Various Venues, Tromsø, Norway
Image: Ismistik at Insomnia Festival by Celine Richard

Inspired by the sleepless nights imposed by the midnight sun, Insomnia takes place in Tromsø, which lies beyond the Arctic Circle. Since 2002, the festival has fostered a culture of inclusive and forward thinking electronica that builds on the city’s foundations as Norway’s techno stronghold. The programme opens with a screening and lectures at Tromsø’s historic Verdensteatret cinema. Harun Farocki’s video installation series Serious Games, alongside presentations by Holger Pötzsch and Noura Tafeche, interrogate the double standards of Western thinking in relation to conflicts in the Middle East, particularly when refracted through media. Although not explicitly related to the curated musical acts, the forum points to the cultural critique inherent to some of the artists appearing this year.

The Palestinian artist Bint Mbareh presents an open air performance at Strandtorget. Facing a harbour and the snowcapped mountains beyond, this square is the weekly meeting place for Palestinian solidarity marches. Mbareh’s work uses the parallels between sound and water waves as a metaphor for dissolutions between states of being, blending her voice and looping buzuq into swelling tides of fractured drones that recall 1990s Seefeel. The Lofoten based sound artist Lasse Marhaug follows up with a delightfully disorientating laptop set in which digital blips, fireworks and foghorns blast off in six directions at once. It sounds like the world grinding on its axis, and turns some bemused heads from the flocks of tourists trying to escape the rain.

Back in Verdensteatret, the Tuvan throat singer Sainkho Namtchylak improvises around Θ (theta)’s bleak temporal basslines. Alternating between Russian and English phrases, primal screams and glossolalic overtone singing, Namtchylak activates the entire range of her vocal ability. Arms beating like a crow’s wings, she calls on the audience to join her in the “dangerous asylum”. Some heed the invitation and sign up for a two day throat singing workshop at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum.

Most of the action happens at Bryggeriet, a club with three stages on Storgata, Tromsø’s main shopping strip. Valentina Magaletti and YPY aka Koshiro Hino of goat (jp) don -fluorescent vests as they deliver a jackhammer thunderstorm. Hino’s percussive samples fuse with Magaletti’s kit like pneumatic tools on a well-oiled construction site. Getting the most out of their trip to Norway, the artists reappear elsewhere: Magaletti with the motorik dub trio Holy Tongue (locked grooves impossible to break away from) and Hino in KAKUHAN, his duo with the cellist Yuki Nakagawa.

With custom turntables, an orphaned air pump and disembodied bass strings, Evicshen delivers an onslaught of theatrical noise that is possibly the most polarising set of the festival. A lot of people are here to dance and for them there’s local legend Ismistik and eclectic selections from DJ Marcelle, not to mention the Iranian duo Temp-Illusion who distill techno to its darkest essence and propel the dancefloor into complete abandon. Hailing from the Nyege Nyege scene, the Afrofuturist collective HHY & The Kampala Unit do much the same, albeit with jouissance channelled through blazing brass arrangements and the dancer Exocé Kasongo, whose tireless energy hypes the crowd into a single mass. The Bug & Warrior Queen close the festival, obliterating the senses with blinding lights and dub cuts exploding out of totemic bass cabs positioned on the edge of the stage. It’s so intense that I have to leave early and I’m not sure if I’ll ever recover completely.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, December 2025