This year’s PUNKT FESTIVAL has been a beautiful affair. After being curated by Eno and Sylvian in the last two years, it was a kind of going back to the roots of PUNKT. The best thing is the Punkt aesthetic which is, beyond the art of live-sampling, a lesson in stripping down nearly every „big thing“ to chamber music size and a sensual „being-lost-in-the-laboratory“-agenda. David Sylvian’s trio, The Kilowatt Hour, shows the silent triumph of an artist rigorously following his own visions and thereby sacrificing old fans‘ nostalgic expectations. In case you’re looking for the best visual choreographies of modern music history, you can start, maybe, with early Pink Floyd, and you’ll end up at The Kilowatt Hour. The duo of Jan Bang with jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan (and special guest Eivind Aarset) was one of the most shining hours of the Punkt history, telling that jazz’s future might be well-grounded in playing with fractured dejavues and nearly lost echoes. By the way, Tigran’s musical life changed when he (once upon a time) listened to „Dis“ from Jan Garbarek and Ralph Towner. The sound of the wind harp ist still alive, folks! Another breathtaking event was the duo of a singer and a guitarist: Eteniesh Wassie’s and Mathieu Sourisseau’s performance was bleak, really bleak, another stripped-down intensity in its purest form. In parts rooted in the East of Africa, their music covered the range from trance patterns to joyous noise. No wonder that especially these three performances in Foenix Cinema and Kick Scene were followed by live-remixes (with Erik Honore, Ivar Grydeland, Jan Bang, Audun Kleive, Arve Henriksen, Sidsel Endresen a.o.) that transferred the original sounds to a totally different landscape without losing the emotional impact. In spite of the election in Norway that went utterly wrong (bad news) we will have PUNKT No. 10 next year (good news).