Markus Popp aka Oval continues to be one of the most prolific and influential creative forces in contemporary electronic music. He began his career in the early 1990s and quickly gained recognition within the scene for his innovative ideas. For many years, the composer defended software intuition over his own role in music creation, anticipating the trend towards the use of AI in composition by almost 30 years.
With extraordinarily evocative and emotive live performances, meticulous attention to detail and an outstanding sense of exploration and experimentation, Popp approaches his work more as an artistic director than a producer, introducing new elements and creative challenges with each release, always ready to reinvent himself and surprise audiences. In his performance at L.E.V. Matadero, the visuals will be presented by renowned Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by Riccardo Giovinetto and Venus Ex Machina & Xtrux.
Auditorio Casa del Lector
22 September
20:00 – 23:00*
Katarina Gryvul is a Ukrainian born composer and sound artist. Her work focuses on a variety of timbres and sound textures resulting in a mixture between organic classical sounds together with ambient electronic music. For this year’s festival, she will do a collaborative performance together with the Peruvian digital artist Alex Guevara. Expect a performance filled with catharsis and emotional release. An intense and immersive experience where the glitchy and distorted visuals will reflect on the fragmented and chaotic nature of Alex, while Katarina’s music, using recordings of her heavy, anxious breathing from her first panic attacks she experienced when Russia invaded Ukraine, provides a cathartic release that allows us to process and translate these events.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by Rocío Guzmán and NSDOS.
Central de Diseño. DIMAD
21 September
21:00 – 00:00*
Second Nature is a project about our relationship with nature. How do we perceive and represent it in the Western world? Why did it detach from us and from culture? How can we create a new relationship with it in this era of major environmental challenges? It took Parisian artist Joakim five years to complete this album, mainly due to the extensive compilation of all the field recordings that inhabit this enveloping work of fauna and flora, in which he also returns to his roots of IDM, classical music, avant-garde pop and ambient. A psychedelic journey in a modern Noah’s ark where a 3D soundscape, multiple videos, smells, and a vegetal set up blend together, blurring the line between the natural and the artificial.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by CoH meets Abul Mogard, Konx-om-Pax and Beatrix Weapons.
CORIN is Corin Ileto, an electronic music producer, DJ and performer working in the field of performance art, sound design, theater and club spaces. Her productions are an assemblage of converging styles moving somewhere between IDM, grime, EBM, trance, and baroque-laden ambience. In her compositions, traditional forms merge with hyper-digital sounds to create new imaginary realms. Coming from a background in classical piano, Ileto is interested in creating a sonic space in which western classical music can be hybridized with contemporary electronic production and non-western forms. Each of her releases focus on speculative mythology drawing from science fiction, western classical music, personal histories and ancestral heritage. In L.E.V. Matadero, she will present a live AV performance around her latest album Lux Aeterna.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by LustSickPuppy, Verbose y Halina Rice.
Glasgow multimedia artist Konx-Om-pax has been publishing since 2010 on his label Display Copy, through which he has released multiple EPs and three albums, including Caramel (2016), which was shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year 2017. In the context of the pandemic, he became interested in and researched the processes of modular synthesis and generative art, developing systems for merging music and visual art that have become crucial to his work in recent years. At L.E.V. Matadero he will present the latest itineration of his project System Works AV, especially aimed at those who appreciate fully immersive experiences. A unique combination of his creative skills that will please your eyes and ears in equal measure.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by CoH meets Abul Mogard, Joakim and Beatrix Weapons.
Central de Diseño. DIMAD
22 September
20:30 – 01:00*
Born and raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, LustSickPuppy is a curator of chaos, invoking spirits through shared ritual. Blending elements of punk, gabber, drum b bass and rap, they deliver warped melodies over hyperactive beats at breakneck speed. Equal parts glitter and blood, their shows are raw and unpredictable, a live rave liturgy taking audiences by the leash while offering the ride of a lifetime.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by Halina Rice, Verbose and CORIN.
Fabled electronic music visionaries CoH and Abul Mogard form a supranatural alchemy of discrete analogue material and digital energies in their extraordinary debut for Houndstooth. Stemming from a chance meeting at festival in 2019, the first collaboration of Russian musician, sound artist and engineer Ivan Pavlov (CoH), deeply respected for intensely curious original solo work and in SoiSong with Psychic TV/Coil’s Peter Christophersen, and Italian artist Guido Zen (Abul Mogard), pioneer of late 90s electronica, focusses stunning new perspectives on the artist’s respective, fiercely singular and widely adored bodies of work.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by Joakim, Konx-om-Pax and Beatrix Weapons.
The alternative approach and the way he reinterprets technological tools have made French pluridisciplinary artist NSDOS one of the most important techno hackers of his generation. In his projects he does not use conventional tools and software, but rather chooses to create his own media: futuristic musical instruments built from old audio converters, Gameboy emulators or assembled metal parts give shape to surrealistic machines. Surrounded by his hybrid creations, NSDOS unravels the rectilinear anatomy of techno music. For L.E.V. Matadero, he will be presenting an augmented interactive music and dance AV performance with spatialized sound.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by Rocío Guzmán and Katarina Gryvul & Alex Guevara.
Venus Ex Machina is the composition and production alias of Nontokozo F. Sihwa. She has contributed her attuned skill of sound and music to a range of projects spanning releases on labels such as AD93 NON Worldwide and Optimo Music, as well as applying it to outstanding installations exhibited all over the world. In 2021, she won the PRS Foundation Oram Award for innovation in music and sound technologies. Trained as a mathematician, she brings both a boundless curiosity and exacting precision to her work. Venus Ex Machina draws on her interest in futurism, posthumanism, and the phenomenology of radio-related communication, all of which inspire her otherworldly and distinctive music. At L.E.V. Matadero, she will be accompanied by the audiovisual work of the Taiwanese multimedia art laboratory Xtrux, specialising in 3D animation and club culture, whose creative practice explores the interaction between the virtual world, digital identity and Taiwanese folk beliefs.
*This session of live shows also includes performances by Oval and Riccardo Giovinetto.
Auditorio Casa del Lector
22 September
20:00 – 23:00*
Lorem is an individual/multiple identity working across sound and media by exploring states of consciousness and emotional datasets through visceral narrative AV experiences. The project is directed by Francesco D’Abbraccio, creative co-director of Krisis Publishing. In the wake of his recent installation Distrust Everything, Lorem presents his new live AV, Tesh. This is the performative version of the work’s new chapter. Based on a weird, adventurous screenplay, the AV set combines transcriptions of dreams and weird literature through the use of machine learning systems.
Weaving sonic and narrative elements within Lorem’s skewed and oneiric imagery,
Tesh is a hymn to imagination as an escape route from the realism that burdens our language and our experience of the world.
*These two sessions of live shows also include the performance by Zan Lyons.
Auditorio Casa del Lector
23 September
Two passes
18:00 – 20:00*
21:00 – 23:00*
