BRDCST, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, Apr 7-9

All musics are embraced during BRDCST (Broadcast or Breadcrust?), a weekender that takes over the three stages of Ancienne Belgique, one of the crucial venues in Brussels. There’s also a fourth space across the street, in Bonnefooi, a happening bar-cum-club. Amongst the electronic, rock and jazz acts were a bunch of artists who customarily reside in the pages of Songlines.

Here was an early opportunity to encounter the rising presence of Joe Rainey [pictured above], native American pow wow vocalist making 2023 his touring year. He’s a member of the Red Lake Nation, of the Ojibwe people, in Minneapolis. Rainey is joined by producer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Broder, who wields a massive power over the combined soundscape. The pair perform in a ritual almost-darkness, Rainey seemingly using his own previously recorded chants in layered fashion, as he adds his own harrowing real-time live voice, raised above everything else, delivered with vibrato extremity. Broder inhabits a very extreme zone, manipulating bass beats at bludgeoning levels, sending out waves of power-noise, dramatically pausing, then bombing back in, as Rainey works out his liberating form of angst, rousing, triumphant, mournful and forlorn simultaneously. It could be said that Rainey ought to be more dominant, that he’s being overtaken by the dreadnaught industrial electronics, but the collage combination of vibrational voice and dark matter does indeed mesh as an ultimate conduit for an altered pow wow tradition.

Gaye Su Akyol (Photo by Daria Miasoedova)

Gaye Su Akyol provided a compulsive climax on the festival’s final day, presenting the latest songbook provided by her album Anadolu Ejderi. Akyol doesn’t compromise by singing in English, now that she’s an international performer, and even here in Brussels she’s mostly weaving anecdotes in her own tongue, acknowledging the significant Turkish presence in the main hall of Ancienne Belgique. The latest band might be the cut-price incarnation, with just a twosome of lead guitar and drums, but the overall sound is still populated by bass pulsations, and is pretty much as strong as ever. Akyol’s voice is maturing, as she resonates with a commanding bass power, dramatically clad as usual, for radical politics in thigh-high PVC boots, her shimmering cape denoting super-powers of persuasion. The songs remain rooted in vintage Turkish pop and psychedelic classics, but dragged into the gothic garage rock zone, often twanging with a demonic surf edge.

Back upstairs in the club space, the Tuvan singer Sainkho Namtchylak joined up with electronics beatmaster Slumberland (otherwise known as Jochem Baelus). She’s a veteran on the scene of vocal experimentation, specialising in a ritualistic form of improvisation, but here operating frequently in a melodic song-form. Even if it’s quite a strange manifestation of khöömei verse-and-chorus. Slumberland is also extreme in his beat momentum, his bass rush so loud that a retreat to the rear bar is called for, by those of us who never wear earplugs. Nevertheless, this all-surrounding thrust certainly empowers the music. Slumberland makes unusual instruments, cobbling gear together on his makeshift wooden frames, favouring the organic-electronic look. Namtchylak seems like the 1930s Shanghai nightclub singer of our imaginations, with veil and black spangle dress, and a vinyl platter neatly attached to the side of her hair-stack. She navigates melodic lines and guttural hackings with ease, an anarchic side-carriage to the hurtling inevitability of the electronics. This was an early set on the last day, but there’s a hardcore of BRDCST fans who are already here, right from the very start. This a festival for extreme dedication to the newness of sonic adventure.