The uncommonly warm October weather is enough to cause trepidation among the people of Tromsø, as they gather in the town square of this isolated outpost on the Norwegian coast.
The sun has fired up a few hundred residents of this, the world’s northernmost city, who have come together this Saturday morning to show solidarity for the Palestinian cause. Chants are led in turn by an impassioned Norwegian girl in a red ski jacket and a woman in plain black abaya. With a hand gripped tightly on a megaphone, she cries out for a “Free Palestine,” for “hands off Lebanon,” and a “ceasefire now.”
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Placards are raised, and red roses are handed out to strangers by children as the protest walks at a mournful pace through the city’s only shopping street. American tourists who have traveled to look at or eat whales, or to capture the Northern Lights on their phones as they hike around a fjord, stare as if it’s the last thing they would expect to see 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle. In the distance, what were snow-covered mountains only yesterday have taken on the color of brightly-lit desert khaki, and are now almost completely bare.
Tromsø has been twinned with Gaza City since 2001, but its firm links to Palestine stretch back to the 1970s. The opening of its university attracted enough politically engaged international students to change a community’s mindset forever. Students continue to make up a quarter of the 80,000 population during term time.
I am here to attend the annual Insomnia Festival in what is the techno capital of Norway. Since 2002, it has showcased Tromsø’s electronic producers, while also inviting experimental artists from around the globe to play to an open-minded crowd.
Filmmaker and Insomnia collaborator Mohammed Jabaly was only meant to have left Gaza for a one-month cultural exchange in 2014. Following the outbreak of the Gaza War, he suddenly found himself stateless in Tromsø, and cut off from his family—as documented in his movie, Life Is Beautiful: A Letter to Gaza. When I tell him I would have expected such a backwater to be conservative, he affirms the opposite: “My heart has broken so many times, but no matter how cold and dark this place gets—the people have only given me warmth and light.”
His involvement in this year’s festival has been understandably reduced: “I cannot bring myself to be part of any kind of festivities right now, with the scale of what is happening back home…” Mohammed drifts off silently before changing tack to the Sámi peoples of the region, an indigenous community who continue to fight for recognition, having only been granted a constitutional right to develop their language and culture in 1987. “As Palestinians, we recognise those that live through the world similarly to us, marginalized and experiencing genocide,” he says. “Like the Native Americans or the Irish—it’s all connected.”
The first day of Insomnia is an outdoor event focused on Sámi culture, named ‘Outsiders’ and organized by celebrated local music producer and DJ, Charlotte Bendiks. After putting on punk gigs as a 15-year-old in the late 90s, when she lived on her family sheep farm in a village of just 24 people, she moved away and has become a proud mouthpiece for Sámi identity abroad. “We honor and champion our roots in a way that older generations didn’t feel safe to do,” she says. Like Biosphere and Røyksopp—also born here—Bendiks’ music channels the space we inhabit within ourselves when traversing such landscapes at the edge of the world.
I walk up from a valley, to a clearing beneath what is considered to be a magic mountain, a scene of Pagan lore that is home to the deified Sámi reindeer. A thin gray mist wavers to the crunch of my footsteps and water rushing over rocks. After 2 kilometers, I hear the gentle thud of beats and see the dance of laser lights within a smoke-machine fog that rushes into the evergreen trees.
Youth of the region have increasingly sought to identify with the magic of their ancient culture. Two Sámi girls lie in the back of a van filled with piles of soft lamb skins. One with vivid red hair exhales thick smoke from her lungs that rushes to the open fire outside. What is it to be Sámi, I ask. “What is it to be human?” she responds, passing me the rolled cigarette. A small stage has been expertly covered by a skeletal frame of tree branches, lit up blood red. One of the organizers takes the microphone to welcome everyone present. A few hundred of us, drinking from cans of beer or locally produced mead, listen on.
She talks of ancient forests, sacred peaks, and dancing rituals, as Bendiks sets up. The crowd are eager to whoop and skank spookily to her future-dancehall beats. Later, scene godfather Per Martinsen—who goes by the DJ alias Mental Overdrive and is one of the founders of Insomnia festival—plays heavy emotional techno, even veering towards psytrance as a man breathes fire with his top off. Anxiously, I scroll my phone to see a pop star’s apparent suicide battle it out for screen space with the execution of the leader of Hamas.
The remaining two days of the festival are held in one large building with three stages. A youthful crowd determined to dance is guzzling pints of lager.
Berlin-based DAKN, a Palestinian rapper backed by his ally DJ Sami, discards his winter coat to get to business. His complex flows over UK-inspired beats hurtle from garage to grime, and get the crowd chanting out to the ‘Sound of Ramallah.’
Another highlight is The Gloria, who was born in a tiny village in the north of Italy. She spends much of her performance crawling around on broken glass and wailing into the microphone at the feet of the teenagers flailing to her powerful, demented techno. “I will never leave Tromsø because this is halfway to the post-human landscape that I dreamt of,” she announces to the crowd. “We can only be optimistic once we have killed half the world’s population.” I am not sure that the local tourist office will feature it on their posters, but in this context, it works.
In a quiet corner, a local resident tells me that horses and anyone who rides them signify evil, and that I should look up Ruohtta, the Sámi god of sickness and death. Instead, London-based Decius emerge with their ode to better days of walloping, spiraling hedonism. Frontman Lias Saoudi, also of Fat White Family, peels off his pervert’s Macintosh coat to reveal what looks like mismatched BDSM gear pulled from Berghain’s lost property box. His screaming and snotting over himself has the large crowd pogoing before long, and he laps it up.
Awk-rock act Slim0 tell me of their relief “to play a festival that openly declares solidarity with Palestine. It may not be that radical—but it is fucking rare.” The band sound like the kind that would’ve become cult-famous forever if Kurt Cobain had worn one of their T-shirts in the 1990s.
“It would be a dream, in a way, to travel to the West Coast of the US, where many of our influences come from,” their singing drummer tells me. “But I am conflicted and I am Iranian, so I am not even sure how that would work.” Their complaints of being racially profiled by security guards, searching for trouble where there is none in cahoots with Tromsø police, is a portent of the aggravation they might face on any trip Stateside.
Azemad, another Berlin resident born in Egypt, takes the crowd on a sonic journey of endless kicks and movie synths. It all collapses only to come back harder—808s and divine 909s uniting everyone as breathlessly it ends. The crowd is left in sudden emotional stasis, like tears in the rain.
As Indonesia’s friendly upstart—and festival highlight—Takkak Takkak takes to the stage, I recall what Charlotte Bendiks said earlier when I asked what makes the mountain we visited magical: “In Sámi culture, we never explain directly; we speak in riddles; it’s how we keep things mystical.” It makes sense as Takkak Takkak allies sordid bass with the weird synths of shamanic horror, in a confusingly warm orange blur. “This is my own decolonization process,” he laughs, referring to his sound. “I make music that frees me. As Asians we know that we do not have to play in Europe to impress anyone back home any more. Europeans are the only ones that cannot see how ‘over’ that already is.”
Festival closer Lord Spikeheart—formerly the singer in Duma, arguably Kenya’s greatest-ever electronic export—comes out to pulverizing gabber that grabs the crowd by the throat and chucks them to the wall. Delivering vocals in the guttural style of his Norwegian black metal heroes, Spikeheart’s performance is a punchy inferno that never lets up, shaking his dreads and booting bottles of water like a man trapped in a purgatory of his own making.
It is a ferocious end to a festival with no clear headliners or corporate sponsorship, a festival for the misfits and the marginalized. A celebration of the weird that continues to be solely driven by love in disheartening times.
Outside meanwhile, the sky emits a terrible electric green light.
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