Interview with Julian Brimmers, COSMOS LGW?
2024.12.26
🔊COSMOS 2024 Embassy & LGW?’s Global Music Community
In November, ICRN proudly joined Le Guess Who? Festival through COSMOS, a programme connecting global music communities. As the Vilnius Embassy (the founding city of the network), we premiered a film spotlighting ICRN’s roots, as well as local initiatives like minimal.lt and Ukrainian Beat. At the festival, members of ICRN joined a four-day co-broadcast with Refuge Worldwide live from Utrecht, including a featured live mix by COOL AIR featuring Lithuanian music. Check out the Vilnius Embassy film, co-produced with NARA, here!
We share some words from Music Journalist and COSMOS Editor Julian Brimmers, who offers deeper insight into the relationship between COSMOS and community radio (as well as some radio highlights for your ears over the holidays)…
Firstly, what is COSMOS and how does this programme differentiate to the wider Le Guess Who? programme?
🗣️COSMOS is Le Guess Who’s global music community. And my name is Julian Brimmers, I’m a music journalist and the editor of COSMOS.
Le Guess Who? is an international music festival, held annually in the city of Utrecht (NL). Over the years, Le Guess Who? has partnered up with so many local collectives, labels, radios etc all over the world – and that number is growing steadily – that we were trying to find a way to collaborate with them and tell their stories throughout the year. With COSMOS, this happens in the form of e.g. written features, monthly radio shows and pop-up radio initiatives, and commissioned documentary films. In 2025 we also want to add a monthly newsletter where we can ask our partners to curate music and news from their respective local scene for our audience. It feels like non-algorithmic, artist-curated music discovery is simultaneously more scarce and more needed now than ever. That’s what we’re trying to provide for the audience moving forward.
But on top of these more public-facing activities, COSMOS is a network of music activists that engage with each other and collaborate behind the scenes. We’re planning more workshops and residencies, IRL and online meet-ups and such things to happen for the wider network. Check out the neat interactive globe on our homepage to see all of our partners.
At the moment, COSMOS is run by less than a handful of people, who are all involved with Le Guess Who?, in some form, too.
There’s been a growing trend of radio/ festival collaborations over the last number of years. What is the connection between community radio and the COSMOS programme, and the role of community radio for the COSMOS showcase at the festival?
🗣️Community radios are an integral part of COSMOS, and have been so from the jump. They’re natural partners for us (we call these partners COSMOS Embassies), because they’re usually physical meeting spaces as well as documentarians and spark plugs for any local scene. I believe we’re still underestimating the exceptional roles that community radios can play as gathering hubs, independent media outlets, and labs for experimentation. (If they’re run the right way and don’t become another form of egotrippin’ or gatekeeping.)
A lot of our Embassy partners are indeed community radios. It’s not that we’re seeking them out deliberately, but oftentimes, radios are the subcultural nucleus of a region. It’s often them, who know best about what’s happening on their respective scene, and they have the means to amplify the sounds of the area. That’s why they’re often our first point of contact when engaging with a new locale. And ethos-wise, they’re usually run by people who get what we’re trying to do. In a way, Le Guess Who? and COSMOS are both all about music discovery – and working with Community Radios on every level is a core tool to spread our curatorial approach, which really consists of partnering up with the right people and handing over the megaphone to them.
Since 2024, COSMOS has become a monthly 2h radio show on Refuge Worldwide. We’re very grateful for this platform, as it allows us to source and highlight exclusive mixes and free-form broadcasts from our Embassy partners, who by now come from over 20 countries.
Can you tell me how the radio programme at LGW? has evolved over the last few years, and to what extent has radio widened the reach and accessibility of the festival to new audiences?
🗣️During Le Guess Who?, COSMOS has taken over a radio booth and foyer space at the festival’s main venue, TivoliVredenburg. It’s hard to explain to anyone who’s never been to Utrecht, but just imagine a mall-like structure (just more vibe-y) with multiple concert venues and club spaces on several levels, connected by escalators. We set up shop in the foyer in front of a venue called Pandora. There’s a radio booth, a performance space turned dancefloor, and you have a stunning view over Utrecht.
In the past we invited different crews to take over the radio booth each day of the festival. This year, we changed it up and created 30+ hours of live radio alongside Refuge Worldwide and our friend, the esteemed journalist & author Emma Warren. We usually start the day with insightful interviews from the studio and later on move to the DJ set up outside the booth, inviting the festival audience to have a little dance before heading to the next concert. We’re also most proud that 10+ partner stations from around the world have co-broadcasted our programme during these four days (largely thanks to the good people at ICRN :)). It’s been really fun and we want to do more of this in 2025.
Can you recommend some highlights from this year’s COSMOS programme for our community?
🗣️If I were to sign-post some highlights of this year, I’m thinking of, for instance, Chicago jazz maestro Kahil El’Zabar in conversation with Refuge Worldwide’s Shiru. Kahil surprise-dropped by the studio way past midnight, after playing to a packed main hall. What a legend!
I also loved this acoustic performance by Iranian-French percussionist Cinna Peyghamy. People stopped what they were doing to peek inside the studio when Cinna started to get busy on his tombak.
Astrønne has been making some of my favourite acoustic soul/folk music of the past years, so I was very happy that she dropped by to play us some tunes, live in the studio.
Emma Warren used a solo slot to play music exclusively by artists we invited to Utrecht, but who couldn’t make it due to visa issues. This has always been a major challenge, but it’s getting increasingly worse. Le Guess Who? has issued a statement to address the problem.
Personally, I had a wonderful time chatting to MC/producer Chuck Strangers for an hour of beats and banter.
Obviously I’d recommend checking out the full COSMOS archive on Refuge Worldwide for the whole set of live radio and monthly DJ mixes.
