cratje – Shapednoise & Sevi Iko Dømochevsky – Slikback

In Music To Hug Your Friends Brussels-based artist cratje presents a surrealistic live A/V show built around a real-time dialogue between visuals and music. At the centre of the story is a smiley-faced character with one simple wish: to hug their friends. What stands in their way is the music industry itself, a lightly absurdist premise that carries a sharper edge. Music To Hug Your Friends asks what happens when the feeling of togetherness that sits at the heart of music gets quietly absorbed by hypercommercial spectacle. Through trancy synthlines and distorted breaks, cratje brings music that sits somewhere between tomorrowland and a muddy rave.

With Absurd Matter Continuum Shapednoise transforms sonic pressure into physical sensation. Through a hybrid setup of hardware and laptop, he delivers an evolving mix of dense low-end pressure, asymmetric grooves, and moments of sheer sonic collapse. The show is created in collaboration with visual artist Sevi Iko Dømochevsky (known for his work with Arca, Grimes and Skrillex), who constructs a delirious CGI world: a grotesque sewer-system teeming with nightmarish entities, glitch-soaked surfaces, and absurd digital detritus. Absurd Matter Continuum offers a vision of contemporary experience that’s disorienting, hyperreal, and uncomfortably familiar.

Friction, a monolithic show of intense dance percussion and bright cyberpunk visuality, sees Nairobi-born producer Slikback improvise upon themes from his album Attrition (2025). Its sounds immersively meld cinematic and game sound design with tough dance music that draws on elements of gqom, dubstep, and hardcore techno. Friction features visuals from New York-based artist Jacob Payne Barber, aka maltdisney, and light design and live video manipulation from Tasya.