Meakusma Festival 2024: “Guaranteed encounters with the unexpected and brilliant”

At this year’s 20th anniversary edition of Meakusma Festival, a tight crowd gathered in Belgium’s Eupen in search of sounds and experiences they wouldn’t find anywhere else.

A multilingual, multigenre crowd descended on the pretty German-Belgian town of Eupen for the 20th anniversary edition of Meakusma. Quaint and pastoral green during an unsually humid summer, cheap local beer and venues within walking distance made for ideal conditions for an experimental music festival. Refreshingly, there were fewer English accents than you’d expect, given the calibre of artists performing – think Krakow’s Unsound, but with less emphasis on the ‘who’s hot right now’ in underground music, and more on the genuine curiosity of its organisers.

Marked by a unique openness and efficiency, this year’s enormous programme guaranteed encounters with the unexpected and brilliant. Highlights included Merope’s evocative folk harmonies played in a Protestant church, a haunting organ installation in a disused shopping mall by composer Maxime Denuc, and improvised minimal ensemble Melos Kalpa‘s atmospheric prog, led by Grammy-nominated producer and recording engineer Marta Salogni’s six tape loops in the Baroque interior of St. Nicholas church.

There were still predictable draws, including Lord Tusk and John T Gast, who hid behind their signature smokescreens of fog in a room of sweaty devotees, playing their comparable dubwise avant-drone and bass on what sounds like CDJs with mixed results. PAN signing Honour was similarly veiled in haze, while drowning found samples and whole tracks – a Mary J. Blige vocal stem here, a fire-and-brimstone sermon there – in reverb and distortion with the odd live guitar. 

Like the aforementioned artists, there was a general retreat from using visuals in most of Meakusma’s performances, with Upsammy’s set being a rare exception – the Amsterdam-based producer’s intricate IDM rhythms and bass textures were accompanied by VJ spo0ky’s environmental footage with digital overlays and interference. The more physical performances tended to be the more exciting, with Polish producer and composer Lutto Lento incorporating live drumming to pummel at his industrial noise, while sitting broodily on a small stage with a laptop and effects pedal. Belgian subcultural ‘supergroup’ 5th of July also brought visceral energy to the same space later, performing to a mostly domestic crowd.

The Heuboden area (arguably the best) was always well-attended, and often so rammed it was impossible to push through the front door. There, mostly DJs ruled for a couple of hours at a time, a.s.o.‘s Alias Error included, whose rhythmic, leftfield dance bangers countered her usual folk and trip-hop ouevre. NTS presenter Lupini played an eclectic two-hour set spanning dance to darkwave, with a Nick Cave deep cut of his early aughts Grinderman project – a surprising selection that had the dance music venue pulsing to the raucous garage rock of No Pussy Blues. It was enough to make a post-punk aficionado feel weirded out and possessive, while affirming the Manchester-based DJ’s reputation as an eclectic party-starter. 

Given the popularity of Heuboden as the rave room, it wasn’t clear how familiar festival-goers were with Cairo-based producer Dijit, but the second-floor space was swamped with sweaty people to the point of bursting during a prime 1am slot. Pressed up against window sills and hanging from the rafters, the audience surged with anticipation for what would be a set of mostly buildup and little release. Stroom label founder Nosedrip played there the next day, flexing an undogmatic sound palette with a selection crossing deep house and downtempo.

Meanwhile, the grassed area next door played host to outdoor sets on the 54 Sound System’s impressive pyramid of handmade analog speakers devoted to multifarious forms of rhythm and bass. There was Elijah Minelli’s groggy, dub-infused outsider folk, Príncipe artist Nídia’s dynamic kuduro, and the techno, dub, dancehall, dembow (and so on) abstractions of Ojoo & Ossia, among others.

The 140+ artists playing Meakusma’s four-day event made up a good portion of its audience – housed in private homes and lodgings – while accommodation for other visitors was totally booked out, even with the addition of camp grounds and cabins to deal with the surplus. It made you wonder how Meakusma, and the town of Eupen, could accommodate what must surely become a bigger crowd for a more popular festival, especially as other comparable ones become more concerned with corporate sponsorship and following fashion. For now at least, Meakusma is a unique, eye-opening experience for the serious music lover interested in encountering sounds they might otherwise never come across.