Pitchfork London 2025: Ali Sethi & Nicolas Jaar & james K

There is an episode early in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the school’s computer teacher, Jenny Calendar, is revealed to be a ‘techno-pagan’ — a witch who manipulates the power of the internet. At the time of airing, this big reveal read as campy, even kitsch, but there was something of a prophecy buried deep within. In the three-decade interval between Sunnydale High’s humble Ms. Calendar and today, the illusory pull of the internet has combined the mythic with the motherboard to produce the glitchy, ephemeral work of Grimes, witch-house, vapor wave, Magdalena Bay, Ninajirachi and many many more. It’s easy for new artists to get buried among the constant tweaks and twitches of the scene, to become just another synthy apprentice in an already overstuffed coven. That is, until james K arrived this year with Friend: a hazy, lulling mix of trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient.

There could have been little better a venue for james K, real name Jamie Krasner, than Union Chapel as part of Pitchfork Music Festival. The lush, whisper-and-mantra-filled pulse of songs like ‘Blinkmoth (July Mix)’ and ‘Days Go By’ swept across the dark wood pews, sliced through only by the pitch-perfect modulations of Krasner’s hypnotic voice. Albums drenched in ambient soundscapes are so often hard to translate to real life, but the propulsive tick of the music sustained the set across a fuzzy, though never dull, hour. Indeed, at points the performance recalled when Caroline Polachek played a former slaughterhouse in the 2019 edition of Pitchfork Festival in Paris; it is hard not to draw comparisons between the scope of Polachek’s work to james K’s own project. Hopefully Krasner will continue on a similar trajectory to wider recognition and acclaim.

Following james K, Ali Sethi & Nicolás Jaar took to the stage for a performance that felt imbued with a different kind of magic. Trained in the Hindustani classical tradition, Sethi’s music summons the capacious chanting of near-religious experience, while Jaar’s immense political storytelling on the Piedras project has pitched the Chilean dictatorship and plight of the Palestinian people against a creeping electronic palette. Together, the duo’s 2023 collaborative album Intiha channelled the power of Sethi’s voice against Jaar’s haunting, seductive beats. At Union Chapel, this led to an electrifying performance. The full timbre of Sethi’s voice is hard to capture digitally, so rich and full of longing, it hung in the air over the audience for some time after the final note should have played out. Songs melted into each other and roiled through the church like incense. At the same time, Jaar’s accompaniment on synth and piano felt purposeful, a second voice pushing forward the narrative. In recent years, Jaar’s chameleonic touch has seen him jump deftly from working with artists like FKA Twigs to scoring the slick dancefloor drama Ema. It is a wonder to try and guess where his talent will take him next.

On leaving the chapel, fireworks exploded over London to remind us of Guy Fawkes’ attempt at revolution — a fitting end to a night filled with the spectral and ephemeral.