Selected Notes: Intonal Festival 2022
Photography: Misael Silva / Henrik Hellström
Intonal Festival provides revellers with a welcome dose of escapism, just not as they’ve experienced it before.
Wednesday, April 20
Malmö is disconcertingly muted. Coming out of the glass domed entrance of Station Triangeln I see cars pass and hordes of people talking, but all I can hear is my own thoughts. I walk to Möllevångstorget, a square which acts as the focal point for this festival and its surrounding red-bricked venues: Inkonst, St. Johannes Church, and Whose Museum. It’s a sunny evening and it will remain sunny for the week, I’m told, much to the amazement of the locals.
At the Ambient Assembly, a small courtyard beside Whose Museum, Nkisi plays a sinisterly live set as the night descends, made only more ominous by the squawking of the seagulls overhead. An intrigued crowd of unwitting locals forms outside the venue and peers through the courtyard gates. Shortly after, on the terrace of a nearby bar, I find myself talking to a young Czechian man with bleached blonde hair who is in the city for the festival.
“Have you been to the nude sauna?” he asks at one point.
“I haven’t,” I say.
“You should. It overlooks the sea.” He shows me a picture on Google Images. It’s a picture of the Oresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. “It looks beautiful, no?”
“Yeah, it does. I might go. We’ll see.”
Nkisi © Misael Silva
Thursday, April 21
I end up seeing the Czechian man again the following night sitting outside Inkonst. He looks elegantly jaded.
“I went to the sauna earlier,” he says. “And after Grouper, I’m in this completely serene state. I can barely move.”
“Sauna and Grouper. Now there’s a business idea.”
He laughs, leant back against the red-brick wall with his hood up and eyes barely open.
The Grouper gig took place in St. Johannes, a staggering Lutheran church, the acoustics of which allowed Grouper’s swirling ambience and abrasive wall of sound to carry itself unto the crowd hypnotically onlooking from the pews. Visuals were projected onto the dome above the alter, seamlessly oscillating between the cosmos, a view of the sky through a cluster of trees, and water lapping over the stones of a riverbed. Co-existing all as one. I found myself stuck for 45 minutes. No thoughts. No movement. Just noise. Only visuals. My knees were bent, my heels hovering above the ground as my toes took all my seated weight. As I adjusted my vision slightly above the lamplit stage where Grouper sits, the alter and its surroundings morphed into geometrical shapes.
Friday, April 22
I attend the Mutant x Retreat Radio showcase at Whose Museum in the evening, where Maria Spivak can be seen playing an aptly placid set in the window front of the cabin-sized studio.
Standing on the pathway where others have congregated to socialise, I meet volunteers from the festival — two Canadians that are studying in the nearby city of Lund. One of them is particularly striking. There are people who enter your life with whom the strangeness of their presence prompts you to question the absurdity of their absence before, and indeed after, that moment. I am soon to find out that they are one of these people. Wide-eyed and tight-mouthed, they speak with glee of Malmö and the sauna before gifting me a piece of flint that they had collected on the shore near the sauna itself. Their strangely alluring demeanour made this feel like a very normal encounter. It wasn’t.
I leave, with a weird yet familiar feeling running through me, and go to Inkonst around the corner. Hiro Kone, real name Nicky Mao, is premiering her Disruption and Epokhē show. I find myself seated on the floor with people lying around me. Primary-coloured lights flash and create a silhouette of Mao as her straight hair hangs down over her face and shoulders and the eerie soundscapes fill the Black Box.
Eventually, I find myself back on my feet. Standing by the doors that lead into the Big Stage and down the stairs to the Black Box, the black and white chequered floor of the Small Stage finds itself in a red hued cloud of smoke for the enigmatic and sonically ineffable John T. Gast.
Saturday, April 23
Space Afrika and Shackleton are overlapping. I find myself standing between the Big Stage and the redlit stairs down to the Black Box with two others in attendance who are also dealing with the dilemma.
“I’m surprised that they put Space Afrika on the Big Stage and Shackleton in the Black Box,” I say.
“Space Afrika have the visuals,” one of them informs me.
“What time are they on at?”
“10:30.”
“What time is Shackleton on at?”
“10.”
“What time is it now?”
We all look down at our phones. In unison, we read the time.
“9:30,” one says.
“9:40,” I say.
“10,” the other says.
It’s 9:37.
I enter the Black Box. It’s the first time that I have seen it repurposed as a dancefloor. An orange glow permeates the dark room while Shackleton eases a crowd thawing out from consecutive seated performances. A tribal feeling descends upon the crowd as the artist assumes his role as the shaman while his followers adhere to the ritual at hand, swaying along to his chants in unison.
I make a swift exit from Shackleton, climbing the stairs up to the Big Stage, where Space Afrika have developed an angelic aura. Joshua Inyang steps away from his laptop to nonchalantly twiddle with the mixer, his elbows leaning on the table. Next to him, Joshua Reid exhales a cloud of smoke from his vape pen from behind his laptop. The visuals beyond the Manchester pair show the first-person perspective of a hazy walk home on the streets at night. Memories blurred, no one to be seen. But that’s not to suggest that no one is there, always watching.
As I find myself surrounded by a chattering crowd, an isolating feeling descends upon me. I welcome it. I don’t reject it. The type of isolation that feels safe, not threatening. It feels absurd to be afraid of being alone. What’s there to be afraid of? Who’s going to hurt you? You? Oh, of course, yes. Sorry for asking, I should have known.
Before leaving the venue, I see the striking volunteer. They hand me another piece of flint. It feels smooth as it caresses my palm on the walk back to my hostel.
Sunday, April 24
There is an unwinding sensibility to the last day of proceedings. With an Irish background, this is an alien concept — tending to do things in excess right up until the bitter end.
Microtub’s transient and transcendent performance of Ellen Arkbo’s Clouds For Three Tubas sends me into a theta state as I slouch in my chair in the Black Box. My sleep-deprived brain rapidly traverses a million vivid scenarios with seemingly everyone I’ve ever encountered. Finally, I see my own reflection in a mirror. The fright awakens me and I dazedly climb up from my slouched position just as the performance ends.
Ellen Arkbo w/ Microtub © Henrik Hellström
Monday, April 25
I make my way to the sauna. The striking volunteer shows me the way. They lead me to the patch where they collect flint, handing me a piece before leaving. We kiss and part ways, leaving me to look down this lengthy wooden pier. A low and wide green building stands at the end in which the sauna resides.
I sit in the sweltering sauna, bollock naked, surrounded by other bollock naked men, all of us looking through the pane of glass at the Oresund strait in complete silence. My knees bend and my toes take the brunt of my seated weight on the hot wooden panels. It feels like the hot, dry air that I continue to swallow has gotten caught in my chest on the way down.
“Stop thinking about it,” I think to myself.
