Interesting perspectives. I can't know all the details about where the more cynical attitudes come from because I'm not from there, however I'd still observe a lot of what is being suggested here doesn't fully resonate with the handful of experiences I've got. Perhaps I occupy a slightly strange middle ground here in that my own music is more likely to be occasionally platformed by an 'artsy' organisation overseas but it's still highly informed by noise and I have a pretty solid, firm foot planted in noise culture, as a fan and maker of things. Even so, the last time I played in Brussels, organised by Kraak - who I'd assume are part of this more seemingly academic, serious bracket, was with Barn Sour and Tzu Nii. Barn Sour being some very weird, chaotic stuff operating on an extremely underground level in fucking Winnipeg of all places, and Tzu Nii being heavy, crushing installation based performance with huge amplified metal wires strung all over the venue. Incidentally, she played a Charnel Ground related show in the Netherlands recently, I believe. Albeit whilst being distinctly billed as a 'sound art' alternative! But I think the guys involved with those bookings have their own projects dealing with more mellow, sound collaged material?
I'll accept that none of this is Harsh Noise but it's hardly on the level of the festival in question, which really looks the same to me as any highly funded, mildly experimental European festivals that feature a rotating cast of desperate professional novelty acts alongside the odd appearance from someone like Youngs. I've done a few of them myself as it happens.
I can observe that more local Harsh Noise heads don't seem to attend or get asked to play these events - which perhaps speak to some of the arguments here, but I suppose I'd offer the provocation of how often would Belgian Harsh Noise crowds invite/want to see/genuinely appreciate someone doing sound poetry/free improv/quiet computer sound art at one of their shows, if only for the sake of bridging gaps between similar ideas and motivations? Maybe at some stage the aesthetic and methodological rooting of all of it just feels...unrelated to the niche you're trying to fill?
Again, I can't possibly understand the full picture of it, and what local relationships are like between these different crowds. An element of the divide will be related to who is DIY vs who has funding of some kind, the latter situation being someone almost completely foreign to an Englishman.
I wonder if it isn't all part of a wider circumstance where hyper genrefication has taken its old in the live arena in the last decade or more. Dries - I'm sure you recall some of those Second Layer/Harbinger fests in the UK and how diverse in style they were. Even when you invited me to Kortrijk seems so different a line up to anything you'd see now! Is this just because as new things have been built and new networks have formed in the face of increasingly difficult logistical realities, the only way for people to really make anything happen is, as you say, to seek it where it exists in the most readily available form VS try to pull together a bunch of slightly disparate things into one event? I don't know. Contrary to everything I've said, I also can say I live somewhere with loads of expressions of experimental music happening locally that are of zero interest to me and I basically see zero crossover. For me, building what I want to see, difficult as it is to sustain, has been better than trying to merge things that don't really work so well together.
