The first fruit of a new partnership between Moers Festival and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival was the fascinating and mutually enriching XN concert series at Moers 2025—XN for eXperimental eNcounters—with more concerts to come in the future as each alternately curates at the other.
Photo by AJ Dehany
In conversation with Moers director since 2014 Tim Isfort in the attic of the Peschkenhaus art gallery, Huddersfield director since 2006 Graham McKenzie offered a chastening note that “Berlin and Munich individually have greater budgets than the entire UK Arts Council”—so in order for the UK to operate at an international level, collaboration is absolutely necessary.
The festival theme of “Stille” (Silence) is in part to a response to Moers director Tim Isfort’s recent tinnitus. Discussing concepts of Lautheit and Leisigkeit (loudness and quietness) he described an ongoing notion “to find the silence in really loud music, to find the noise in silence.” He recounted how in each decade Moers, a ‘jazz plus’ festival, has had its “provocative moments” with the 1990 booking of Blixa Bargeld’s LOUD industrial outfit Einstürzende Neubauten being memorably controversial, and in 2025 the eight-hour acousmatic recording performance (my term) of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part renaissance vocal work Spem in Alium. There’s a juicy hint that the theme for next year might be kitsch. That would certainly wind up the purists.
The progressive end of hcmf// has been associated with Modernism and New Complexity in classical music, but McKenzie has tried to pivot the programme to include more ‘new music’, or “younger music that is neither/nor but in between.” The linchpin of “hcmf// moers” in 2025 was composer-saxophonist Cath Roberts, who was first commissioned by hcfm// in 2021. Moers director Tim Isfort grew up in Moers and his first formative contact with improvised music was peeping over the fence to watch Anthony Braxton. At hcmf// in 2024 Cath Roberts performed a solo set premiering “Patch dynamics: three sections of a collage” in support of Mariam Rezaei and Kobe Van Cauwenberghe’s Ghost Trance Duo performing the Braxton masterwork. The third of three concerts on the Friday night in the sonorous but crystal-clear acoustic of the Envangelisch Stadtkirche in Moers was a new “XN trio” using electronics and saxophone alongside electronic artist Kate Carr with poet Iris Colomb sitting crosslegged between the two tables, working with a stack of instruction manuals for electronic instruments. The trio performed two pieces of live sound collage in what struck me, with my art critic hat on (forgive me), as a thoughtful response to ASMR using sonic and vocalic glitch to explore the nature of the posthuman.
Part installation, part performance, David Sappa’s “Foreshores Rising” opened the XN programme, filling the chancel with kinetic sculptures constructed from objects found on the banks of the river Thames, synchronising non-tonal rhythmic sound to release a musical effect. The ferocious free-playing “Right Here” duo of Charlotte Keefe on trumpet and Ashley John Long on double bass came close to sound art and musique concrète in another absolutely perfect pairing of talents.
XN Creative-Workshop-Concert was a measured performance of studied abstraction and third stream improvised music. Welsh improvising stalwart Angharad Davies, sawing away at the violin, was joined by four talents from the world of academic credential, Verena Barié with her extraordinary four-foot-long recorder that looks like it’s made out of Roblox, Adrian Thieß minimalistic on trumpet and bloopy electronics, with Aaron Rosenow’s textural drums, and Carolin Schnabel’s plosive vocal utterances. One of the few concerts to successfully grapple with the festival theme of “Stille” (silence), absent of jazz language, languouring in deep stasis and pure abstraction more silent than silence itself, with a portion of the concert conducted in complete darkness. Moers and Huddersfield, each with festivals in their 54th and 48th respective years, share a commonality that reminds me of a point raised by Douglas Hofstadter: Chi dice Siena dice Palio — to mention Siena is to bring up its famous horse race. Which would go for Wimbledon too: you think of tennis (or wombles?). In any word, many concepts are sous-entendus: there, but whispered.
In the discussion, Graham McKenzie and Tim Isfort admitted that the programme had been assembled quickly, which seems almost disingenuous. As the “hcmf// moers” partnership ripens and develops, we look forward to being treated to more remarkable and mutually enriching work.
The three-year hcmf// moers project is funded by GVL (the German copyright collection agency for performing artists and producers), PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited), and the Goethe-Institut London.
