In its third iteration, Pitchfork Festival London was bigger than ever, taking place across 15 venues around the city, from sticky-floored bars to elegant churches and prestigious old theaters. The realities of the current political moment hung in the air, which many artists addressed during their shows: MIKE shouting “Free Congo, free Sudan, free Palestine!”; M(h)aol imploring people to donate what they could; Yaeji thanking people for making time to see her set during of a weekend of protests. Across six days, the genre-spanning festival demonstrated music’s ability to offer a kind of connective tissue through hard times. Here are some of the highlights.
Ryoji Ikeda – Barbican Centre, Wednesday, November 8
At times, Japanese glitch pioneer Ryoji Ikeda’s set felt viscerally violent. Fittingly taking place within the brutalist architecture of the Barbican, it began with a tinnitus-like piercing ring that crescendoed into white noise, all backed by sharp black and white pixels scattering behind Ikeda like TV static. An audiovisual performance based on his 2022 album, Ultratronics, the show moved between an industrial sound and something texturally warmer, at times ambient and others more club-facing. The visuals—data sets wrought into maps, streams of digits flooding the screen, a saturation of orange explosions—added to the sense of apocalyptic digital abrasion.
Fly Anakin – EartH Hall, Thursday, November 9
The current school of U.S. underground rap might seem at odds with energetic live performance: These are artists reveling in smudged, stoner-y production and intricate, introspective flows, not the sort of hefty hooks and beats you associate with a raucous crowd. Virginia rapper Fly Anakin’s set challenged this notion. Between songs, he did tequila shots and even attempted to see how many push-ups he could do in a row (36, if you’re wondering). As the quickfire bars of “Sean Price” flowed out of him immediately after that exercise, he began to laugh at his own vocal control: “I had to hold my breath like a motherfucker! The lung capacity!”
