In Tune with Nature with NiXiE

Belgium's oldest jazz festival, Jazz Middelheim, returned to Park Den Brandt in June 2025 after a three‑year absence, bringing a fresh perspective that blends tradition and innovation across two main stages and a third for jazz‑infused DJ sets. The vinyl set recorded live at the festival was part of a one‑and‑a‑half‑hour hybrid performance for My Analog Journal, guided by the theme 'remembering we are nature.' It combined vinyl records with live instrumentation tuned to natural and healing frequencies, field recordings, and spoken word, moving through dreamlike landscapes and ancestral grooves—from Jon Hassell's oceanic mysticism to Midori Takada's lunar poetics, Orphan Fairytale's harp sounds, Heerlens Percussie Ensemble's biologic music, and Mort Garson's plant‑speak. Field recordings of sea sounds and whispers from Ursula K. Le Guin’s poems were woven into live improvisations, creating a journey between the visible and invisible, earth and ether, offering rooted presence, cellular remembering, and quiet awakening. NiXiE, rooted in Brussels’ underground music scene as an artist, DJ, and curator, expanded into sound therapy and energy work; her sets—whether DJ‑driven or ritual‑based—invite altered states and subtle activations that help us remember we are nature.