UH FEST 2024

There is no UH Fest in Budapest this year, but there is SCKRUUHK at Recyclart, Brussels from 6th to 8th June. SCKRUUHK is a three-way collaboration curated by schiev, Kraak – both operating mainly in Brussels – and the Budapest based UH Fest.

After its 2024 edition UH Fest decided to have a break for the next year, but couldn't resist this fun with their buddy festivals in Brussels. The story goes back... but to cut it short: UH Fest is a long time follower of Kraak label and festival, presenting an artist or two of theirs almost every year for more than a decade now in Budapest, UH and Kraak also did a joint event in Brussels in 2023, while the friendship with schiev goes back to the foundation of Shape of which both festivals are members since 2015. Still, the three-way bonding moment happened at UH Fest 2023, when both the Kraak and schiev crew spent the week in Budapest to be part the UH experience. And now there is SCKRUUHK, a festival of friendship and weird music from Friday to Sunday, with panel discussions on Saturday and a label market on Sunday as well.

Here goes the manifesto and the full line-up (in alphabetical order) with short descriptions from the curators.

A three-way festival smorgasbord with buddy fests from across city lines and country borders curating a potluck of sauced-up artists for a long weekend à la franquette at Recyclart in Brussels! Belgian festivals schiev and KRAAK team up with Budapest’s UH Fest to offer an international musical menu for adventurous palates spread over three days. We got Hungarian buchla-folk fused with Brazilian rhythmic romps doused in Egyptian dancefloor wizardry sprinkled with some Belgian nü indie hymns and Southern gothic reverb’d strings ~ and that’s just a taste? It’s a hutsepot of all sounds loved and relished, mulled together in a friendship stew to share at will. Grab some napkins and join the feast, there’ll be enough to go around for everyone.

2K88*

schiev says: Pioneer of the polish hip hop scene and keen on sampling, the lastest music of 2K88 feels like a thick layering of interwined influences. If it’s a modern take of the sound of the polish hiphop scene of the 90s, that scene was itself reworking the sound of London.

The result of this referential orobouros is a hazy music with a murky groove, drowned in a wall of fog pierced by fluorescent stabs.

Amber Meulenijzer

KRAAK says: dearest Amber Meulenijzer has been blowing us away - sometimes literally! - since her days as a hopeful graduate of sound art when she played announcer at KRAAKfest ‘19. Between her SAAB horn processions and organ meditations, her field of work is unpredictable and filled with uncanny resonances that stirr and still in equal measure. What she’ll cook up this time is an enigma, but most certainly one delivered with a twist to the earspace and a twinkle in her smile.

Áron Porteleki

UH says: With Hungarian folk tradition in his bloodstream and a more than a decade long presence in improvisational music, Áron Porteleki is probably the most original drummer and multi-instrumentalist of the Budapest experimental scene, and also beyond – with various ad hoc or conceptual impro-formations in free music, being also member of unconventional rock formations like Dorota or the Decolonize Your Mind Society just-tuned psychrock orchestra, and he recently released Smearing, a solo record recontextualizing the sonic languages and structures of black metal, drone music and noise rock. At Sckruuhk he will experiment the idea further on drums, electronics and voice.

Assyouti*

schiev says: If you've been following the adventures of schiev, you'll know that we've been pointing our musical compass towards Egypt for some time now. Over the last few years, we've come to believe that Cairo is where the latest mutations in the hardcore continuum have taken place, in a sort of post-hardcore melting pot of jungle, break, rave, drum and bass and breakcore, pushing just about every genre into the red.

Assyouti is one of our latest finds. Operating out of Berlin, he’s an excellent representative of this scene that hits hard, changes feet at all times and distorts everything. His music is eminently urban, somehow reminiscent of motorway time-lapses - just with more smoke, more dust, more noise and more frequent pile-ups. Egyptians do it better.

Augustė Vickunaitė

KRAAK says: Lithuanian tape spinner Auguste Vickunaitė was first spotted by our kraakian lens as part of the duo Liver Love at Troglobatem 2023 ~ we were intrigued by her fluid dexterity with reel-to-reel recorders for blending complex soundscapes together, and her subsequent solo show sightings have only deepened the admiration. Worlds appear and disintegrate in a grainy mush, inhabiting sonic collages in unpredictably rhythmic ways and just as soon obliterating themselves in the melée ~ music to sink into and dissipate with.

David Edren

KRAAK says: Sometimes known as DSR Lines, Antwerpian fixture David Edren has been ringing eardrums with his trickling compositions of exquisite delicacy for the better part of this millennium. We’ve been itching to have him back on a KRAAK bill since 2018, and his latest exercise in environmental symphonies, 2024’s Binnenin, felt like perfect timing: a springing, chiming interweaving of woodlands minimalism tugged by the dramatic undercurrents of elemental electronics paint an ever-unfolding illuminated scroll brimming with exotic energy and creature comforts.

Drogded*

UH says: It's easy to namedrop when it's about Marci Bíró aka Drogded, then you decide if it’s all made up or not: a noisemaking perpetuum mobile of Budapest's self organized punk underground, legendary drummer of avant-hardcore outsiders Norms, psych-noise-rocker of Piss Crystals, cosmic-prog-nowave-joker of Protoplasma, coregrinder of SxOxTxEx, acid-techno-mutant of Safffyúk, recently teamed up in a doom metal supergroup with MA’IWA (do you remember them from the Kraak/UH collab event in 2023?), but also among the founding members of rave collective Pénz (meaning: Money), a constant free music collaborator and cornerstone-factotum of the Kripta (meaning what else: Crypt) self-built punk venue – just to name some. He might have been your sound technician last time you played in Budapest back in, say, 2019. Now, freshly back from Indonesia's Jogja Noise Bombing, Drogded will bring his no input mixer pedal madness and you'll have fun. He definitely will. No Bandcamp and IG sorry, it’s alive!

Eugène Blove / Clyde Arcalis / Ugné Vyliaudaite (residency)*

schiev says: It's always exciting to struggle to place an artist, and Eugene Blove is one of those elusive ones. He can sing - in a delightful voice - a conventional pop song, but after a few minutes you can expect him to destroy it with loops and effects pedals. A drone can turn into a lullaby, a word can be repeated to the point of disgust and loss of meaning. To strengthen his post-Tazartes experiments, Eugene Blove will be accompanied by Ugné Vyliaudaite and Clyde Arcalis, following a residency as part of the SHAPE+ programme.

Eve Aboulkheir*

schiev says: Listening to Eve Alboukheir's music, I can't help but think of Permutation City, a Greg Egan's novel where a new form of life is created within a digitally simulated ecosystem, the Autoverse.

As I wander through the musician's artificial soundscapes, I can feel the digital wind blowing on this otherworldly territory while little creatures made up of 0s and 1s flee as I approach.

Félicette

schiev says: With its toy pianos, acoustic guitars and instant-earworm melodies, it's hard to imagine a more fitting way to end a festival under the sun than Félicette** .

Borrowing the playful, lo-fi sound of some of the best guitar pop of the 90s, Félicette takes us straight into the closing credits of a teen movie screened at Sundance or on a beach by the fire, just as you're putting on your lumberjack shirt to ward off a cold. It's music to whistle in the shower the next day, to put you in a good mood before heading back to the real world.

** Hoping the chaotic Brussels weather doesn't prove us wrong!

Fiesta en el Vacio + Inès Rousset (residency)*

schiev says: Beneath their false airs of spoken-word nursery rhymes or lo-fi dub, the songs of Fiesta en el vacio are like little cabinets of curiosity. They all contain their share of magic and mystery, but also their share of anguish and strangeness.

This French-Argentinian artist's dreamlike, uncomfortable vignettes will be presented here in a brand new version, produced with Inès Rousset following a residency as part of the SHAPE+ programme.

Gondozási központ

UH says: A primeval folk desert populated by magical undead creatures with no recollection of the past and a future they never had: Gondozási központ (means Care Center) is a conceptual project of Márton Bertók aka Triglav and Éva Bárdits, formerly of Budapest based feminist indie-punk trio Holnaplányok, merging Béla Bartók's research practice with Mark Fisher's capitalism critique, with Bertók on drony modular electronics and Bárdits on electronics and voice melancholia recontextualizing fragments of Hungarian peasant song archives. You think you want to be a peasant, but you are just manipulated by capitalism, sorry.

Jabu

UH says: A Soft and Gatherable Star was one of the hidden beauties of last year, Jabu's third record shifts from the vocalized soul ambience of Sweet Company through the rough dubbed out drum machine led sketches of the Boiling Wells demos into an introspective dream pop softness and dub-gaze urban melancholia, stripped down intimacy, layered minimalism with distant echoes of Low, but always rooted in Bristol's distinctive and rich post dub sonic landscapes, and most of all in the fragile inner universe of Amos Child, Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt.

Kalozin

KRAAK says: the upbeat, kaleidoscopic world of Brazilian-born Kaloan and their Kalozin alter got us hooked from the first melodies that tumbled out like squiggly toys from their Nonlocal/Pamsychia release Pindorama X700. Jangly beats, cartoonish samples, sinuous synths and other ad-libbed elements mingle in and out over a tapestry of reinterpreted rhythms straight from the homeland. Feels like being in a bustling video game jungle, where all is playtime in emerald/sapphire atmospheres and filled with encounters that are wild and of manifold nature and which always catch you by surprise mid-dance.

Kinga Ötvös*

UH says: Transculturalism and gender-fluidity keeps the artistic identity of Kinga Ötvös in motion. Born as part of the Hungarian speaking minority of Romania's Zilah, now lives in Berlin. With degrees in academic vocal and acting studies, and years spent in experimental theater, Kinga Ötvös is not an artist performing music on stage, but a performance artist merging drag, avantgarde voice and electronics in a live action shapeshifting drama of technicolour.

Turner Williams Jr

KRAAK says: Our favorite Alabama man over in Marseille rambles his way back into our sphere after his magical opener at KRAAKfest ‘23. With his lap-wielded electric shahi baaja and janky pedal board, Turner Williams Jr dazes in his utter deconstruction of stringed music, contorting and commingling influences of indeterminate origin and timeless appeal. His sunny disposition is no accident, considering his origins and dwellings; the man carries the sun within him and shares it ~ albeit jaggedly ~ wherever he goes.

For all SCKRUUHK info, daily tickets, passes, schedules, label market and panel discussions check out this website.

* This concert is held with the support of the Shape + Platform and Creative Europe. SHAPE+ is a European platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art co-funded by the European Union and Pro Helvetia. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.