German digital artist Robert Henke brings to L.E.V. Festival his audiovisual performance CBM 8032 AV, developed with vintage computers. The project is an exploration of the beauty of simple graphics and sound, using five Commodore CBM 8032 computers.
This work is about the ambivalence between a contemporary aesthetic and the usage of obsolete and limited technology from 40 years ago. Everything presented within the project could have been done already in the 1980, but it needed the cultural backdrop of today to come up with the artistic ideas driving it.
One of the most special events of this year will be the closing act, on Sunday April 30 at Teatro Jovellanos. For this occasion, the festival brings back the project Dökk by Italian studio fuse*. It was part of L.E.V. Festival 2021, with the constraints imposed by the pandemic, but being one of the most outstanding audiovisual performances of the last years, we want it to be able to reach a wider audience this time.
This live-media performance takes us to a journey to the subconscious, the emotions and the unpredictability of the human being, combining live dance with a data system able to perform a real time analysis on aspects such as sound, the movements of the performer o her heartbeats, to interpret and project them on stage, transformed into digital landscapes and 3D objects. A space where each gesture has a direct consequence, in a continuous search for balance between light and darkness.
After more than ten years, four albums, dozens of EPs, and gigs all over the globe, Ikonika is one of the most respected names in the UK bass diaspora. Best known for her numerous releases on and affiliation with Hyperdub Records, as well as EPs on DBA, Night Slugs and more recently Club Djembe, she is an artist ever in motion, now light years away from the post-dubstep landscape where she first made her name.
While certain aspects of her sound remain consistent – a love of club-friendly rhythms purpose built with digital flair and a strong sense of melody – the diversity of her interests, like pop, R&B or bashment, have become even more apparent in recent music.
She’s now opened up to singing herself on new material she has written, giving her productions a lighter pop feel. This includes the new amapiano-soaked Bubble Up EP and has led to a new live show which combines singing with live edits of her songs as well as DJing.
This show premiered to a rapt audience at Berlin’s Panorama Bar on September 2022, and arrives now to the 17th edition of L.E.V. Festival in Gijón.
Internationally acclaimed producer Throwing Snow, aka Ross Tones, presents his fourth album in L.E.V. Festival, Dragons AV, a work that occupies the space between science and ancestral wisdom. It links music back to its prehistoric capacity for transmitting knowledge and to new technology, that can untangle the complexity of the contemporary world.
Dragons’ ten tracks of heavy primal rhythmic and electronic productions incorporate the physicality of acoustic sources, from ancient ritual instruments to modern drum kit, and each track is accompanied by unpredictable visuals generated by a neural network, developed with artist, designer and technologist Matt Woodham.
Hélène Vogelsinger is a French composer, producer and sound designer, best known for her modular synth projects, in which she explores different places and connects with their energies to create unique and poetic moments.
Her musical signature is a mix of minimalist and repetitive music, lyrical voices, including deep and soaring layers. In L.E.V. Festival, she will be presenting her project Metaphysical Alteration.
French musician and composer Franck Vigroux arrives at L.E.V. Festival together with multi-award-winning visual artist Antoine Schmitt to present the world premiere of Videoscope, an audiovisual performance based on Vigroux’s latest album, Magnetoscope.
In this project, we travel to the sound and aesthetic elements of the 80s, a “terrifying time” as the musician calls it, and the influences left by dystopias like Blade Runner, Polaroid colours, VHS video recorder aesthetics (in French, magnetoscope) or the sound of the cassette.
The compositions, between progressive pop, Vangelis romanticism and dark, abstract layers of sound, are worked out in detail, driving forward, and can also be harmonically complex. Nevertheless, remain timeless and classic, combined with a kind of melodic euphoria paired with machine-funk elements and now with the visual work of Antoine Schmitt, with which he takes us on an infinite ride in space and time on the autobahns of a world in deep transformations.
After playing in 2021’s L.E.V. Matadero in Madrid, Zoë Mc Pherson & Alessandra Leone come to Gijón with Pitch Blender live AV, a new audiovisual show around Zoë’s recently released eponymous album.
This breathless third work by the multimedia artist, whose practice absorbs elements of performance, sound design, installation art and DJing, is a tight set of cybernetic dancefloor experiments that flicker between the rave and the art space, and arrives courtesy of SFX, the boundary-pushing A/V-focused label Mc Pherson runs with their long-time collaborator Alessandra Leone, Berlin-based Motion Designer, Director and Multimedia Artist.
Ninos Du Brasil is an italian project whose origins and background have remained shrouded in mystery. Dedicated to a bold and unlikely mixture of noise, batucada, samba and electronic, their sporadic live appearances have already become legendary and mythological.
Be it a punk squat in Belgium or the famous Venice Biennale of Architecture, Ninos Du Brasil, without fail, rally the troops, from every walk of life, and create some of the biggest festival style parties on the dancefloor.
For those fortunate enough to have witnessed Ninos Du Brasil live, their stories comprise of otherworldly experiences. NDB’s condensed yet intense set is a fervent intermixture of old school techno, stadium spirit choruses, Carnival style parade celebrations unified with the physical intensity of old-school hardcore shows.
Kai Whiston was born into dance music in the late 90s. His mother and father were young ravers of the New Age Traveller community, a reality he confronts more than ever in his latest and long-awaited album Quiet As Kept, F.O.G., which was released last September.
This new work is an overwhelmingly ambitious, devastatingly beautiful symphony. In his own words, Whiston describes the album as the creation of a realistic exploration of these memories and the impact of this community on his life: part-celebratory, part-critique; part-reality and part-fantasy.
Aimée Portioli is a Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer who records and performs as Grand River, making experimental electronic music with rich emotional colours. Her work is atmospheric yet rhythmically complex, incorporating a wide range of contemporary compositional and production techniques.
Her third album All Above, her most ambitious and divergent set so far, is rooted in her deeply personal philosophy as an artist, blurring the boundaries between electronic music, influenced by minimalism and ambient, and acoustic music, with a wide variety of instrumentation, including voices, strings, organs, guitars and synthesisers, focused around the piano. All this, accompanied by Marco Ciceri’s light design.
