Good luck, frankly, to any algorithm that attempts to recommend music to me after analysing complex brain data from me during MENT festival. Over four nights my auditory cortex finds itself tickled and shaken by Turkish psych, sludgy doom metal, clattering techno, chaotic glitchcore, a tin whistle and a hurdy gurdy. This festival in Ljubljana – now in its 12th year – includes the folksy and the far out, guiding its international crowd of punters and industry professionals towards music from the Balkans and beyond, featuring 27 countries this year. We come away with a strong sense of Slovenian sounds for sure, but more than that, we discover relentless alloys; hybrids of Anatolian, Sephardic, Arabic, Western European, American styles.
The festival opens with Dublin band Madra Salach, performing in Kino Ŝiŝka, the same 1960s cinema turned music venue where Lankum played last year. Twisting traditional Irish folk songs up with post punk angst, the lads treat us to the miserable, and considerable, charms of their debut single ‘Blue And Gold’ about pinning hopes on €2 scratchcards. Sour and searing covers of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Ribbon Factory’ and The Pogues’ ‘The Old Main Drag’ follow, with warm mandolin and harmonium merging with the snarl.
Downstairs Grunt turn out to be a moreish, understated Slovenian folk rock collective whose chill frontwoman remains deadpan while expertly sliding up and down the scales, issuing melismatic Macedonian laments in the minor key offset by rolling grooves; like Fleetwood Mac at a Kurdish wedding party.
Female vocals provide highlights elsewhere too; see the complex, ancient noodlings of Serbian singer Svetlana Spajić from enigmatic trio Gordan, or the feral milkmaid appeal of the charismatic Meral Polat, whipping the room up with her blend of Turkish jazz, human rights-centred agit-pop and writhing Ethiopian funk.
Ukrainian singer Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko performs the astonishing Гільдеґарда (Hildegard) with synth drones from Heinali; an intense, pin drop experience, followed shortly after by the magnificent Holy Tongue. Catching impish, queer, British-Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti play live is a guaranteed dopamine hit, so it’s a welcome bonus extra when they follow up her Holy Tongue gig with a solo performance of her powerful, unmacho and inventive percussion the following night.
Forward planning what to see goes a bit out the window on Friday night when forty acts are programmed around town. A glass elevator funicular slides visitors up the side of Ljubljana Castle, through ancient rock (300 million years old to be exact, and semi-fossilised) delivering us to the castle’s chapel. Singer Irena Tomažin is repeating a type of mantra plaintive and insistent in Slovenian, accompanied by hurdy gurdy under an ornate painted ceiling. Upstairs Welsh trio Tristwch Y Fenywod gather in a circle of long hair and glitter dresses, like the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, before unleashing their enchanted, gothic pop; a mystic blur of clanging bells, zither and driving drums.
I take the free festival shuttle bus to Metelkova City, a grungey cluster of dive bars that evolved out of a squat in a former military barracks, now a much-Instagrammed landmark with metal sculptures and graffiti outside. If one room is full up, you just take a punt on something else. Which is how, after the glorious, soul cleansing doom of Slovenia’s Hexenbrutal in Gala Hala nightclub, where the drums are as heavy and satisfying as the cheese burek I ate at lunchtime, I find myself watching German artist Europa (real name Moritz Haas) setting fire to aerosol cans next door as he plays his trap-flecked ambient pop to a room of folks swirling lit sparklers.
The symbols for this year’s MENT are the rabbit and the snail — reflecting the festival’s different tempos. Sometimes you’re darting through sleet showers to catch the end of a set in an old power station, other times you’re lingering to nerd out to the geology ASMR of Czech-Portuguese sound artist Pinheiro or the ambient acoustic ditties of Januš Aleš Luznar, who hand-makes his own kora and harps.
The closing night finishes back at Kino Ŝiŝka for CE/MENT, a night of audiovisual thrills. Slovenian industrial noise artist Lifecutter presents Deluge, his dark ambient techno score played in front of a nightmarish film of fluorescent flotsam and jetsam. Huddersfield producer Aya is extra unhinged and disgruntled tonight after SwissAir delayed her on the way to the festival, but her twitchy soup of gabba, rave and after-party angst goes down a storm, as she wavers between performative bouts of high self esteem and technical glitches, growling at the crowd that she’s in charge. Marcel Weber (MFO) amplifies her performance of hexed! beautifully with his bubbly, holographic projections against a plastic curtain, flooded in clouds of red, blue and green light.
Munich DJs Polygonia and Skee Mask (Bryan Müller with Lindsey Wang) take turns cajoling the Saturday night crowd from a room of relatively restrained head nodding into far looser, sweatier dancing, with excellent sets of techno and euphoric IDM. Although we may not have been roaming around the cobbled streets of Ljubljana today, I notice as I slide into my hotel bed in the small hours of Sunday morning, that I’ve almost done 10,000 steps already that day, on the dancefloor. MENT makes for a melting pot of weird and wild sounds from around the world, gathered up in the dragon city.
