As always, the 2012. edition of Skaņu Mežs festival will also include a night of innovative dance music and related genres. This time the party is going to happen on October, the 12th, at the concert hall Palladium, which was once a movie house.
These are some of the musicians that are going to perform on this night:
Kode9 (born Steve Goodman in Glasgow, Scotland) is a leading figure in the South London Dubstep scene. As a producer and DJ he most known for his collaborations with MC The Spaceape (aka Daddi Gee). He is also the founder of the pioneering UK label Hyperdub. Along with Pinch, Kode9 was one of the few producers at the dawn of Dubstep not from Croydon.
Inspired by jungle, dub, drum and bass and the then emerging 2step garage scene (or what he calls the “hardcore continuum”), Kode9 released his first tune ‘99 on Katasonix and in 2000-2001 he hosted the Hyperdub sessions in London, probably the first club night to push the dubstep sound. 2002 saw the release of the seminal Fat Larry’s Skank on Tempa, followed by Babylon on Tempa and tracks on Rephlex’ Grime 2 comp in 2004. Since then he founded Hyperdub, released two albums and was featured on mix series such as Dubstep Allstars and DJ Kicks. He was also a FWD>> resident and hosted a weekly show on Rinse.
He is often noted for his Memetic Philosophy on music and sonic culture. Steve has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Warwick and is a Lecturer in Music Culture in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London. In 2009 his book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, was published by MIT Press.
Since 2010’s King Felix and into last year’s highly lauded Hour Logic, Laurel Halo has developed a self-contained take on electronic music, collapsing the boundaries between ambient, pop, synthetic psychedelia, dub and the techno music of her Midwest roots. Fixed stylistic territories fold in on themselves, time quickens — her music is meant for transit, body listening and loud soundsystems.
Quarantine, her debut album and first release on Hyperdub, is her most focused and evolved release yet. This is an album of transporting songs, various altitude shifts via effecting pop-concrete, built on a rich synthesis of intuitive but exacting electronic abstraction, bass pulse and heartfelt songwriting.
Her expressive singing works as a pivot in songs that eschew the usual melodic routes to generate emotion, serving as contour and human definition in contrast to the forbidden synthetic space. Sensual melodies are bent to the point of nausea, inducing the torque of a psychedelic pop that simultaneously recalls elevation and trauma. This is a kind of music you might not have heard before, and in 2012 that in itself is rare.
Stellar OM Source is the solo project of electronic musician, producer, DJ and artist Christelle Gualdi. She is a Paris native, and resides in the Netherlands. She began to play electronic music as a teenager assisting her father at the radio studio and recording soundtracks for exhibitions, using Yamaha MSX and Atari 1040 systems. Next to this, her music taste has been influenced by early fascination for fusion, Rubycon and ECM artists, as well as disco and new-age music. She started her own solo work in 2005 centered around analog synths and old sequencers. Her current sounds can be related to Doris Norton or Detroit pionneers, and Stellar OM Source gathers much of her inspiration from the likes of Underground Resistance or UK acid parties. She has shared the stage with artists such as Nite Jewel, Gavin Russom, Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, Panda Bear, Sonic Boom, Excepter, Inc. or Teengirl Fantasy.
Nashville’s Ren Schofield, a mind-bending multi-instrumentalist with a history of noise, drone, and tape-collage psychedelia, takes a stab at heavy beat-oriented electronics with his Container project. In 2009, after a string of harsh, leftfield releases as God Willing on his cassette label I Just Live Here, for Container he applied compositional techniques and musical approaches that are more akin to noise, offering lo-fi, crunchy textures and elemental, warbling techno. His debut album LP – one of the most celebrated electronic records of 2011 – was released on the Editions Mego sub-label Spectrum Spools.
Skaņu Mežs festival is a member of the festival network European Cities of Advanced Sound. It is sponsored by EU program ”Culture 2007 – 2013” and the Latvian Ministry of Culture. The main commercial sponsor of the festival is iRobot. Concerts of Container and Laurel Halo are supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding.
