This weekly guide covers Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4, and its central trip is Friday night at ALICE: Leila Bordreuil, the French-American cellist and sound artist whose work treats bow, strings, wood, amplification and room acoustics as one restless system. Her Copenhagen date arrives as a concentrated choice amid a crowded opening weekend: a concert built for listeners who enjoy hearing familiar instruments shed their usual scale and function. ALICE presents Bordreuil with Swedish artists Mimosa Baker x nrl:ndr, making the evening a compact study in texture, resonance and sustained attention.[1][3]

Bordreuil’s practice has a particularly physical appeal. The source material is cello, yet the result can travel through abrasive feedback, high harmonics, bowed friction, drone and passages of near-stillness. ALICE describes organic creaks and bow strokes meeting noise fields and extended synthetic tones; Rewire Festival similarly places her work across noise, contemporary composition, improvisation and drone. Those descriptions matter because they suggest a concert with a strong sense of cause and effect: pressure on string, vibration through amplification, then sound widening across the room.[1][3]

The cello as a pressure instrument

For listeners arriving with classical associations in mind, Bordreuil’s solo catalogue offers a useful frame. Her 2019 release Headflush is credited as live, unprocessed, amplified cello, written and performed by Bordreuil. That directness is key. Amplification here reads as an extension of the instrument’s body, bringing grain, scrape and resonance into the foreground. At ALICE, the programme foregrounds an instrumental language that keeps its acoustic source audible even as its edges become volatile.[1][2]

The bill also places Bordreuil inside a wider web of experimental practice. ALICE notes collaborations and performances with artists including Laurel Halo, Kali Malone, Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore and Toshimaru Nakamura, while Rewire identifies a similar line through improvisation, contemporary composition and noise. These names function less as a checklist than as a map of the scenes around her: musicians interested in timbre as form, intensity as detail, and performance as a live method of shaping sound. Bordreuil’s own concert can therefore hold both formal focus and raw force.[1][3]

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An opening set built from drones and voice loops

Mimosa Baker x nrl:ndr opens the evening. ALICE frames Baker’s music through drones, distortion and vocal loops, with nrl:ndr joining her for this Copenhagen performance. That makes the support slot part of the editorial logic of the night, setting up a listening environment in which extended tone, repetition and altered vocal presence are already active before Bordreuil takes the stage. It is a pairing that encourages audiences to hear the full bill as one unfolding programme, with two distinct approaches to density and duration.[1]

Plan the Friday night

Leila Bordreuil with Mimosa Baker x nrl:ndr is at ALICE, Nørre Allé 7, on Friday, October 2. Doors open at 20:00 and the concert begins at 21:00. Give the opening set its full space, then stay alert to the small acoustic events inside Bordreuil’s larger sound: the appeal lies in the detail as much as the volume. Recheck ALICE’s official event page before leaving for current ticket, door and programme information.[1]

Sources

  1. Leila Bordreuil (FR/US) + Mimosa Baker x nrl:ndr (SE) — ALICE
  2. Headflush — Leila Bordreuil
  3. Leila Bordreuil — Rewire Festival