La Nature Festival through five key performances

Deep in the Belgian Ardennes, La Nature Festival pairs a secluded woodland setting with four days of bass-heavy, boundary-pushing electronic music.

Nestled in a clearing in the Belgian Ardennes, La Nature Festival occupies a patch of woodland at Baraque de Fraiture that seems to exist slightly outside of time.

In winter, this is one of the few places in Belgium where you can ski. In June, the snow is long gone, and the beech trees are in full leaf, as around 3000 people arrive without knowing who they’re about to hear – La Nature Festival‘s line-up is intentionally never announced in advance. Names are revealed only on-site, on the opening day. What draws people here is not a bill of headliners, but something harder to quantify. There’s no air of pretension here, but rather a collective trust in this year’s nine curators, and an unyielding willingness to be surprised.

Those curators brought a programme as eclectic and considered as the landscape it inhabited. At the centre is NoName, the Belgian non-profit collective that has shaped La Nature since its inception, drawing on more than twenty years of collective experience in electronic music and running a year-round ecosystem that spans the Fleur Sauvage label and the Hors Piste open-air event in Seraing. Alongside them were Maloca, RebelUp, Dub&Dal, Crépite, Katatonic Silentio, Moojo, Whispering Signals and Simon Médard – together covering a spectrum that ran from dub, techno and druidstep to electroacoustic experimentation, euphoric club music and ambient meditation.                 

Across four days, La Chapelle – the main forest stage – delivered rib-shattering low end and trippy visuals beneath the trees. La Clairière kept the faithful locked in with hypnotic techno under open sky. La Ruche hosted some of the weekend’s most extraordinary experimental and live performances. Moojo served up euphoric, house party bangers for those who needed lifting. And the Hypnose Room swallowed people whole as the night drew to a close.

Here are five of our standout performances from this year.

O.M.Theorem (LIVE) feat. Sonikblasts

Berlin-based Norwegian O.M.Theorem has spent years building a body of work around percussion-driven, bass-heavy music that refuses easy categorisation – polyrhythmic, low-end-obsessed, and thrillingly detailed. Their Eruption album, released last October, offered a glimpse of what a live collaboration with Sonikblasts might sound like, but nothing quite prepared the Friday afternoon crowd for what actually unfolded live.

It began with O.M. Theorem alone, performing entirely live, laying down highly detailed low-end punch with a warm, chest-filling sub that felt native to the trees around La Chapelle. Then the vocalist Sonikblasts stepped forward and elevated the set to another level. What emerged was Konnakol, a South Indian vocal percussion technique dating back some 5,000 years, in which the rhythmic syllables of Carnatic music are rendered entirely through the human voice. Over the top of O.M.Theorem’s sound system explorations, the syllables interlocked with the bass frequencies in ways that felt natural and just as importantly, incredibly fun.

Adding to the occasion was Dub&Dal, founded by Indian-born, Berlin-based curator Aarti Kriplan, whose curatorial fingerprints were all over this slot. In the lead-up to the set, Dub&Dal moved through the crowd handing out homemade dal – a ritual rooted in a practice that fuses South Asian heritage with the community-minded ethos of sound system culture. A warm sub accompanied by a warm meal.

Trois-Quarts Taxi System (LIVE)

Paris-based producer and live performer Eloi Petillon has been quietly building one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary bass music. His project Trois-Quarts Taxi System occupies the liminal space between club and experimental – dubstep, techno, dub and leftfield low-end exploration folded into something that can’t be easily categorised. This is present in his recent LP Scarecrow, released earlier this year on Maloca and signals an artist who has found their sound. The Saturday night slot at La Chapelle was the ideal place to find out what that sounds like at volume.

By 9pm, the festival had found its rhythm. Three days in, the crowd was fully locked, and looking for something grittier and more raw than the afternoon’s warmth had offered. Trois-Quarts delivered this in abundance. The live set moved through polyrhythmic patterns and glitchy noise layers draped over crunching snares and rippling subs – this was physical music. As the light faded through the trees and the night drew properly in, La Chapelle felt like exactly the right vessel for it, with the low end hitting harder in the dark, and the visual art installations weaving through the trees to create an intoxicating environment.

Kaâm

RebelUp, the Brussels-based collective and label that has spent nearly two decades championing sounds from the global underground, brought Kaâm to La Ruche on Saturday night. What followed was one of the weekend’s most unforgettable sets – not entirely for reasons anyone could have planned.

Around midnight, a biblical storm broke over the Ardennes. Rain hammered down in sheets, and some festivalgoers pegged it for the cover of La Ruche, piling in soaked, out of breath and laughing. What had been a stage became a shelter, and in doing so, it transformed into something far more electric, rammed, and buzzing with the particular energy that only comes from a shared experience. Then the speakers cut out. Then they came back. Then they cut out again. Kaâm took every technical issue completely in their stride, reading the room with the ease of someone who has played in far more chaotic situations than this one, and the crowd loved them for it.

When the music was there, it was irresistible – baile funk and wonky percussive hitters, sounds assembled from across the globe and delivered with wit and precision. The storm and the chaos didn’t detract from the experience; they enhanced the experience. Everyone arrived soaked but left considerably drier, and in a state of euphoria.

Kotoe

The Tokyo-born, Berlin-based DJ and performer has built a reputation for sets that move freely across disco, acid, tropical and club music. At Moojo – the stage perched at the top of the hill – she put that instinct to work across two hours of unadulterated bangers, moving through UK garage, tech house rollers and house anthems with the casual authority of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and is thoroughly enjoying themselves. Anything cheeky was fair game.

There was a real levity to the set that felt expertly crafted rather than accidental – a sustained high that never dipped, a house party atmosphere that somehow kept building even at 3am. After the biblical storm, this was the perfect respite: an exceptional DJ and a crowd completely in their hands.

ddwy

By Sunday at 5pm, the weekend was winding down and the crowd had thinned. Those who remained were in need of some wistful, relaxing music, and ddwy was the perfect send-off.

The London-based duo make music described as a tranquil brain massage of dubby ambient and swirling downtempo, inspired by the headiness of dub, trip-hop and experimental house. Live, that translated into something serene and unhurried: processed vocals with looping and reverb effects drifting over trip-hop and house rhythms, the kind of music you nod your head to slowly with a drink in hand, not quite dancing, not quite still. A remedy for the previous night’s chaos. A gentle unwinding of everything the weekend had offered. It was a small crowd, but the right one. And ddwy certainly cured a few sore heads.