Life in the city: Balcony concerts at dormitories are starting today
The Spring sun has begun showing its face, we can once again visit restaurants and cafés, and more people are hitting the streets.
Now we can also see a bit of a cultural bloom in Aalborg.
Today the first of 45 balcony concerts are starting – concerts where local, talented bands and musicians deliver music straight to people’s doorstep.
The small concerts will be performed in the backyards of a handful of student dormitories.
“This is one of the first steps towards the opening of our cultural lives as we know them.
Music and concerts out in the open.
I am glad that we can activate our own local musical talents and bring the music to our young students who have been cut off from both their social lives and the cultural scene during the lockdown.
I hope that the music can bring warmth, happiness, and community to the young people now that we are hopefully close to a “normal state of things” again,” Mads Duedahl, council member of the Health and Cultural Administration in Aalborg Municipality, says.
Concerts the next three weeks
The 45 concerts will take place in Aalborg from today, April 22, until May 13.
The band Pachamama is kicking of the festivities today at the Alexander Foss-, Kennedy- and Østerbro Brygge dormitories.
Pachamama is a world music band that consists of a group of international musicians from Aalborg’s local music scene. They all share the mission of creating one common language: music.
There’s a total of 12 members in the band and 10 different nationalities.
At the dormitory concerts, they’ll be performing as trioes.
“A while back, we played by housing associations and in backyards, and it was great to thus bring joy to people.
It is exciting to meet people and play music for them at places where they do not normally listen to it.
And even when concert venues open again, we would like to continue to play these untraditional, intimate concerts because it is such a giving experience.
Our music represents diversity because we are so many different nationalities in the band, and we want to bring this to the students at the dormitories.
We want to bring them along on a journey of sound but also play more classical songs from different musical cultures – we look forward to it,” Guillermo Neuenschwander, one of the members of Pachamama, says.
Needed a global sound in Aalborg
Pachamama was started by the facilitator Kenneth Dahl Knudsen when he noticed that Aalborg was lacking a more global sound.
This is how the idea of gathering the city’s international musicians came to be, and today they are running the band independently.
The 45 concerts are a part of the “restart package”, which Aalborg Municipality earmarked for activities for the city’s young people and students.
They are held according to the current corona restrictions and are therefore closed concerts, which are performed in the backyards of dormitories and student housing.
