Friday’s festival night sets off with Icelandic composer and musician Kaðlín Sara Ólafsdóttir at the Clarissine Concert Hall. Icelandic composer and musician whose work reflects on deterioration by drawing parallels between the imperfections of memory and technology. Kaðlín Sara Ólafsdóttir is an alumni of the Institute of Sonology in The Hague and has recently released her debut album titled Hljóðfirring. She will perform material from the record alongside Toby Kruit; reflections on the meaning of home, as the artist’s life spreads across three distinct cities. Kaðlín Sara Ólafsdóttir performs on voice, clarinet and uses cassettes and field recordings, while Toby Kruit performs on harmonium. A beautiful, meditative concert imbued with gentleness, nature and a yearning to belong.

Limpe Fuchs is a legendary German composer of acoustic and visual happenings and experimental musician. After studying piano and violin in the early sixties, Fuchs was active in a group called Anima and continues to produce recordings and perform to this day. She could also be described as a sound researcher – she uses and deeply understands a lot of unusual, most self-made instruments. On her website Limpe Fuchs describes her practice in the following way: “Making music while listening to the streaming of time. Simplicity and emotion.” She will bring her impressive set of unusual percussive instruments to Bratislava.

Continuing at A4, next in line are international electroacoustic improvisation collective NOISS Collab, a festival commission formed of creative musicians from Norway, Iceland, Turkiye and Slovakia. This year’s program organized in collaboration with the audience development project NOISS also features Arnalds & Mofjell & Rónaiová & Skavhaug Nergaard & Tanrıkulu.

Lyra Pramuk‘s debut album Fountain was created by utilizing only recordings of the American, Berlin-based artist’s own voice, “processing and layering largely non-verbal sounds to explore the very fiber of her being,” as Pitchfork declared in their Best New Music review. Fusing elements of classical vocal techniques, pop structures, performance practices and influences of various genres of contemporary electronic music, the result is what could be best described as some kind of sacral, futuristic folklore. Since the release of the album in 2020, Lyra Pramuk has collaborated with musicians like Holly Herndon, Ben Frost, KMRU, Colin Self and others. Her performance at NEXT will be followed by concerts at C2C and Pitchfork Music Festival this autumn.

DJ Lycox will bring contemporary club music to the unique boiler-room venue Kotolňa at the Faculty of Architecture. The prolific Parisian producer is one of the breakout names associated with the Portuguese imprint Príncipe in recent years. His production range is wide – introspective afrohouse bangers sit side by side with cinematic jungle excursions, slow love potions are followed by melodic pieces featuring traditional “latas” batida percussion. He will perform a DJ set, one that promises to be as eclectic as it is exciting.

The night will also hear De Schuurman. De Schuurman is one of the key names spotlighting the Dutch bubbling house movement, a hi-energy dancehall permutation. As the legend goes, in the late 80s a young DJ Moortje from Curaçao was playing at Den Haag’s Club Voltage, where he accidentally played a dancehall track at 45RPM, not 33, to feverish reception from the dancers. De Schuurman’s latest compilation Bubbling Inside on Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes is a collection of hard-to-find pieces highlighting the propulsive rhythms of this genre, produced from the early 00s all the way to 2019. Brilliantly produced, energising music made for the dancefloor. For fans of anything released on Nyege Nyege or Príncipe.