Bringing together 16 experimental musicians for three days of spontaneous sessions and one-off live shows, The Monheim Triennale created a charged space for collaboration, improvisation, boundary-pushing and play.

The Monheim Triennale, much like the offside rule in football, is difficult to explain to those new to the game, so forgive this toe-punt: firstly, this year’s Triennale wasn’t really the main festival at all, but rather ‘The Prequel’. Under this lofty banner, 16 artists drawn internationally from the fields of experimental music and jazz – plus the fertile seams in-between – gathered for three days of live performance encompassing both programmed shows and informal, unplanned sessions. 

The motivation behind all this collaboration and artistic soft-play was to lay the groundwork for a much larger project, to be staged at the festival proper a year from now. Like this edition, it will take place in Monheim, an unassuming but culturally rich town in the Rhineland, just outside of Düsseldorf. This year, however, proceedings were kept intimate, spread across three venues: a small Gothic chapel, Marienkapelle; a boat featuring two stages, moored in the Rhine; and a café, Sojus.

Received wisdom says football metaphors have no place in a review of a festival devoted to experimental music and modern composition, but the hackneyed comparison makes a bit of sense, at least. On Friday afternoon, the auditorium of the MS RheinFantasie was home to a ‘wild card’ surprise performance from California-based Tamil vocalist, composer and Sault collaborator Ganavya Doraiswamy and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. Performing under the pseudonyms Willy and Nelson, they improvised against a backdrop of a Germany v Spain in the Euros quarter-final – literally, it was projected on a giant screen at the back of the stage. 

The decision on the part of the festival organisers to embrace the scheduling clash was a stroke of genius: part comedy routine (New Yorker Ismaily was baffled at every collective intake of breath and stifled groan from the seated audience), and part melodrama as Ganavya faced the screen and riffed, first jokingly, then in seriousness. Despite the patent absurdity of it all, there was a moment where the heartache unfolding on screen and echoed in the rich language of Indian classicism and the storytelling tradition of the harikathā, in which Ganavya has trained, hit on something almost profound. “This is a war song,” Ganavya declared. Quite.

Ultimately, happy accidents like this are what sets Triennale apart. A series of artistic trust-falls and leaps into the unknown, all in front of a paying audience? It’s nuts, but brilliant. On Saturday, there was a hurried dash to the boat for an impromptu gathering of small piper Brìghde Chaimbeul, producer Anushka Chkheidze and trumpeter Peter Evans. Against flinty breakbeats layered live by the Georgian producer, Evans, switching between cornet and trumpet, elicited a range of screes, squawks and farts, sometimes even playing without a mouthpiece at all. It was a physical performance that nonetheless found unexpected rhyme in Chaimbeul’s smallpipes; a traditional Scottish instrument that, like the close relation, the bagpipes, marries melody with sustained notes – ie. that ancient, mossy drone. Sometimes Evans and Chaimbeul played melodies in unison, other times they seemed also engaged in a conversational back-and-forth. Towards the end of the 30-minute performance, as Chkeidze steered into calmer textures, Evans played a series of cycling sustained notes that recalled Jon Hassell.

Another startling collaboration came in the formal environment of the boat’s main auditorium, between German composer and director Heiner Goebbels and Palestinian producer and musician Muqata´a. An emotional charge resonated from every plucked piano string, every monolithic slab of bass or rat-a-tat percussion lick. Muqata´a often draws samples from his homeland, and here, fragile strains of Arabic pop drifted across the sonic rubble as Goebbels played the exposed piano with mallets or pieces of wire, and laid hulking chains inside the casing before playing ringing, muted tones of the compromised instrument. The overall effect, though short, was devastating.

Although the emphasis across the three days was on collaboration, there was room in the schedule for solo performance. Of particular note Brìghde Chaimbeul’s solo set, in the Marienkapelle. The applause was so effusive after her virtuosic transposition of Philip Glass’ Two Pages that she played an encore of Highland dance songs. In an age where traditional music is finding new audiences, her modernist approach felt vital. 

Two other standout performances came from composer and multimedia artist Terre Thaemlitz, familiar to many for their more club focused DJ Sprinkles project. The first was billed as an electroacoustic ambient set, but also had the bearings of tone poem or lecture. In a room lit solely by neon blue strip lights, Thaemlitz drew from samples taken from chat shows, news reports, porn, pride parade vox pops and, in one memorable passage, the festival programme’s own foreword, penned by the mayor (voiced by AI software, then cut and spliced). The result was an essay-stroke-sonic-assault that circled around queer resistance, societal oppression – of non-comforming queer bodies specifically – and civil disobedience. Those familiar with Thaemlitz’s 2003 work Lovebomb will have recognised the surreal blurring of kitsch and revolutionary violence that is Between Empathy And Sympathy Is Time (Apartheid), a piece that maps an ANC speech fomenting violent uprising mapped to the tune of Minnie Ripperton’s Loving You. This both-barrels onslaught of heteronormative cultural slop and fragments of ear-splitting sonic shrapnel (like, say, studio audience applause distorted to deafening volumes) resulted in an atmosphere both claustrophobic and deliberately agitational.