Once Again, Kortrijk is Set to Become the Slushwave Capital of the World
The annual hybrid audiovisual festival Slushwave returns to Belgium with a massive 4-day programme in August 2026
It was towards the end of the pandemic that I first heard of a festival named Slushwave.
I wasn’t even a huge fan of live-streaming events, but I hadn’t been to a real concert in a long time and I was pretty curious to know what the vaporwave scene was actually like these days.
Over the next two nights, me and my friend sat in front of our laptops in different cities, with chat windows open, listening to ambient soundscapes made predominantly from slowed-down and manipulated samples, and watching psychedelic visuals edited from old films, videos, commercials, found and computer-generated images.
I remember being completely blown away by the creativity and diversity of the participating artists, most of whom I’d never heard of. They all remained completely anonymous and hid behind strangely spelled names like ⦓🍊⦔ タンジェリン [Kagoshima Tangerine], S O A R E R , Illusionary ドリーミング, y o u s t i l l f e e l t h e m o u t t h e r e , d o n ’ t y o u , or days of blue [天].
Their sets took me on a whole series of Bandcamp explorations over the following months. Going down these rabbitholes ultimately reignited my love for vaporwave as a whole, which had significantly cooled down in the late 2010s, for various reasons.
One reason had been that around 2015/16, the scene started feeling like an increasingly toxic environment, where conversation mainly boiled down to anonymously firing snarky comments at each other. Gatekeeping, elitism and infighting seemed to dominate ‘discourse’ in the forums and on social media. The wider public was convinced that vaporwave was dead and had always been nothing more than a bad joke.
Attending the Slushwave festival online, it wasn’t just the music and the visuals that surprised me – it was also the positive, supportive and respectful tone in the chat during the livestream that struck me as extremely refreshing. I learned that the slushwave subgenre, which had been around since Telepath’s legendary first run of releases in 2013/14, was on the course of evolving into its own, independent community and along the way was apparently getting rid of the infantile, immature attitudes that I’d previously become so tired of.
“Slushwave is so far away from vaporwave now. It’s much more ambient-adjacent”, the festival’s founder Will Hallworth-Cook said when I spoke to him earlier this year. He’s better known as the trailblazing UK artist desert sand feels warm at night. “Separating from the main scene has only done it a world of favors, because we’re now in this bubble. We’re very much self-innovating, we’re a strong community, and everyone’s so supportive of each other. We really don’t accept pretentious people. We don’t like that at all. We thrive on just helping each other out.”
“The Slushwave crowd is an insanely thankful, happy, joyous crowd, and the musicians as well”, the Belgian artist and activist Sebastien Dessauvage alias Zer0 Rei confirmed in our conversation, “just really genuine people full of love for the music and the artistry around that. I’ve done a lot of live shows, and I’ve really never had this few problems and this much appreciation for what we do.”
Sebastien is the driving force behind organizing the IRL version of Slushwave festival which has been happening annually since 2024 in his hometown of Kortrijk, Belgium. “It’s a village pretending to be a city”, he explained to me. “It’s 80,000 people, but we punch seriously above our weight when it comes to culture and music. It’s a good place to be.”
The first remote edition of the festival went down in 2020, when “online festivals were everywhere”, as Sebastien remembered. “I was chatting to Will [desert sand feels warm at night, ed. note] over Discord a lot, and at some point I had the crazy idea of doing it IRL. I ran a punk music venue here in Kortrijk for more than 10 years with my wife. That got me hooked up with the local BUDA Arts Center, which is quite outsized for the city.”
That local arts center slash movie theater seemed like the right venue for a live audiovisual experience, with just enough space for a couple of hundred people to really immerse themselves in the Slushwave experience, while still maintaining the atmosphere of a family reunion.
“I pitched Slushwave not just as a music event, but as this audiovisual experience with projected, pre-recorded visuals on a cinema screen, and it came together in an absolutely magical way”, Sebastien told me. “It’s tough to describe, but if you’re in the room with the plush cinema seats, the huge screen and sound, you just melt away into it. It’s a really fun experience.”
Over the last years, the annual festival in Kortrijk has become a real-life meeting hub for an otherwise decentralized online community. What started as a simple pandemic livestream has expanded into a long weekend with a mix of URL and IRL sets on Thursday and Friday, a full night of back-to-back IRL sets and live panels and interviews on Saturday and a special closing event called Naturewave on Sunday, where a bunch of vaporwave, ambient and drone artists play live music for free in an outdoor location – a cozy picnic in the park with some great music.
Once again in late August this year, the small Belgian city will welcome slushwave and ambient artists from all over Europe – the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Finland, Belgium. The U.S. will be represented by days of blue skies, 818181 and you still feel them out there, don’t you, who will all be heading over the Atlantic ocean. The ‘26 lineup feels more diverse even than in the last few years.
“For Will [desert sand], it really is about that little corner of the scene which is uniquely creative, valuable and authentic”, Sebastien told me, “and showcasing the best and brightest in both upcoming and established artists from that scene.”
I shot Will a message over Discord and asked him about his intention behind the curation for this year’s edition. His statement truly exudes the passion and commitment that Sebastien described:
“Slushwave 2026, like its predecessors, celebrates the wonderful and ever-growing diversity of culture and sound in the community. This year we have more live acts than ever; 15+ live performances across the 4 day festival. The curation of this monumental line-up happened as a result of unwavering enthusiasm from artists, volunteers and members of the core team.”
“People from all over the world attend for the love of the genre, to spread joy and happiness, and above all to listen to some ethereal soundscapes in the slushwave capital of the world – Kortrijk. I am ecstatic and cannot wait to meet everyone there.”
(desert sand feels warm at night, Slushwave festival founder)
Facts: Slushwave/Naturewave 2026
Date: Thursday August 27 – Sunday August 30 (4 days)
Location (IRL): Kortrijk, Belgium, at Textielhuis (Aug 27/28) and Budascoop (Aug 29). Naturewave (Aug 30) is a daytime outdoor event – location tba.
Location (URL): Vapor Memory livestreams all days for free.
Lineup: See posters below, timetable tba.
Tickets: Regular: €60 / VIP: €90
Access: Kortrijk is one hour by direct train from Brussels main station.
Accomodation: Affordable hotels and apartments are available.
