Walking outside the church afterwards, the festival’s other signature artists were amongst those dabbing their eyes, hugging each other and generally beaming from the experience. Given that Monheim Trienniale mostly deals in the broad reach of ‘new music’ – contemporary exploration beyond the traditional structures of classical and jazz – it’s impressive that it avoids the pitfall of becoming impenetrable or elitist like a lot of avant-garde offerings can do. As the closing concert demonstrated, the festival’s ambition doesn’t take away its heart. You could see it in the expressions of the musicians appreciating each other’s work on stage. Reaching across all manner of ages, ethnicities and genders with a modernist musical outlook, the programming of the event felt youthful in spirit, even with plenty of seasoned artists involved. 

Monheim Triennale revolves around a core group of 16 ‘signature’ artists who initially came together for last year’s ‘Prequel’ edition to collaborate, improvise and test out ideas. This year, everything was more focused by design, as the group returned to deliver their signature projects. New work was developed exclusively for the festival, and many trusted friends and collaborators fleshed out the line-up. The programme was bursting with high-level players across all kinds of disciplines, with an abundance of extended techniques taking old instruments into new territory alongside adventurous electronics and an undercurrent of deeply dedicated folkloric traditions. 

In some cases, initial encounters during the Prequel led to traditions intertwining, not least for Brìghde Chaimbeul, whose ancient Celtic small pipe drones found resonance with Julia Úlehla’s Moravian-Slovak-rooted singing during a brief afternoon performance. Chaimbeul also revived last year’s chance encounter with Georgian electronic artist Anushka Chkheidze and New York jazz provocateur Peter Evans, bridging broad disciplines to find a subtle, subdued harmony between the unlikely meeting of trumpet, synths and small pipes. 

Evans’ signature project, Being & Becoming, stretched across two parts on consecutive nights, bringing his bold vision of a new kind of spiritual jazz to life with a perfect balance of precision and expression by his core band of fellow New York players plus Sofia Jernberg, an accomplished vocal artist from Sweden he worked with during the first round of the festival. Interconnectivity drives a lot of what happens at Monheim Triennale, and it gives the festival a cohesion that might otherwise be tricky to pull off across this range of outsider music. 

Some artists in the programme, however, chose to focus on their own signature projects. Rojin Sharafi, the Vienna-based Iranian artist, led two of the strongest performances of the festival. On the Thursday afternoon, her band HUUUM performed their infectious, physical blend of Persian, Kurdish and African traditions shot through with Sharafi’s dexterous electronics. It was simultaneously sharp and serious, but also utterly infectious and fun, thanks in no small part to Omid Darvish’s charismatic vocal presence. He and the other members of HUUUM joined Sharafi for her signature project Sinthome’s Scenery, where the space opened up for Sharafi to go deeper into her considerable synth flex, some buzuq shredding and an utterly joyful sequence of play amongst the crowd between Darvish and suona player Ya-Nung Huang.

Similarly holding his own space in the line-up was Muqata’a. The Palestinian producer from Ramallah brought the main programme to a brooding, intense close on the Saturday night with False Vectors, his signature project with visual artist Fairouz Hasan. It was an inversion of the often opulent stage setups of ensembles and group performances at the Triennale, with Muqata’a’s compact table of gear to one side, and Hasan’s visuals set up to the right. The chasm between them was filled by a rawly arranged sequence of imagery, from grainy archival footage to Google Maps plotting a route through the Negev desert in Israel before resting on a notorious prison camp at Ktzi’ot, close to the border with Gaza. Finally, a live projection of beautiful butterfly wings being shredded in real time brought a visceral, physical immediacy to Hasan’s work. Meanwhile, Muqata’a’s sound, still unmistakably drawn from his crooked, noise-laced beatdown palette, came through in pared-down, forbidding form. Thunderous bass rumble interspersed with uneasy static crackle, only punctured by a brief flurry of jungle breakbeats at the mid point. False Vectors was ruthlessly minimal in its presentation, form and message, and while it was clearly steeped in the artists’ perspectives as Palestinian people, it felt all the more powerful by not spelling out a meaning.

Terre Thaemlitz also performed on his own. Late on the Thursday night, he took to the dimly lit bow of the main boat venue, the MS Rheinfantasie, and prefaced her set with, as she described it, “an update about censorship at Monheim”. The previous year, a code of conduct had been issued to artists a week before the festival with guidelines around political messaging on stage, which was always going to antagonise an artist like Thaemlitz, who has consistently tackled issues of free speech throughout his career. The guidelines broadly suggested “free speech has a limit”, implicitly tipped towards criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Germany’s heightened wariness around issues of anti-semitism. No such code of conduct was issued this year, and Thaemlitz described seeking clarification from the festival on their position and whether any restrictions on free speech were now in place. He never received the definitive answer she was looking for, and was driven to point this out before her performances. She proceeded to spin a two-hour DJ set of “electro-acoustic ambient”, as described in the programme, with a near-continuous stream of recorded discourse around Palestine, Israel and modern Germany’s fraught relationship with free speech. It was an intense, unrelenting listen, but the viewpoints were balanced and considered – especially from a Holocaust survivor and former IDF soldier who condemned the atrocities being inflicted on the Palestinian people while never negating the true, confirmed aspects of Hamas’ massacres on 7 October. 

In Germany, the issue of discourse around Israel and Palestine has been tense throughout the ongoing genocide, but Thaemlitz questioned the absence of an explicit policy this year. She suggested condemning Israel’s actions might be less inflammatory in German society after another year of escalating bloodshed and brutality, that the festival was retracting its position, or perhaps that nothing had changed, but the festival was “just not bringing it up”. Delivering the same possible reasons before his delicate solo piano performance away from the thrum of the festival in a small villa by a lake on the Saturday afternoon, someone in the audience responded, “maybe [the festival] don’t know what their position is”.

In a brief conversation about the politics of the event, Festival Director Reiner Michalke described the question of censorship at Monheim as “a ghost discussion” amid the politics inherent in the festival’s line-up. While he expected an outspoken stance from Thaemlitz on the issue, he also pointed to the curation as a strong indication of the festival’s values. The prominent presence of LGBTQ+ artists and expression from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds naturally led to political manifestations in performances – whether it was Darius Jones honouring a forgotten blues from the late 1940s Mississippi State Penitentiary or Selendis S. A. Johnson grappling with the German Revolution through the medium of big band free jazz.  

As well as Muqata’a’s poignant closing statement, Shahzad Ismaily’s signature project matched a roving, improvised musical backdrop to a very pointed array of spoken word that opened with Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun delivering unflinching, darkly humourous depictions of life under bombardment. Among a programme that could have easily rested in instrumental abstraction, there was no ambiguity about the position Ismaily was taking as one of the festival’s most prominent figures. 

From the opening concerts on the Wednesday onwards, Ismaily performed multiple times every day, carting around his trusty Moog Rogue synth and tuning into all manner of energies and contexts with his wide-open improvisational approach. Talking to him briefly between gigs, he confirmed that strong composition played a bigger role at the Triennale this year. You could sense a solid framework around the wild spikes and playful phrasing of Oren Ambarchi’s Hubris, a live rendition of his career-highlight 2016 album that soared to a feverish cacophony of two drummers, five guitars and explosive reeds and bass clarinet. Meanwhile, yuniya edi kwon’s silver through the grass like nothing had its own visceral composure, mapped out by a mind-boggling visual score brought to life by a god-tier ensemble of double bass, viola, violin, cello and ritual percussion. Operating well outside the lines of familiar tuning and tonality, edi kwon’s own virtuoso violin and glass-shattering vocals formed the centre of a shockingly original, perfectly realised storm.

There was space for more overtly electronic expression, too. Yves B. Golden held a powerful, imposing poise at the core of German drummer Ludwig Wandinger’s intense, metallic project Atelic Halo, but her words were nurturing and fortifying even as Rian Treanor and Elvin Brandhi shelled down shards of electronic noise. At the other end of the scale, veteran German sound artist Heiner Goebbels brought his long-standing electro-acoustic practice to a refreshing new soundworld with his project The Mayfield, a band also featuring pioneering Italian saxophonist Gianni Gebbia and Nicolas Perrin’s incredible modified guitar work. The collision between time-honoured practice and new textures was a thrilling constant across the festival.

Part of Monheim Triennale’s unique function is the relationship it has with the town itself. The ambitious scope of the performances is reliant on a close relationship with the local authority for funding. The town is unique in that current mayor Daniel Zimmermann offered low tax rates for businesses to positively boost the local economy, while at the same time channelling some of that reward into ambitious, accessible music education for the town’s school children. That vision gets realised throughout the Triennale programme, with many of the resident signature artists performing with school orchestras and smaller groups, often aided by local musician Achim Tang. He and Ismaily make quite the pairing, beaming at each other across countless performances while leading school kids through some truly adventurous music-playing.   

These moments form some of the most moving throughout the weekend – yuniya edi kwon’s sheer joy at being conducted by a child shines out of her during one such collaboration. It helps ground the festival in its community, no matter how international and elaborate the meat of the curation may be. Returning to the last moments of the festival, on the Sunday afternoon in the church, Ismaily was of course the one to draw a line under the entire week with the very last words to be uttered: 

“It’s important to remember that the rest of the year, Achim [Tang] is here working with the kids,” Ismaily declared, gesturing to his local counterpart. “It’s all about them [the kids]. Really, that’s where everything is going.” With that, he stepped off the stage and the festival was finished.