Boundaries Festival, Sunderland, 2024

Sometimes, it’s the provincial towns where the fascinating stuff happens. Take Sunderland’s Boundaries Festival. In theory, assembling an international array of experimental music gurus in a northeastern city better known for footballing struggles and industrial heritage should be a non-starter. Easy to assume there’s no local audience, and nobody willing to travel to an unfashionable outpost regardless of who is on the bill.

Yet it works. This year’s edition, the fourth, was the biggest yet. By now, Boundaries has established a reputation and people – artists and audience alike – are very much keen to brave the first bite of a North Sea winter to be a part of it. Graeme Hopper, creator and curator of the festival, reported that he was close to selling all the two-day festival passes in the week leading up to the weekend and the climax, in Sunderland’s atmospheric Minster, was a triumph: powerful, meditative music and sound that kept the crowd rapt.

It started with Arnold Dreyblatt, a legendary figure on the experimental scene whose career spans five decades since he emerged in the New York scene. Flying in from Berlin purely for the Sunderland festival, he treated a rapt audience to a performance that proves you don’t always need a high energy stage presence to put on a show. It’s something of a ballsy move to step onto the stage and, without a word of introduction, quietly set up an electronic drone, complete with a rustling of strips of paper. That drone, expertly manipulated, was the basis for a 30-minute sonic exploration. Minimalist, yes, but light years away from the chugging rhythms of a Steve Reich or the glossy pulsing of Philip Glass. This views the classical minimalist tradition through an industrial lens; heavier sound, greater use of microtonality and non-musical sound.

It's absolutely not easy listening; you won’t find much in the way of crowd-pleasing hooks here. Sparse vocal samples are not intended to spoon feed a narrative to the audience. Instead, you get a sonic universe to explore. It’s also some distance from Dreyblatt’s roots. He finished his Sunderland set with his current version of Nodal Excitation, calling card since 1979. This work, built around an electronic double bass strung with piano strings, is all about rhythm and the release of harmonics. It has some of the drive of Reich while retaining its own identity.

Next came Loula Yorke, who creates other-wordly sounds from a cottage studio in Suffolk. Of the three acts on the bill, Loula’s music is probably the most accessible: anyone familiar with the Doctor Who theme will recognise something of that in here. But this brand of retro-futurism – performed using analogue synths in the manner of a frantic pre-digital telephone exchange – unfolds into something deeper. There’s a whiff of Kosmiche about it, a hint of the grittier end of Sovietwave. But most of all, there’s a timelessness, a sense of an unrealised future resonating through this. It’s powerful and addictive stuff, and probably the most accessible set on Saturday’s bill.

If Loula Yorke is timeless, Rojin Sharafi is very much in the here and now. This is music that never sits still. In a 2022 interview, Rojin told Struma + Iodine how ‘less is more’ is not a philosophy she can live by. “Reduction bores me, not only in music, but also in other areas of my life. I always want to learn new instruments as if it were a toy and if I work with something once, I don't want to do it the next time. I think it has a lot to do with my childhood. I like it when it is and remains colourful and diverse.”

Tehran-born, Vienna-based, Rojin’s back story informs some of that ever-changing sound world: at times there are snippets of Persian folk music surfacing through the mix; other moments evoke some of the brutalism of the Second Viennese School. Electronics merges with percussion, a zither-like instrument pounded at great pace in an animated stage performance. And, while much of the experimental school steps away from explicit meaning, there’s a moment when a heavily distorted speech addresses the plight of marginalized cultures – specifically Palestine, but it’s hard not to connect some of this to her homeland’s international isolation as well. Provocative, at times uncomfortable listening, but blessed with moments of rare grace and beauty in the midst of the turmoil.

Boundaries Festival is an annual event, usually in late November in Sunderland. For updates on future editions keep an eye on Insta, Twitter or the website.