Alter

03/06/2026

It is with great honour that we invite Alison Cotton to his year’s instalment of ALTER!

Alison Cotton has been recording for almost 30 years – in bands like Saloon, The Eighteenth Day of May and The Left Outsides – and her solo career, which started with a cassette release a decade ago, came about almost by accident. But in the ensuing years, Alison has developed a singular and affecting style according to parameters she set herself: “to work predominantly with the instruments I play and own… these parameters have grown as my music has evolved but mainly because I’ve bought new instruments. As for the sound, I really just play what comes naturally to me and it comes out in a folky way. The drone element started almost as a necessity, as I often use it as a base to play other parts over when I’m improvising. My first album was mainly just viola and vocals and, it worked well playing and singing over a viola or omnichord drone.

occupies a unique place in the current English music scene, the way that often quite experimental drones of her work meshes with the more traditional elements seeing her included with artists like Nico, John Cale and Dorothy Carter. After remarkable releases like The Portrait You Painted of Me and Engelchen, The Gods Laugh feels like the fulfilment of incredible promise.

Find your ticket via the link in our bio 🔗

29/05/2026

It is with huge excitement that with present 9 additional artists for this years ALTER! For this batch we once again invite artists who push the boundaries of the musical landscape.

The 9 new artists are:
Alison Cotton ( )
Alle
Curbside Lambsear ( .lambsear )
Devon Rexi ( )
Muskila & Simona Abdallah ( )
Oscar Friisgaard ( )
Roxane Metayer ( )
Swanasa ( )
Yngel & Rasmus Daugbjerg ( .daug )

Nature is invited in when Roxane Metayer creates a universe through her music that borders on animal and plant mimicry, whilst Yngel & Rasmus Daugbjerg’s organic and folktale-like collaboration celebrates the magic of nature

In Alison Cotton’s droning folk music, swanasas’ meditative sound collages and Oscar Friisgaard’s sound works, the audience will be led into a space for contemplation. The same can be said of both Alle and Curbside Lambsear, who both work with diverse forms of fragility, allowing listeners to get up close and personal.

On Saturday evening, Muskila & Simona Abdallah’s Kurdish and Palestinian roots will transform rhythms from the diaspora into heavy, club-oriented soundscapes, whilst Devon Rexi’s motoric krautrock mentality, with an unmistakable dub-infused physicality and an experimental sensibility that defies categorisation – will undoubtedly get even the least danceable guest moving.

ALTER 2026 is kindly supported by:

dk

eu

22/05/2026

In a week we will reveal the third round of artists for this years’ ALTER - From music that blends field recordings, acoustic instruments and voice to mimic the animal and vegetal universe to an indubiously
dub-laden experience flirting with the motorik krait-rock mentality

Tickets can be found via the link in our bio or via alterfestival.dk/tickets/

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ALTER is a festival that has been of great importance to the Danish musical landscape since 2020. ALTER has allowed new compositional music to perform side by side with other,
primarily innovative and experimental music and art, without regard to genre labels.

ALTER takes a critical approach to its own role and significance for the music and scenes that are presented and represented. ALTER has also done this with a lot of media attention for this type of event, with Soundvenue highlighting the festival’s programme as so wide-ranging that it “could have taken place on different planets” and with a sold-out festival with over 1,700 visitors in 2025.

Over the past five years, ALTER has presented challenging and new music and art to a
diverse audience. ALTER has successfully encouraged this audience to leave their prejudices at home and experience the music with open ears.

18/05/2026

It is with immense happiness that we present Tara Clerkin Trio at this years festival!

With two extraordinary mini-albums – In Spring (2021) and On The Turning Ground (2023) – making a splash on London’s formidable World of Echo label in wake of their self-titled 2020 ’s upcoming Somewhere Good LP is, in many ways, the band’s most realised work.

In running their usual gauntlet of idiosyncratic (*an overused adjective for which here there is regrettably no sufficient alternative) approaches, Clerkin & co. colour in and outside of compositional lines over the course of 40+ celebratory minutes - never wallowing, despite inherently somber subject matters of self-defeat, disease, displacement, restlessness, gentrification - allowing their arrangements and improvisations ample space and time to situate, stretch out, breathe, cross-pollinate, and ultimately take deeper hold on the listener’s imagination – all while somehow sounding more like themselves than ever before.

The hazy, unmappable skyline-mirage of droning harmonium, upright bass, peculiarly accentuated wind instruments, acoustic guitar, hushed yet literally mighty keys combine to hypnotizing effect. The band may make underlying nods to jazz, sure, but it’s not appropriation, it’s that they have the actual chops to build it out. Beneath the janky samples and oddball percussive embellishment lies actually great drumming.

Beyond the manipulated vocal witchery and woefully reflective plain-spoke moments are Tara’s subtly inspired melodies, sung with what might honestly be the glue to the whole crazy equation. A calming consistency throughout the otherwise unpredictably dynamic, boldly intuitive, uniquely British exploration of this (their own) universe in song.

11/05/2026

11/05/2026

We can’t wait to invite guests in to the riff heavy universe of Statoil!

Statoil is the sound of the sticky, black-gold liquid being pumped out of the earth, distributed over the globe and turned into capital. As the only preserver of the genre ‘static-oil-core’ (an instrumental genre of heavy, repetitive riffs and shrieking noise) they are the manifestation of the middle finger to hyper-capitalism, cynical raw material extraction and the lack of compassion for the common human.

ALTER 2026

08/05/2026

Snuggle will drape our guests in their musical duvet when they visit ALTER this year!

snuggle’s sound is both three-dimensional and cottony, concealing a conflicted inner dialogue. Their abundant guitar riffs, melodies, and lyrics graze against each other to shape their distinct world. Members Andrea Thuesen and Vilhelm Strange located instant symbiosis as schoolmates at Copenhagens Rhythmic Music Conservatory, bonding over sprawling jam sessions. The self-professed “musical soulmates” lingered in Copenhagen’s underground for years before unveiling snuggle in 2023. Thuesen makes up a third of the trio Baby In Vain, which has rolled out grungey releases since the early 2010s. Strange established his footing producing the left-field boy band Liss. has become a shelter from life’s storm — oblique arrangements injected with equal doses of existential dread and poetic humor.

snuggle is a social practice rooted in intuition. “music has always been a social practice for me. A way to be together, and create, and have an community around something” Much of Thuesen and Strange’s output also sparks in domestic moments lounging in bed, improvising on guitar, and watching television, isolation. The project’s name references an intimacy that impacts these albeit moody routines. “One day, Vilhelm just came along and
asked, ‘What do you think about “snuggle”?,’” Thuesen reflects. “And in one way or another,
it just made perfect sense to me, because we were both kind of cozy like that, when we
need protection from crazyness.”

06/05/2026

We are very happy to announce OKI at this years ALTER!

One of the last surviving players of the tonkori - a 5-string harp performed by the indigenous Japanese Ainu people - OKI mixes traditional Ainu folk songs with international influences as varied as dub, Irish folk, throat singing, African drumming and music from Central Asia.

Born on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1957, he is a contemporary of the likes of Haroumi Hosono and Midori Takada, an explorative folk musician who is one of Japan’s most respected and restless contemporary folk musicians.

It is OKI’s openness to international influences that has helped him revitalise Ainu folk music and he is one of only a handful of musicians who play the tonkori, a five-stringed Ainu harp, which is both the pulse of this record and the force that unifies the disparate sounds he introduces: “I’ve never seen a traditional tonkori player”, he says “they were all dead when I started”.

Thought to have originated in the mid 19th Century on the island of Sakhalin, the tonkori arrived in what is now the main Ainu community of Hokkaido after Sakhalin was annexed by Russia after WWII. The Japanese government had previously passed an act labelling the Ainu as “former aborigines” and with Ainu culture outlawed the Ainu are now almost fully assimilated into Japanese society - in 2011 it was estimated only 300 people understood the Ainu language. “What happened to the Ainu is similar to the Aboriginies in Australia and the Native Indians in America”, says OKI “My grandfather – a bear hunter – didn’t teach Ainu culture to my father”.

04/05/2026

It is a great honour to invite NYX to be the voices behind this years opening ritual at ALTER 2026!

NYX is a London-based collective of artists working at the intersection of choral music and electronic music performance. Led by music director Sian O’Gorman, their work explores connections between the body, architecture, and nature to create music that bridges the ancient and the futuristic. A self-managed collective, NYX has performed at London Design Festival, the Pompidou Centre, Rewire Festival, Roundhouse, ICA, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Dark M**o. Their 2020 collaborative album Deep England with Gazelle Twin was named one of The Guardian’s top ten contemporary albums, and they received Film London’s Breakthrough Talent Award in 2021. They also contributed to the Diablo IV Official Soundtrack and debuted their first TV score for the BBC and Bad Wolf’s Dope Girls in 2025. In Greek mythology, NYX is the primordial goddess of the night, born from chaos giving birth to light and day. Inspired by this duality, NYX’s music harnesses the voice as a limitless medium for profound emotion, capturing the vast spectrum of human experience with power and authenticity. They invite audiences to engage on their own terms, finding personal meaning in the sound, and envisioning a world where music connects, transforms, and redefines belonging.

For this years’ ALTER NYX will be guide the audience through our re-occurring Opening Ritual, with a special one off performance made specifically for the festival.