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Mar 04, 2024 By James Thornhill Photography by Katja Goljat (lead photo) Web Exclusive

What is Ljubljana’s MENT festival at 10 years old?

Sure, we can give you all the PR spiel, the fact it is arguably Europe’s finest showcase festival, bringing the best talent of the surrounding region and the rest of the continent together with the industry’s great and good connecting and mapping out the future of music. This is all true but it’s more than that…

It’s a bubbling cauldron of sonic wonders, drawing on the city’s punk and counter-cultural heritage, and is a consistent narrative-changer, eradicating any notion of Anglo-American exceptionalism in the musical arts, presenting mainly new acts with a focus on local, and wider-regional talent. While there are political things that can’t be avoided, MENT is about presenting awesome new acts to new people - it’s really that simple, and that is why it works.

There’s an air of defiance across the city and the festival that feels normal rather than revolutionary, doing things differently is just how it is. Again, the collision of state-of-the-art venues like Kino Siska with the squat punk vibes of Metelkova City Autonomous Cultural Centre, an old army barracks with a history of artistic self-determination, shows what MENT is about.

It is also peerlessly curated, “I don’t think I’ve seen anything truly bad at MENT,” said one inebriated attendee, “stuff that isn’t for me, but nothing shit.” This isn’t “industry” driven as such, it is music lovers crafting what they see as truly worthwhile.

The whole thing remains a mesh of ideas, thoughts and memories. Here is what we could unravel:

Post (rock, punk, hardcore. EVERYTHING)

The major takeaway from the tenth edition of MENT is that “rock” (whatever that is these days) is in fine health across the continent. While in the UK so much of the prominent guitar music is peddled to appease nostalgia-addled, “real music” fans trapped in the reductive end of Britpop or the bland malaise of the landfill era (jeans tighter than the rhythms, more swagger than substance, missing the point of what made the 1960s or punk so exciting in the first place), the EU is rife with subversive acts subverting the rule book. It’s a post-everything maelstrom.

In Ljubljana itself, Moonlee Records was celebrating 20 years at MENT. The label has been at the forefront of amplifying this rock-forward ideal and their specially curated stage in Grompka was a highlight of the festival. Starting with the return of the band that kicked the label into life, Analena (featuring MENT festival organiser and label head Miran Rusjan), the night was nothing less than thrilling. The Croatian-Slovenian post-hardcore cult legends, after 10 years away, soon found their groove. A gem for old fans and a worthy introduction for new ones, Analena proved as good as any late 90s band of a similar ilk in the US. Singer and bassist Ana Franjić and her showstopping vocals led the sonic juggernaut of screamo vocals, pure punk blasts, power pop melody and mathy experimentation. A special return from a band that more people need to know about.

We, unfortunately, only heard noise rock act Nikki Louder from outside, such shows the appetite for their kinetic, discordant sound (we had the same issue later for Koi Koi who without a doubt are one of the best live bands on the planet), but found our way back in for Seine, who care not for genre conventions. One minute delving into minimalist trip-hop atmospheres, the next finding a kosmische groove before heading into jazz and noise rock, no two songs hit the same but all have a “vibe” such is the quality of the playing. Genre-defying-defiance at it is best.

Even before that blinding label showcase, the opening night revealed a plethora of gems. Personal Trainer opened with their post-punk-pop cabaret of oddness. They have a genuine quirk that adds something kinetic to their loving crafted tunes. They are thoroughly likeable in that “this could all fall apart” way, something that takes serious skill.

Local big band MRFY bounced around styles as much as they bounced around the stage. Their presence is bombastic, slightly camp and fraught with a creepy sexuality. Their opening number stated, “I don’t want to fuck your mother”, which begs the question as to whether she asked. It’s big fun and slightly wrong which shows why it might be popular in Slovenia. Under the stairs in the Komuna venue at Kino Siska, that same night, was where the real magic happened. Alicja Sobstyl’s art pop vehicle Artificialalice plugged goth rock elements through Bjork pop adventuring with precision. Sobstyl’s crystalline vocals were propelled by unexpected twists and sonic turns.

Bologna’s Leatherette personifies the rule book tearing, post-everything approach to “post punk” in a jaw-dropping manner. Sonically where they are and where they are going was a question at every point of every song. It’s a mess but the kind of mess you want all over you. Shades of Blurt’s skronky off-funk, Television’s arty ambition, Swell Maps’ abandon, the metronomic shimmer of the Monochrome Set and any number of the best of post-punk’s rule-breaking adventurers, are all crammed into the set. Majestic stuff.

Propping up the opening night, denizens of the Slovakian underground Berlin Manson, elevated themselves even above the lofty heights of the show we witnessed at last year’s Sharpe festival. It’s punk in spirit and genre-bending in delivery. It crams elements of hardcore punk, electronica and hip hop into a punching package that attacks social issues in their lives. Berlin Manson, forged identity away from expectations away from Western-centric ideals of “punk” and miles away from the three-chord reductiveness of old heads. It’s vitriolic, it’s glam, it’s sleazy, it’s political and it’s worryingly sex-fuelled - it’s what punk always was meant to be, by not being.

Not presenting the expected was a definite theme of Ment’s rock portion. Take French band Irnini Mons who bend and mould power-pop, French ye-ye pop, punk funk, jangle pop and much else into accessible but challenging new forms. Dancing guitar lines, intertwining vocal melodies, funky bass and a drummer hitting some beats like it is needed to stop the end of the world with others dancing around the stars. They flit between making the audience dance and stop still in awe.

Elsewhere, Czech band Fotbal traversed the spaces between psychedelia (with some serious shoegaze fuzz, kosmische musik and off-kilter post-punk/no wave. They constantly found a hypnotic groove to sink into, whilst discordant guitar danced above it, almost taunting the songs to collapse. Offset with sweet, reverbed female vocals and the concoction was unexpected and mesmerising. Inch-perfectly performed this complexity seemed effortless.

Vagina Corporation (maybe not the best name for English-speaking audiences, given the heavy quota of vagina-less humans in the band, or maybe it’s funny, who knows?) take a similar line but infused Americana and more classic soft-rock elements to the mix. “KRAP” they call their genre (krautrock, Americana, psychedelia), which it isn’t, really! This North Macedonian lot did what they came to do, nothing wrong with that.

If everything seems a little “post punk” in this review, Belgium’s Pruillip upped the heaviness quota as one of the festival highlights. The two-piece could be pegged as “sludge metal” as they certainly have the crushing, expansive riffage of the likes of Earth et al, but there is more to the punch. They draw melody and invention out through the sonic slime to present drama-ladden catharsis with moments of beauty embracing pure fucking evil. A collapsing Black Sabbath? A prog Neurosis? Who cares? They rattled minds and internal organs in a way that you’d ask for more. Intense!

In short, “rock” at MENT was pummelled into new, unexpected forms and we are more than here for that.

What is “world” music anyway?

“World music” is a dumb term, what is it? Where you are from and then “everywhere else”? Talking to the minds behind the exceptional record label Glitterbeat (responsible for releasing incredible sounds from around the globe) they rejected that term as fervently as anyone with half a brain. That same night in Channel Zero, one of their acts Avalanche Kaito laid waste to not only that dumb descriptor but just about every other anyone could muster.

Take the band’s programme blurb “their expansive universe where the oral traditions of West African griot converge with Belgian post punk” and if that doesn’t excite you, you are probably dead inside. The performance in the small basement venue defied even that insane description. With Kaito Winse fronting the band, fully expressing the griot traditions so clearly intrinsic to his soul, playing an array of traditional instruments (all that add a danceable drone to the already obtuse sounds) and dancing in a confrontational yet inviting way, that would, in most cases, be enough. But his cohorts also proceeded to find a driving wall of noise touching on bands like Fugazi, Can and into the realms of electronica, and the jazzy weirdness of Black Midi. Avalanche Kaito is a truly unique sonic experience, challenging but inviting and even offering some joyous sing-along moments. They are everything music could be and should be.

Part of the aforementioned opening night extravaganza, international concoction Los Bitchos’ smile-inducing instrumentals mined areas that “indie” rock don’t often touch - Turkish psych, cumbia, chica and unashamed surf rock - hitting a stone-cold groove throughout, whilst enjoying every minute. They journey around the world with little effort.

While jazz, like everything, has in many ways settled into its formulas, acts like Slovenia’s Oholo! still use it as an exploratory form, not so concerned with rules but expanding sound. Their skronky vision dances around genres (free jazz, psych, rock, funk) and time signatures, jumping around like a hyperactive child in aural form.

The bleeping heart of Europe

While the CE:MENT element brought new levels of discussion and focus on Europe’s vast and diverse electronic music, the curation nailed home this fact with aplomb and drove home that even in a world so demarcated by genre, now is an incredibly fluid time and an era where “electronic music” has infiltrated almost every aspect of popular music.

Take Glasgow duo Comfort are as punk as anything else on the bill, especially with the captivating, confrontational yet inviting performance by frontwoman Natalie (we could find no last name, so maybe she is like Prince or Cher), but other than blasting drums the mood is driven by oscillating synth sounds. It’s punk, it’s synth-pop, it’s performance art and it is thoroughly enthralling. The vulnerability meshed with a pure revolutionary spirit. A middle finger to expectations and bigotry to pounding electro-punk. Yep, that’s good.

The showcasing of the region’s electronic talent produced fragments of brilliance as we flitted in and out of spaces. There was console’s classicist synth excursions fitting between Tangerine Dream and Ulrich Schnauss and egg’s dark soundscapes in the confines of the city’s castle, while the additional night on the last night at Kino Siska offered up an array of electro-wonders before tiredness killed us off.

Black Dot delved into dark, sleazy EBM with a menacing frontman Le Chocolat Noir (a blinding stage name if we ever did see one) and deep 80s vibes, while Croatia’s Babilonska ended our whole festival as a total revelation, whose deep mesh of genres was presented with a knowing grin and complete control of the sounds. To be so playful and loose within the techno space, forging an identity all of your own is no mean feat and Babilonska did this effortlessly. One minute bass-heavy, the next light dancing psych experiments. It is this wonder that left us at the end of our MENT, with many hours still to go but early flights to catch,

You can leave MENT, but each MENT never leaves you, that is its beauty and its curse. This year was no less important, no less unexpected and no less enjoyable. Here’s to another decade of this mad wonder of music.