Jakke Jalink and Eline Cremers are Oei!, a young duo that has only recently started organising shows but already made enough of an impression for them to be invited as guest curators for this anniversary edition of Summer Bummer.

Oei! has only recently started putting up shows?

Jakke: This will be our third event. As a fifteen-year-old I already made fictitious line-ups with acts like Man Is the Bastard, posters included. Oei! came about in 2023, when I was speaking to Greg Abels of Het Bos, and we concluded that very little experimental music was going on at the time in Antwerp. I felt the urge to organise something, but I lacked knowhow and financial resources. So when Greg proposed to do something together, that decision was quickly made. The first night we booked was a total flop, because our headliner, Gnaw Their Tongues, cancelled their show.
For the next event – the first one using the name Oei! – we invited Leandro Barzabal, Marta Zapparoli and Dylan Belgrado. I had asked Eline to design the poster, but it quickly became clear that it would be more fun to make the line-up together.
I’m still satisfied with how that night turned out. We had booked it instinctively, but it worked really well. Koen (Vandenhoudt) of Sound in Motion, who was deejaying that night, told me he hadn’t seen an experimental show with such a spot-on curation in a long time, and that he barely knew the acts.

What turns an evening into an Oei!-evening?

Jakke: After that first show, we mainly talked a lot and thought about what we wanted Oei! to become. We realised we wanted to showcase music we missed in Antwerp: abstract stuff that’s not tabletop music per se. There’s often an acoustic element in there, or self-built instruments.
Eline: There’s also no need for Oei! to happen regularly. It’s more important we’re both fully behind every aspect.
Jakke: The name – ‘oops!’ – already implies we consider the possibility of experiment and failure.
Eline: That first night could’ve just as well been a one-off event. At this point the organisation is merely an e-mail address and an Instagram account.

The second Oei!-show took place in December 2024, again in Het Bos.

Jakke: That was Tongue Depressor, the American duo of Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey. They make very dense drones: acoustic and tape based.

And then came the offer to curate a few shows for Summer Bummer…

Jakke: After that second night Koen sent me a text message: “Let’s talk,” and I couldn’t help but think “Oops, what is this about?”

Liegenaar

Jakke, your project Liegenaar was the closing act of Summer Bummer 2023.

Jakke: Koen knew me from my radio show Nachttoeslag on Radio Centraal. Liegenaar was still in an early experimental phase, but Koen had heard we worked with self-made instruments and were quite noisy. That was enough for him to invite us to play the festival. Kiara (Govaert) and myself knew what Summer Bummer was, but when we saw some of the artists on the first day, like Rob Mazurek and Gabriele Mitelli’s Star Splitter, that was quite the what-the-fuck-moment: “Wow this is our competition?”

I thought you guys were the perfect closing act: some experimental noise for the insatiable die-hards.

Jakke: We both hated that set. We still laugh about how horrible it was. But we’re super grateful for the opportunity of course, and we learned a lot from it. We really didn’t know what we were doing back then, each show was different. Once we realised that, we decided that Liegenaar is about improvisation, but also about doing something fresh for every show. When we did a tour with Leandro Barzabal, we worked for months on developing a set-up, that allowed us to improvise something else every night, with self-built instruments and tape manipulations.

Eline, are you a musician too?

Eline: No. When I did my internship at Kraak – I was studying literature, but I ended up there via my passion for experimental music – I discovered that writing about music made me listen to it in a different way. Curating music myself seemed like fun at the time, but I wouldn’t have done that by myself. Jakke’s question came at the perfect time.

No chickens!

Back to Summer Bummer. Were you given carte blanche for your part of the program?

Jakke: Yes. We suggested four acts, but Sound in Motion refused one of them: a project by Isa Opstaele and Lennert Lefever, in which chickens set the rhythm by picking seeds from a large metal plate with contact microphones. We thought that was a nice combination of electro-acoustics and performance, but Koen and Christel (Kumpen) deemed it a bit too adventurous. (both laugh)
Eline: We didn’t want to come up with acts that they would book themselves. But they immediately agreed with the three other proposals.
Jakke: We asked Zinc & Copper because we were blown away by Robin Hayward’s ‘Words of Paradise’. You can’t go much more hardcore when it comes to instrumentation and abstraction than that record: such beautiful music.

Zinc & Copper had been on Summer Bummer’s longlist since forever.

Jakke: We had no idea.

Your second booking is the Estonian duo Katariin Raska and Villem Jahu.

Eline: I saw them play at Cabaret Voltá in Tallinn, where I was studying for a few months. I ended up there as I was trying to figure out the Estonian music scene. Katariin and Villem’s concert was the first thing that really impressed me there. It was freezing cold.

I saw a video of that: they were the only ones not wearing gloves.

Eline: That vibe, exactly. I remember I immediately sent a video to Jakke.
Jakke: Katariin plays traditional Estonian bagpipes, but in a very dissonant manner. Villem works with self-made synths, often based on the circuits of the American DIY-synth maker Peter Blasser. They improvise noisy and dissonant drones, but just sometimes a weird folky melody comes peeping through.
Eline: Katariin also plays traditional Estonian folk, with mouth harps and stuff like that. That knowledge and tradition is noticeable in the background of their improvisation.

The third artist you booked is Antwerp’s own Joke Caimo.

Jakke: I’ve known Joke for a long time. We wanted to do something with installation art, and I immediately thought of Joke, because I really like their work. Joke’s work should be displayed in big institutes, but for whatever reason, that hasn’t happened yet. The installation Joke shows at Summer Bummer is called ‘Human Organ Concerto’: it’s basically an old organ, converted so that visitors can play it, breathing through a mask. Joke will perform with the installation on Friday, but the audience can play with it for three days.

Is there an act on the ‘regular’ program that you are looking forward to?

Eline: I think we both want to see Brandon Lopez and Steve Baczkowski. Lopez could’ve been an artist we added to the line-up ourselves.
Jakke: Very much so. But if you ask me what act I am the most curious about, that would be David Toop. Then again: the greatest thing about Summer Bummer is that you can go through the line-up and look up every act, but you won’t know what you’ll get anyway. Even when they book Wolf Eyes, they’ll hook them up with Hanne De Backer.