The shape of BRDCST to come

To guarantee its visitors that they will hear the sound of the future, BRDCST regularly delves into the past. Innovation occurs thanks to pioneers, who did whatever they wanted irrespective of what anyone else thought about it, wherever they were born in the world.

> Reviving voices.

One might wonder what is innovative about Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (4/4, 20.00, AB Flex), but the women’s choir that has been active since 1952 keeps getting rediscovered by each new generation. In the mid-1980s, Ivo Watts-Russell and his hip record label 4AD ensured their breakthrough in the West. More recently, their goosebump-inducing vocal brilliance was picked up by Lady Gaga and Gorillaz and was sampled by Drake and Leftfield. A new group of singers recently recorded with Lisa Gerrard (Dead Can Dance), who will be joining them in Brussels. The time is ripe for another revival

> Fourth world music.

The term “Fourth World Music” was invented by Jon Hassell (5/4, 20.00, AB Salon), who released Dream Theory in Malaya. Fourth World Volume 2 in 1981. Now, this record that crosses ethnic music with electronica is the soundtrack for an evening around the label that rereleased it. Tak:til, a fresh imprint of Glitterbeat, is not only digging up the American ambient musician (who studied under Stockhausen and played with La Monte Young and Brian Eno), it is also presenting the slow, tactile music of Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society and the Slovenian trio Širom.

Unruly make-overs

BRDCST is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the innovative Ghent-based Consouling Sounds with a label night (8/4, 18.00, AB Club) focused on drone master Dirk Serries; the fifteenth anniversary of Madlib’s instrumental hip hop classic Shades of Blue by letting the young British jazz hounds Vels Trio (4/4, 20.30, The Music Village) loose on it, and the fiftieth of White Light/White Heat by playing the Velvet Underground’s album “quasi-completely”. Only the unforgettable final track “Sister Ray” is being made over by the noise-orchestra BARST (5/4, 23.30, AB Club) in an epic guitar manifesto.

A jazz supreme

The Ancienne Belgique is injecting BRDCST with a heavy dose of jazz. With Josef Leimberg (5/4, 20.30, The Music Village), it is being amped up to cosmic proportions. The American trumpet player was a guest on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and on his debut Astral Progressions, he has set the bar very high for the shape of spiritual jazz to come. Mattias De Craene is doing his very best to reach that bar with his project MDC III (8/4, 17.00, AB Box). Along with drummers Simon Segers and Lennert Jacobs, the Nordmann reed player gives a particularly compelling performance.

Raise your fists

By giving a stage to adventurous sounds from the African diaspora, BRDCST is combining its musical mission with a political statement about the worst periods of Western history. The festival has programmed the activist British band Young Fathers (6/4, 19.00, AB Box), but the message of the NON Worldwide collective is harder-hitting: be there when the fierce Chino Amobi (6/4, 19.00, AB Box) describes the American wasteland, and when the Belgian-Congolese Nkisi (6/4, 21.00, Bonnefooi) denounces the system with a resounding electronica offensive and Congolese rhythms.

> BRDCST. 4 > 8/4, various locations