Pitchfork Music Festival London returned last week to England’s capital for its fifth edition. This year’s installment saw 81 acts across 20 events in venues including the brutalist concert hall of the Barbican, the iconic backroom of the Shacklewell Arms, and the experimental east London institution Cafe Oto. Five days of music created space for living legends like Laurie Anderson and Lonnie Holley to perform alongside artists who are charting the future, like underscores, Los Thuthanaka, and MIKE. Here are six highlights from the week.
Truck Violence – 93 Feet East, Tuesday, November 4
Truck Violence covered the Pitchfork logo backdrop at 93 Feet East with a hand-scrawled sign that read “Violence.” It’s the title of their superb and weird 2024 album, but also a blunt statement of intent: to batter the audience from the jump. Because this four-piece’s sludge-metal and post-hardcore is unrelenting, full of fierce drumming and gnarled riffs. But it is arguably Karsyn Henderson’s elastic voice contorting itself into yelps, whines, and growls that is the most effective instrument on stage. When guitarist Paul Lecours introduced a banjo for “I bore you now you bear for me,” he transported us to the band’s rural upbringing in Alberta. It’s like gazing at a photograph so long that you start feeling you were there.
Ali Sethi & Nicolás Jaar – Union Chapel, Wednesday, November 5
It felt like poet Ali Sethi and producer Nicolás Jaar’s paths would cross eventually, but it took Sethi getting on Instagram Live during lockdown and reciting Ghazal poetry, a form of medieval Arabic verse, over the spectral fragments of Jaar’s Telas, for a creative partnership to blossom. This is a story Sethi recounted during the artists’ spellbinding hour together at Union Chapel, as Jaar conjured up prickly electronic sounds with flickers of metallics, soft tinkles of piano, and subaqueous bass, the sort of sparse arrangements that allowed Sethi’s commanding and sublime voice to soar. The venue’s iconic east window—stained glass in the shape of a rose featuring medieval instruments—hovered above the two musicians.
Los Thuthanaka – ICA, Thursday, November 6
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is located on the Royal Mall, a ceremonial route from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square. It’s hard not to think of the symbolic proximity to these monuments of colonialism as the sibling duo Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton took the stage and blasted bass-boosted renditions of traditional Andean Huayño dance rhythms. The jolting drum shuffle of “Phuju” was followed by Crampton’s syncopated, jagged guitar, and a flurry of DJ tags were dropped gleefully by Chuquimamani-Condori. In matching bedazzled Aymara suits and cowboy hats, they presented a world interconnected and communal, fluid and dazzling. As they played DJ E’s “Until I Find You Again,” the crowd moved in unison to the arrhythmic drums and triumphant yet wistful accordion motif. The Mall outside had never looked so lifeless.
