amazingly – begged the most basic question of compositional competence, as did the première of Johan Sara Jr.‘s The Eight Sámi Seasons, theoretically a work exploring the traditional year, in practice an agonisingly prolonged display of the most rudimentary musical ideas. By turns bored and infuriated by it, i found myself contemplating again the kind of environment and audience mindset Borealis seems keen to inculcate: all wide-eyed optimism, openness and uplift, wellbeing and inclusion, hugs and happiness, sparkles and smiles. What about sound and music? What about experiment and challenge? What about difficulty and complexity and strangeness and edge and weirdness and vacuum and overload? A festival where travesties such as the aforementioned are featured, even celebrated, has misconstrued inclusivity, allowing it to run amok. Being open is one thing, Borealis is gaping.
More genuinely thoughtful results came elsewhere. Camille Norment and her accompanying ensemble delivered a curious stream-of-consciousness in Will there also be singing?, passing through delicate stases and low-key bubbling and pulsing textures, periodically alighting on unexpected coincidences and striking timbral moments. Jaleh Negari and her quartet went deeper, challenging notions of song and structure, of soloism and solidarity, with some of the most telling music emanating from Zeki Jindyl’s EWI, a kind of abstracted human voice. The balance of lyricism and noiseplay was intoxicating, with an engrossing sense of group dialogue, in the process tapping into suggestions of chant and wail that suggested ritual, suggested distress, ecstasy and pain, dream state and stark reality, timidity and triumph.
BIT20 Ensemble walked a similar line teetering between concrete and abstract forms. Helena Tulve‘s Stream was the most overtly beautiful, the players (as in so much of her music) moving together but uniquely, individually, suggesting tangible ideas from a place of almost geometric enquiry. Øyvind Torvund pushed abstraction further in Neon Forest Space, though despite injections of familiarity and melodic writing, was a tough world to penetrate, whereas Diana Soh‘s Modicum, though simpler proved more engaging, playing with pointillistic behavioural states. Hannah Kendall‘s Even Sweetness Can Scratch the Throat was the unequivocal highlight, articulating a kind of abstracted melancholy. Plaintive shapes, tremulous forms, a tense unanimity permeating the ensemble, bristling, fibrillating (even febrile), yet with a sense of line always running through, a focal point through its tough, spiky soundscape. Mesmerising.
The best music i heard at Borealis 2026 proved that there’s life in the festival yet. Several of the most effective works involved some form of physical engagement. To experience Sámi composer Sara Marielle Gaup‘s Nana Nannán (solid soil) it was necessary to head up Fløyen, one of Bergen’s surrounding mountains, progressing from the funicular rail to clear roads to vague paths to an increasingly non-existent track that somehow – not really inexorably – led to Jiennagoahti, a small listening hut. Nestling on the side of the mountain, buffeted on three sides by the shrieks and howls of icy wind, a small group of us curled up inside, lying on furs and drinking hot coffee, while listening to Nana Nannán. It blended seamlessly with both the internal and external environment – in fact, it seemed to complete it: the wind outside, filtered by the hut, provided high frequency bustle and violence; the music inside, unfiltered, gently filled out the sound spectrum.
As such, the voices in the work – their presence the one constant throughout – emerged out of both real and sculpted noise patterns, often as little more than bare traces, vocal vestiges, memories of a song. So liminal were these voices it felt as if they materialised directly from the wind, phantom and illusory, embedded, only partially emergent. This was in keeping with the sonic character of Nana Nannán overall, occupying a liminal space where real sounds – crackle, crunch, bubble, drip, chirp – were abstracted. Tones thus became akin to focused bands of turbulence; voices overlapped to form meta-vocal textures; even bird calls and bees sat somewhere beyond simple statement, as if their pitch and buzz were being fashioned by more elaborate noise-sculpting processes. And throughout it all, the song – finally blooming into a vivid chorus – continued, persisted and prevailed, just as the Sámi themselves have done through altogether more testing levels of noise and violence.
A more literal kind of immersion took place in Borealis’ annual ‘Music for Sea Bathing’ event, which traditionally begins the final day at the local outdoor swimming pool. From this vantage point, mostly spent in the warmth of the main pool, periodically broken up with necessarily brief dips into the frigid waters of the adjacent fjord, we experienced Paragorgia. Performed by folk musician Benedicte Maurseth and percussionist Håkon Mørch Stene, both amplified and put through electronics, the work demonstrated a wonderful mixture of elements. From an ambient-like intro, the duo focused on objects falling in and around tanks of water, producing complex granular textures, enhanced with evocations of dolphins and whales. Maurseth’s singing and fiddling, combined with Stene’s marimba and vibraphone, kept the music grounded, tactile, establishing a charged tension between acoustic and electronic sounds, and even more so between extremes of delicate fragility and robust power. The pool was packed to capacity, and by the end every face and all ears were fixated by the duo’s mesmerising performance.
The most immersive listening experience of Borealis 2026 – theoretically much dryer, but thanks to the non-stop rain that fell throughout the festival that’s not really true – came at a concert titled ‘Sonic Entanglements’ in the club space of Østre. Both performances explored the interiority of sound, seeming to position us deep within the music, such that it overwhelmed and subsumed, providing an eye-of-the-storm-like revelation of intricate detail within massive quantities of energy. Serene Din, a fantastically-titled work by Mariam Gviniashvili and Hilde Marie Holsen, took trumpet as its starting point. The tentative opening belied the duo’s intent, transporting us into the midst of an epic, effluvial torrent of wind and noise, a welter of details clearly discernible within the centre of this maelstrom. In due course the perspective seemed to shift uncannily; Holsen’s trumpet turned lyrical, underpinned by throbbing bass, and the tumult – by now less intense and variegated than before – became more impenetrable, suggesting we had unknowingly passed outside it (or it had passed through us?), arriving at a place of pure vestige, final buzzes and gusts petering out.
Equally astonishing, and even more extreme, was Roföldur by Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir and John McCowen. Barely audible overtones emerged from the ambient noise floor, like half-asleep birds caressing sound. Abruptly this gave way to the most almighty blaze, a scalding, razor-edge of abrasive bass, no longer a focal point but everywhere. Here, too, inner details were revealed, the most startling being a tiny triad described by overtones, a seemingly implausible presence – so shockingly small and intimate in this overwhelmingly massive context – yet seemingly supported by everything looming over it. Contrabass clarinet and electronics melded together, utterly inseparable, they eased off, poised before blazing anew, the music now serving as a kind of sanctuary for birdsong-like trills and blips playing out within its vast walls of judder, and ultimately winning through. i’ve rarely heard such enormity and intimacy made to work so sympathetically and effectively. At this concert, finally, was everything that had been so conspicuously absent elsewhere at Borealis: risk, challenge, complexity, experiment, provocation – and above all, utterly stunning music.
It saddens me to say that returning home from Bergen was a relief. Over the years i’ve attended, Borealis has become less like attending a festival than spending time in a commune, the curated output of which is so often presented as a kind of tonic, a balm, a primary source of encouragement and support. Not so much like a concert series than a retreat, playing out within the ultimate, carefully-designed, cotton-wrapped safe space. “Retreat”, “safe” – these are important words, and from the perspective of contemporary music and the avant-garde, their connotations – pointing emphatically away from dauntless visions of courage and radicality – felt overwhelmingly present and fundamentally problematic. Borealis’ strapline has long been “a festival for experimental music”, and i honestly came away feeling that all three of those key words had been fatally undermined: not really a festival; not particularly experimental; music only sometimes the purpose and point of the proceedings. But this year was the literal end of an era; in 2027, Borealis’ new artistic director Tze Yeung Ho takes over, so for now at least, there’s hope for the future.
