Delayed x Perpendicular: Marini
This year's Perpendicular Festival was the grand finale of our week-long road trip through the Spanish midlands. On Friday morning, we left Salamanca for the final stretch of our journey, heading toward Madrid and then deep into the forests. With mandatory stops at Decathlon and a supermarket behind us, we were ready for another unforgettable weekend with friends.
The last stretch of highway before we turned onto the local roads was lined with yellow bushes. It was idyllic. Welcoming, even. We allowed ourselves to start imagining what the next few days might bring.
I asked my copilot, Ira, to check the timetable and see who was opening the festival.
“Marini,” she said.
There's a particular kind of excitement I get when looking at the Perpen and Mostra lineups. Of course, seeing familiar names is always a pleasure, but it's the unfamiliar ones that often get me most excited. More often than not, they end up becoming some of my favorite discoveries of the weekend. I'm usually someone who sticks to his guns when it comes to music, but the incredible amount of talent coming out of Spain has taught me to trust these crews blindly.
And so we arrived.
We parked conveniently right behind our hut and started unpacking. Marini was already in the zone. Polyrhythmic halftime. Controlled pace. And just like that, Perpen became reality again.
Those first few hours of a festival are quite special. One ear is reserved for catching up with friends you haven't seen in a while, and the other for listening to the music. Everyone is swaying, slowly getting into the rhythm of what will become a weekend-long marathon. Opening a festival like Perpendicular is an interesting assignment. With so many music heads around, it would be easy to overthink the situation. Marini understood the moment perfectly. Her set was a beautifully paced halftime journey that gave everyone enough rhythm to start moving while leaving plenty of room for those first conversations, welcoming hugs, and inevitable interruptions. The music had a wonderful sense of balance, and by the time everyone had settled in, the weekend was already well underway.
photo by Kernel
Over the following days, I had the pleasure of getting to know Marina a little better. She's outgoing, curious, intelligent, and deeply invested in the idea of community. Interestingly, her DJ journey began only a few years ago, encouraged by friends and her involvement with the Espacio Perpendicular family. That detail says quite a lot about the environment she's part of.
Marina is a passionate reader, a feminist activist, and someone actively involved in advocating for women in prison. Her interests reach well beyond music, but the importance of connection and collective support seems to run through much of what she does. Even the spoken passages from McKenzie Wark that open and close her set at Perpen offer a little insight into her wider interests.
During our conversations, she mentioned the concept of idiorrhythmy a couple of times. It's an idea explored by Roland Barthes, essentially asking how people can live together while maintaining their own individual rhythms.
I kept thinking about that afterward, because there's something about Perpen that fits the idea beautifully. Everyone arrives with their own history, interests, habits, and musical tastes. Some spend most of the weekend on the dance floor, others hang around beneath the pine trees for hours, and some seem to be everywhere at once. Yet somehow, everyone finds their place within the same little community.
Marina's story is a lovely example of that. She found encouragement among friends, started exploring her own musical interests behind the decks, and now contributes her own perspective to the very community that helped her get started.
Sometimes the smallest gestures reveal the most. During the festival, Marina left an analog camera on a table for anyone to use. Friends could pick it up, capture whatever caught their attention, and eventually revisit those little fragments of the weekend once the film was developed. Such a simple idea, and such a lovely way of sharing memories.
When Irina and I first connected with the crews behind Perpen and Mostra, this sense of community was one of the things that immediately stole our hearts. Watching younger artists like Marini find their feet, surrounded by friends and experienced artists who genuinely support one another, makes that feeling even stronger. And thinking back to that Friday afternoon, with our bags still half-unpacked, friends arriving from every direction, and Marini's halftime rhythms floating through the forest, I can't imagine a more fitting way to begin another Perpendicular weekend.