Peel Slowly And See Festival : Leiden Holland : Live Review

Peel Slowly And See Festival

Various venues in Leiden Holland

Live review

March 2023

Photos by Jaimee Korbee and and Minja Sarovic

In its 10th year, Leiden's Peel Slowly And See Festival is an exquisite micro event that is punching well above its weight. Sticking the spotlight on a well-curated adventure of bands from across the bricolage of modern underground culture, the festival is a fast-forward snapshot of an impressive underground culture that is sprouting across Europe.

The backdrop is Leiden, the Nottingham of Holland – a town with an atmospheric centre of winding old streets, legendary art galleries, a tradition of clothes making and a distinctive place in the endless sprawl of cities that makes up the packed high-density urban sprawl of West Holland.

Zig-zagging across the city's winding ancient streets, we enter the venue for Rotterdam sludge/garage duo VULVA who instantly set the bar high. The duo consists of Kim Hoorweg (guitar/vocals) and Nadya van Osnabrugge (drums/vocals) and debuted this year with ‘Woe To The Wicked’ album that was a manifesto of impassioned intent. Their live set is a thrilling nocturnal ride of sparse post-punk, dark black metal atmospherics, drone rock noisenik breakouts, impassioned vocals and minimalistic grooves. This is a brilliant experience. They sound perfect – the dynamics pull you in switching from stark bass lines to explosive noise crescendos.

VULVA know how to hold the tension with Kim's exquisite bass drives the brooding melody and the high-tension lines before the songs explode in a frenzy of tension and drama. The music perfectly matches their political and they deal in gender, identity and feminism and backdrop this with a theatrical flair. This is no lo-fi workout but a perfectly staged event. The pair of them enter the stage dressed to the nines in evening dresses and perform in front of a backdrop of mesmerising films set deep in the spooked spectral forests of mid-Europe cut with stark confrontational content. Still kicking against the pricks, Vulva are very much of the now and their sound is enormous and you are drawn into their world with this stunning show.

SNACKBAR the ambassador is the alter ego of multidisciplinary artist Matthias König who grapples with his laptop and keyboards to deliver a party set that is a big beat in dub with adventures into krautrock and tripped out cumbia in a Day-Glo delivery. It bounces and its use of dub reverbs an adventure into sound adds another layer to the death disco of the party beats

Day 2 takes over two venues facing each other in the city centre and the bar is already set high by the astonishing experimentation of PoiL Ueda who are a mind-blowing combination of French prog band PoiL and Japanese traditional vocalist and satsuma biwa-player Junko Ueda. Combining the two forms, they mesmerise with their pulsating rhythms that see the freeform avant-garde of the band backdrop the atmospheric trad folk Japanese instrumentation. The songs are backdrops for Japanese folk tales of talking with ghosts and being lost on the high seas in a triptych tale that is sung in Japanese but explained in English. It's deep and moving and yet still full of skittering tribal rhythms and unexpected musical twists and turns that create a perfect tension for Ueda's compelling vocals. The band are fantastically inventive, grooving and bouncing like an early seventies Gong or another of their inventive ilk and always keeps a twitching energy that you can dance to.

German band The Notwist have been around for thirty years and have collected musical wonk to add to their thrift store of sound. The stage is like a junk shop of musical instruments and possibilities. There is a giant horn, a sax, loads of keyboards, a battered indie guitar and loveably worn Lou Reed style street hassle vocals with music to match as they merge their trad indie with electronic sections in a mish-mash of styles. It's like crate digging turned into a musical adventure. Somehow they make it all work and the odd juxtaposition of styles makes sense in a charming lo-fi ragbag of musical trips.

Pip Blom are one of the most successful exports from The Nu Netherlands’ underground and the current kings and queens of the current (Eton) crop of Dutch indie. Their last album ‘Welcome Break’ was an international breakout and their frenetic scratchy guitars and post Postcard off-kilter melodies are a joyous romp through the Trad Indie songbook that has the main hall bouncing.

At the other end of the scale are the compelling and confrontational SIKSA. It's been four years since I last saw them, and the duo of punk poetess and a lightning rod of charisma and confrontation, Alex Freixeit and bass player Burio have increased their already captivating presence. Whilst Burio digs in and plays the same distorted bass riff for about an hour in an act of high-decibel hypnosis, Alex Freixeit is dressed like a sci-fi punk rock medieval dragon with an exotic outfit of horns as she holds the crowd in the palm of her gloved hands. She then spends the next hour delivering her intense poetry, holding the audience with her charisma overload. Her staring eyes drip TV eye passion and high-intensity intelligence as she cajoles them with her intense word skree telling tales from the frontlines and delivering her poetic angst in a voice that is one part high octane word flow and another part has the dark resonance of a Diamanda Galas. It's thrilling stuff and a brilliant example of the art of performance that thrills and empowers you whilst it ‘smashes the patriarchy one gig at a time’.

Rushing across the venue, we catch Groningen-based GEO, who deal a stripped-down minimalist no wave that captivates with its sparse rhythms of a powerhouse rhythm section slashed over with the cheese grater guitars. There is a whiff of this stuff around at the moment but Geo does it so much better than anyone else I have seen. Every instrument is precise and perfect. It's taut, hypnotic and full of tension and release, and the song's stripped-down chassis captivate with their sense of space. Geo are yet another inventive Dutch band in their booming guitar scene which is full of ideas and twists and turns and overlapping bands and projects pushing the sonic envelope into new spaces. It's no coincidence that Michiel Klein from the equally captivating Lewsburg is in the band, and like his other group, the stark lines and hungry beat inventiveness within tight musical frameworks is apparent.

KOIKOI is a new band from the vibrant Belgrade scene that deals a stadium ready BIG INDIE. Whilst not sounding like The Killers, they have that kind of huge songs twisted with the inventiveness of the post-punk underground to make them feel invigorating, cutting edge and oven ready for the mainstream. It's a delicate tightrope and one they nimbly traverse. Koikoi have the tunes – big bold things that mix the twin female harmonies with the singer's impassioned, almost Springsteen-esque delivery. They have a powerhouse rhythm section that turns the room into a sweating, seething mass of indie dancing. They also have twanging neo Shadows guitar lines and swirling keyboards to colour it all in, and the whole room is hipster dancing like it's their new favourite band as they turn the packed 300 capacity hall into their very own stadium. If they dare to dream and dare to embrace the mainstream, then they could be the first Serbian language band to break big across the whole of Europe.

The wee small hours see Nusantara Beat dealing a tripped out mix of seventies psychedelic music from Indonesia with bolshy funk undertow that is the perfect comes in colours party bookend. Peel Slowly And See festival has been a victory. There is so much stuff going on out there that it's perfect to get it corralled into these events. Yet it takes a skill to peel the culture back slowly and sift through the narrative and thread together a concise story and the weekend has been a thrilling snapshot of where we are at with the current adventure into sound.

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