Bad Bonn Kilbi Festival
Düdingen, Switzerland
3rd-5th September 2026
One of the great European alternative festivals with a brilliant line up, a strong local focus, and forward-thinking attitude.
What makes the perfect festival? A lack of pretension and industry bullshit? A simple focus on fabulous music? Good people enjoying themselves in a glorious setting? Bad Bonn Kilbi has all of these factors in spades. This easy-going and determinedly local event busies itself by stocking up on mutual trust with a devoted clientele and sprinkling a fair bit of magic dust through its programming. Situated on the outskirts of Düdingen, an unpretentious Agri-industrial settlement in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, Bad Bonn Kilbi feels like a micro-version of Roskilde.
Enough wool gathering and picture the scene: on entering the festival grounds you were confronted by a huge cardboard robot, with a battle stance and quiff that reminded me of the founder of this august publication. Said robot was staring down a large freestanding bust of Aphex Twin, perched on the canopy of the small club stage, grinning evilly and resplendent in lippy. What could be a better spiritual portent for three days of brilliant music?
Make no mistake, the festival was a sonic riot: a jamboree. It’s impossible to adequately describe the alchemy of some of the shows, and it’s difficult to know where to start. Maybe two interplanetary gigs with an African flavour. On the Friday evening, on the hangar-like Halle A-Stage, KMRU (aka Kenyan, Joseph Kamaru) and Aho Ssan (French digital artist Niamké Désiré) undertook a collective mindmapping of the audience, courtesy of a vast electronic noise that felt beamed down from the stars. A koschmische sound that felt terrifically old, it could have been a lost signal that once allowed Ice Age humans to cross the Bering Straits. We melted into this terrifically slow-moving racket as the sun set. Contrast this with a show earlier that day by Uganda’s John Katokye, in a glade overlooking a sundappled Swiss lake. Katokye and his companion sang of a cowherd and their cows looking for water: each cow being named and described in detail using a rhythmic and very hypnotic vocal. The pair held the previously fun-loving group of limber and lithe bathers in rapt attention; the increasing languor of the scene brought an idyl painted by a member of Der Blaue Reiter group to mind. You just had to be there.
Imagine, too, seeing a procession of great young acts throwing down the gauntlet and shaping new attitudes. Brainrot Cowboy, from Brussels, staked a claim to be one of the most exciting acts on the bill with a terrific, and decibel-shaking gig full of theatre and colour, at turns inspiring and unsettling. This was a vampish, even coquettish mix of Young Gods, Ministry and Garbage, replete with concrete-heavy beats and burnt-out guitars, played by a young duo who slammed across the stage like teens drunk on cider at a house party. They were incredible. Meanwhile in the Kantine B-Stage tent their pals, the Swiss-Belgian trio SickSassySix hollowed out a new Moria for this century’s doomheads to play in. The grunts, howls and screams of the Fem bassist, guitarist and drummer – dovetailing their larva flow of metallic noise – would have had John Calvin packing his bags and running for the hills if he’d been around to witness it. Then there was Ugly, who served up an engaging and sometimes punky fizz of sounds, ideas and impressions. It’s difficult to pin them down, what with all their chord and key changes, and knockout musicianship, but they eschewed a very British anarchist cheek that glued everything together. This restless gang whose energy, complimented by some astute drumming, was possibly last seen with the likes of Deaf School, Soft Machine, or Henry Cow. Ugly really should have soundtracked the Aldermaston marches. A word too for the local Fem/Riot Grrrl band, Manic Pixxies, who played a mesmerising mainstage show early doors on the Saturday. Their gig was full of instrument swaps, singalongs, dancing and righteous declarations: a “Genzeddy” sonic cracker, constructed from sonic thrift-store finds from the likes of Kleenex, Malaria! and Alanis Morrissette. They were really, really great.
Switzerland has a long and noble history of cabaret. None of this clowning-around, crowd-pleasing schmuck here, though: cabaret is a serious business with an unsettling and enervating side to it. This is the land that birthed Dada, don’t forget. Locals Die Brennnessel mixed a cavalcade of sounds (including Harmonia-style electronic rave, Magma-esque cabaret and the sort of punk preaching last heard with Die Goldenen Citronen) with a parade of “Ensorian” masks, outsize horns, Mummer dancing and strange choir routines. It was a very very odd show and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Other oddities (though less threatening) were seen with Vinnieragua’s The Hardcore Trainer and One Man Acid Band. Dutch squat-nonsense in excelsis. These sort of wayward dudes and their insatiable fetish for junk used to brighten up my life a few decades back, but their colourful take-it-easy world has been sadly side-lined in the Doomscroll Age. For a brief window of time, we got that world back in all its scuzzy glory. In the hot, cramped and very cool Haus (an old farmer’s house it seemed), Vinneragua mounted a weird Go Kart-style contraption to play a fuzzed up coagulant of Gabber and Acid House, whilst necking a can of ale and grinning wickedly. A day earlier, in the Kantine B-Stage, he’d worked out – like all the musclebound Bros – on some odd personal trainer robot, again whilst making an unholy racket from the dark side of Toytown. Wonderful.
“The only safe mosh pit is a queer mosh pit.” Thus spoke Violeta Parra, guitarist and singer of punk transfeminista band Traidora. In a steaming Kantine B-Stage tent Traidora blasted out a righteous, high-velocity and ear-ringing rebuke to the binary and a host of other social injustices. Deafeningly loud guitars – including a bass that sounded like a military tracked vehicle having an emotional breakdown – sandblasted an enthusiastic crowd. This Saturday night broadcast even got nods from the placid groovers and inner-space cadets communing in the nearby Awareness tent. Later, Traidora’s London allies Microplastics cranked out their music for a new society. On this evidence, 96 back, aya and Jennifer Walton could be a posse of postdocs going mad with oscillators and found objects on an Open University broadcast; it felt like a thrilling post-digital resuscitation of Peter Hammill and very early Aksak Maboul. Last act on Thursday, DJ Marcelle had bewildered the heads with a set that crunched every form of music together like in a car crushing plant. What new amalgams would come out? It hardly mattered. And late on the Friday, as his act’s shuddering beats coursed through his body, Decius singer Lias Saoudi flitted around the A-Stage like some lonely ghoul sick of sin who just wants to be redeemed. Decius’s itchy, persistent spirit sleazed its way over the festival grounds like a Cthulhic shade, summoned from the lake. Don’t shun the freak flag.
Oddly, given its compact grounds, Bad Bonn Kilbi is a festival that manages to serve up a lot of headspace. The aforementioned Awareness tent, and the sylvan scene by the lake brought balm to many. Music for meditation came courtesy of Milkweed, who played a spectral set: the Kantine B-Stage crowd straining to catch the quiet atonality of their “slacker Trad” sound and a series of gnomic utterances, presented like someone talking to a Dictaphone. Another duo, Jazz Lambaux, concocted an odd mix of bagpipes and glitchtronica on a very fusty Haus stage whilst in a rapt Kantine B-Stage tent, the spiritual minimalism of One Leg One Eye invoked what remnants of La Tène culture still exist here. Early on Thursday, Horsegirl’s winsome and very personal C86 sound stroked the crowd into compliance. They are very sensual. Swiss flute rebels Flutorama kicked off the Friday programme with a wonderfully refreshing set, mixing wildly mediaeval vibes and their own interpretation of the recording sessions for Faust’s debut album. Possibly the pick of the bunch was the gig from percussionist Julian Sartorius, whose Zenlike rhythmic equations held everyone still and silent, whilst washing the clutter and grime from our souls.
Swiss trains are very good indeed, perhaps the perfect vehicle to take you away from a dream, whilst keeping you in a reverie. And the Sunday morning train ride back to normality after three days of unearthly delights was, like visiting the Korova milk bar, a state full of rare insight and peace, but one you know is temporarily maintained: it has to end in a crash…
~
Photographs by Patrick Pirncipe and Christel Hayoz, supplied.
All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.
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