  
For six editions, SoundArt Festival has carved its name into Romania’s cultural bedrock as a crucible of sonic experimentation, visual alchemy, and collective transformation. From its humble 2020 origins in Bucharest’s underground basements to its current status as a pilgrimage for avant-garde seekers, the festival has conjured moments that linger in the psyche like half-remembered rituals. Below, we traverse the labyrinth of memory to resurrect the most electrifying, haunting, and transcendent episodes from its storied past.
The Birth of a Beast: 2017’s Stoner-Prog Awakening
The 2017 edition, chronicled in visceral detail by The Interwission1, marked SoundArt’s emergence from niche obscurity into something fiercer. That year, Control Club and Quantic became temples where stoner rock met progressive metal in a haze of feedback and revelation.
The Italian Incantation: Fakir Thongs’ Opening Rite
When Fakir Thongs took the stage on May 4, few anticipated the tectonic shift their set would trigger. Their sound—a fever dream splicing Tool’s polyrhythmic precision with Queens of the Stone Age’s desert swagger—acted as a sonic lodestone. Witnesses recall the air thickening as guitarist Marco Conti unleashed the spiraling riff of Lizard Queen, its dissonant harmonies mirroring the geometric projections swirling behind the band. "They played like architects of delirium," wrote one attendee, "building cathedrals of noise that collapsed into pure catharsis."1
Stoned Jesus and the Night the Desert Swallowed Bucharest
May 6, 2017, belongs to Stoned Jesus. The Ukrainian doom prophets transformed Quantic into a sandstorm of fuzz and fury. As frontman Igor Sydorenko bellowed the opening lines of I’m the Mountain, the crowd became a single organism, swaying to the 14-minute epic’s glacial grooves. The climax came during Here Come the Robots, where drummer Dmytro Zinchenko’s double-kick barrage synced with strobes to create a strobe-lit séance. "It wasn’t a concert," a fan later recounted. "It was possession by sound."1
Risin Sabotage: Janis Joplin’s Ghost in Doom Metal Drag
In the post-midnight haze, Risin Sabotage emerged as 2017’s sleeper hit. Frontwoman Lina Vassilopoulou channeled Janis Joplin’s raw-throated abandon over sludge-drenched riffs, her sequined cloak catching the light like shattered glass. During Scorpion Wine, she climbed onto the bass drum, howling into a theremin—a moment forever etched into the festival’s lore as "the night doom grew wings."
The Alchemical Crucible: Dan Șerbănescu’s 2023 Sensory Exorcism
No artist embodies SoundArt’s ethos more than Dan Șerbănescu, whose 2023 Alone in The Hollow Garden performance at Control Club5 redefined ritualistic sound.
The Hollow Garden Blooms
Surrounded by Tibetan singing bowls and modular synths, Șerbănescu crafted a drone symphony that bypassed ears to vibrate directly in the bone marrow. Attendees reported synesthetic episodes—tasting chords as "burnt honey"5 and seeing soundwaves as mandalic patterns. The climax came during Nada Brahma, where live feeds from subterranean Bucharest sewers merged with subharmonic pulses, collapsing the boundary between performer and audience. "We didn’t listen," confessed a regular. "We were dissolved."
2024: The Year the Walls Wept Poetry
SoundArt’s pivot toward interdisciplinary fusion reached its apex in 2024 with the inaugural Institutul Blecher Literary Night
Claudiu Komartin’s Electro-Lament
Poet Claudiu Komartin stood bathed in crimson light at Hidden – The Social Space, reciting Autumns of Soldered Iron over Amarthalos’ ambient drones. As the line "we are the rust on God’s wristwatch" echoed, synth textures mimicked the creak of aging metal—a collaboration that birthed SoundArt’s now-signature blend of verse and vibration.
The Evolution of Tragedy: Tragic’s Metamorphosis
Romanian post-metal outfit Tragic exemplifies SoundArt’s role as incubator. Their 2017 debut1 saw them shuffling shyly through Tower of Silence, barely interacting with the crowd. By 202546, they’d morph into titans of catharsis, their setlist now including the 20-minute epic Carpathian Elegy, where cellist Ana Munteanu’s bowwork drew blood from her fingers—a sacrifice mirrored in the audience’s tear-streaked faces.
Green Yeti’s Retrograde Orbit
The Greek trio Green Yeti closed 2017 with Desert Show1, a 70-minute voyage through Kyuss-worshipping riffage and sitar-laced psychedelia. During Black Planets, frontman Michalis Amorgianos detuned his guitar mid-solo, creating a dissonance so profound it triggered a venue-wide power surge—an accident forever mythologized as "the night SoundArt broke reality."
The Symposium of Fractured Time (2024)
Geologist Gheorghe Ilinca’s 2024 lecture6 at Casa Universitarilor fused Dacian pottery patterns with quantum crystallography. His demonstration—projecting Neolithic spirals against graphene’s atomic lattice—proved art and science share DNA. "Every culture’s art is fossilized vibration," he declared, as the crowd grappled with this seismic truth.
Bong-Ra’s 2025 Prelude: A Glimpse of Chaos
Though technically part of the upcoming 2025 lineup, Dutch breakcore maverick Bong-Ra’s March 6 warm-up show in Budapest2 sent shockwaves through the SoundArt community. Footage reveals a maniacal Jason Köhnen manipulating Amen breaks into a "rhythmic holocaust"2, foreshadowing what Quantic Club will witness on March 15.
Epilogue: The Unseen Tapestry
These moments form mere threads in SoundArt’s ever-unfolding tapestry. From RoadkillSoda’s 2017 stoner anthems that "smelled of petrol and rebellion"1 to Villagers of Ioannina City’s impending 2025 Balkan odyssey26, the festival’s magic lies in its ability to transmute sound into shared memory. As Dan Șerbănescu himself growled during a rare interview: "We don’t create concerts. We forge experiences that outlive the flesh."
In Bucharest’s sacred venues, past and future collide—a continuum where every feedback screech, whispered verse, and alchemical projection becomes eternal. To have witnessed these moments is to carry fragments of SoundArt’s ever-burning flame |
