The Laguna Boreal in Gijón’s Jardín Botánico Atlántico returns as one of L.E.V. Festival’s venues with two live shows in a new format the audience will enjoy through wireless headphones. Through a radio frequency signal, the attendees may move away from the stage up to 300 meters and keep on enjoying the sounds and the environment without losing any sound quality nor creating any negative impact on the surroundings. All of this thanks to a close collaboration with Fundación EDP, aligned with their values of environment sustainability.
Astrid Sonne, composer, producer and violist based in Copenhagen, will delight the Botánico audience with her electronic experiments that breathe side by side with baroque approaches, and improvised passages incorporated into precisely cut compositions with intuitive grace. Her latest album Outside of your lifetime consists of 10 tracks appearing like sonic spaces, where the individual can disintegrate into a sphere of keys, strings, voice and buttons.
Teetering precariously between discord and harmony, the prismatic distortion of Tot Onyx (Tommi Tokyo, formerly of group A) and Hiro Kone’s (Nicky Mao) new project Enxin/Onyx abandons all former distinctions for something mutable and unsettling.
In their first EP Dorothy, a constant interplay between elements of their individual practices give way to sonic experience that knows no bounds. Not surprising for both artists whose work spans across numerous collaborations, including film and dance.
Metallic and feral, murky and sharp, Dorothy feels alive and impervious to current musical trends, making it an exciting debut for the duo, which with be performing live as part of the night programme at LABoral Centro de Arte in this edition of the festival.
WaqWaq Kingdom is a Japanese tribal bass duo formed by Kiki Hitomi, singer and songwriter as a solo artist and for essential projects like King Midas Sound, Black Chow, Dokkebi Q or NoinoNoinoNoino; and Shigeru Ishihara, mostly known as breakcore-gameboy legend DJ Scotch Egg. Their genre and time bending psychedelic sound combines Japanese traditional style Minyo with Jamaican dancehall, footwork, dub, techno, tribal polyrhythms and Super Nintendo soundtracks.
The lyrics and visuals are deeply influenced by ancient Shinto mythology and the Japanese “Matsuri” festivals that honor the local gods “Kami-sama”. Their hypnotic and shamanic live performances are an intense time warp experience that re-connect their animistic roots with the future of urban neon colors.
Kathy Hinde is an audiovisual artist inspired by behaviours and phenomena found in nature and the everyday.
She will bring to L.E.V. Festival her performance Twittering Machines, which renders John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale in Morse code, reinterprets it sonically, then uses multiple output devices to interfere with the transmission, simultaneously redoubling it and struggling to translate the bleeps back into recognizable language.
Meanwhile, recordings of birdsongs are treated to generate further distortions and interference. The effect is of a swirling, chattering dawn chorus of birds singing, real and artificial. The result serves as a reminder of how technology can overrun the natural.
Komatssu is the most personal and intimate alter ego of the iconic DJ and Asturian producer Héctor Sandoval, a personal L.E.V. favorite since his beginnings. The project is based on the natural fusion between the most melodic IDM, breakcore and spectral avant-techno, and conceives sound as a catalyst for emotions, giving shape to a highly personal sound imaginary.
In collaboration with the Youth Department of the City Council of Gijón, Komatssu will be in L.E.V. Festival performing his third album No place For Poetry, released with Tensal Itd. A new and surprising exercise in eclecticism, combining space techno and melodic landscapes, solid breaks and beautiful atmospheres, in a live show that will also include some of his latest productions and remixes.
Since his first vinyl release in 2015, James Shinra has explored the more melodic side of braindance, electro, breakbeat and rave with a string of EPs on Null + Void, Analogical Force, Craigie Knowes, Feel My Bicep, 20/20 Vision and Anjunadeep.
His well-received debut album Vital Heat on Analogical Force saw him move away from the dancefloor and broaden his musical range in several directions, from laid back piano pieces to frenetic breakbeat workouts.
This time he will be using his full arsenal of machines at Muséu del Pueblu d’Asturies to delight us with an acid-tinged live set full of electro beats and memorable melodies.
Annabelle Playe, multidisciplinary artist and music producer, and Alexandra Rădulescu, multimedia artist and designer with a focus on immersive and interactive experiences, come together to create KRASIS, a project whose title comes from the philosophy of E. Coccia, who used the term to defend the idea that all living species are continuously mixing and in contact with each other.
For the artists, this ‘total mixture in which all bodies occupy the same space, while still preserving their qualities and individuality’, implies a vision and desire for a hybrid contemporary world attentive to its own essence, in contrast to the fractured times we are living.
Under this conceptual framework, Annabelle Playe and Alexandra Rădulescu have created an interactive performance in which the devices and media with which each one works on stage are interconnected in their individual actions, generating a dialogue and exploration in real time between image and sound.
In collaboration with the Youth Department of the City Council of Gijón and especially for L.E.V. Festival, Jailed Jamie will premiere his album Gimme Something To Break, just released on March 17th.
A side project by a very well-known name in Spanish underground electronic scene, Jaime Tellado (Skygaze), now joins forces with local label Antic Mass to release his second album as Jailed Jamie, paying tribute to timeless genres from late nineties-early noughties, such as bigbeat, breakbeat, jungle an electro.
Undoubtedly the darkest and most danceable work that the Asturian has produced to date, in a premiere live show in which he will be accompanied by a crucial name in Gijón’s culture: Helios Amor.
Claraguilar is a multi-instrumentalist musician who moves from theater, dance and cinema with ambient and pop-chamber arrangements to electronic music and techno.
Her album debut Mystery is all (Amên Discos) is an electronic music set drenched with brooding melodies, orchestral samplers and a bunch of synths that creates multi-melodies, which she brings to L.E.V. Festival in a live performance that includes new songs and the collaboration of Osicla Estudio for the light design.
The Laguna Boreal in Gijón’s Jardín Botánico Atlántico returns as one of L.E.V. Festival’s venues with two live shows in a new format the audience will enjoy through wireless headphones. Through a radio frequency signal, the attendees may move away from the stage up to 300 meters and keep on enjoying the sounds and the environment without losing any sound quality nor creating any negative impact on the surroundings. All of this thanks to a close collaboration with Fundación EDP, aligned with their values of environment sustainability.
Samuel Organ is a multi-disciplinary creative, working primarily with live instruments and sound design. His recent collaborators include Caroline Polachek, Sega Bodega, Danny L Harle, Iglooghost, BABii, Shygirl, Donna Missal. Samuel is also a founding member of the experimental jazz group The Physics House Band. At the festival he will deliver a rare live performance, presenting new experimental, electronic and piano works, as well as unique renditions of songs from his album A Safe Place In Cyberspace. A meditative but sonically varied blend of ambient, classical and electronic sounds.
