By Danna Campos. Mexican journalist and writer (master in Journalism and Communication from Mexico City), right now visiting Aarhus and jumping at the chance to be a SPOT volunteer journalist.
Aarhus: A growing city to discover new music
SPOT festival has an unpredictable nature that suites Denmark’s weather: What will happen next is a mystery that is about to be unfolded, and it is not until one attends this festival that one comes to understand what it is really about. Big bands and venues? Forget about it. Booking legendary headliners? That is a task already assigned to other music festivals.
While Aarhus has grown under the shade of a music capital like Copenhagen, Denmark’s second biggest city has created a musical and cultural scene of its own, forming a unique atmosphere that cannot be compared to other music events, and which is expressed in the shape of independent music venues and festivals like SPOT.
Días Nórdicos: Destroying the world’s walls through music
At a glance, this music celebration might seem like a very local one, since its program is mostly conformed by Danish and other Scandinavian music acts. Nonetheless, one of the festival’s biggest bets consists on partnering up with music collectives and platforms whose main focus is to bring live performances with a different approach towards what could be done on-stage.
Días Nórdicos is a project whose main aim is to set the spotlight on emerging artists from Nordic countries, Spain, and Latin America, in order to make a significant cultural exchange between these cultures. After seven years of successful residences in Latin America and Europe, Días Nórdicos’ eighth edition arrived to SPOT Festival 2017 with live acts such as Slow Train Soul, Ida Wenøe, Lucio Mantel, Mariana Paraway, Ricardo Vicente, Axel Krygier, Le Parody, and Diosque.
With an opening concert in the shape of a laboratory at Godsbanen music venue, all participating artists created unique fusions of their own musical styles by performing together different songs, which they composed during the past days.
The laboratory at Días Nórdicos, alongside a second set of individual live acts, highlighted the true essence of this festival, which was accurately expressed by Morten Varano from Slow Train Soul, earlier today, at the reception of this 2017 edition:
“I was talking to one of the musicians from Argentina. And, you see, my Spanish was not very good and his English wasn’t very good either, but we managed to understand each other through music to create something new. Music acts as a common tongue that we all can understand. It immediately makes all -cultural, racial, and politic- walls come down.”
Photo: Henrik Friis
And one could feel Varano’s words materialized in each performance, as everyone -organizers, artists, and the audience- could see such different countries like Spain, Argentina, and Denmark, coming together as one in a single place, on a particular stage, and with the mindset of crumbling down the barriers the world has created between people, which can only be torn down by music itself.