More music acts for the 15th Elevate Festival

One should not praise the day before the evening. All the better if the evening is this promising: Just in time for the end of the year, the Elevate Festival team gives you a closer look at its music programme. From 27 February to 03 March, the whole of Graz will be dedicated to contemporary festival culture. Live concerts, audiovisual experiments & electronic beats are the proven components of the growing music programme on eight stages in and around the Schlossberg in Graz. The rich daily programme consisting of panel discussions and all kinds of lecture formats is dedicated to the complex relationship between fact-based objectivity and revolutions of cultural knowledge in the age of digital (de)formation of truth. Together with the growing media art and performance program, specific topics and speakers will be revealed in January. Now it's time for a look behind the scenes of the Elevate Club.

46 Speakers for Hyperdub - The first club evening of Elevate 2019

To immerse yourself in the magic of dance-crazed club nights with Elevate 2019 is a success of its own accord: For the first time since the festival was founded in 2005, the sound of the Dom Im Berg will wash over the audience from all directions. Ambisonic is the name given to the promise of full-blown dance orgies on the dance floor. Thanks to over 40 loudspeakers distributed throughout the room, Elevate's main location at Dom Im Berg will be transformed into one of the most modern clubs in the world over the course of the next few years: the music comes from virtually everywhere. As a harbinger of this development, Hyperdub inaugurates the new system on the first club evening of the Elevate Festival, Friday, 2 March, the 15th anniversary of the company. As one of the most creative and world-renowned labels for electronic music, it is one of the best in the industry. Why? Because it regularly breaks all their rules. One of them, the British sonic fiction master Lee Gamble, has been commissioned by Elevate to transform his material from "In A Paraventral Scale“, the first chapter of his upcoming Hyperdub triptych album "Flush Real Pharynx“, into a 3D sound experience that tells stories without words. The ingredients are echoes from the spheres of hip hop, jungle and ambient, with which Gamble uses orchestral instruments and Doppler effects to make things approachable from a pop distance, without placing them as a fixed wall between audience and stage. With more than 160 danceable beats per minute, Gamble tells of a world of unmanned vehicles, contradictory realities and mythical creatures that make life in the here and now seem magical, threatening, unreal, actually danceable. The rest of the night is dedicated to a showcase of the Hyperdub community. Under the direction of label founder Kode9 they will bring freshly printed grime, kuduro, juke, IDM records (and more) to Graz.

Industrial technology and natural wonders - IDM by Paula Temple and Bjarki on Saturday night

"I wanna go bang" - these words catapulted the young Icelander Bjarki Sigurdarson into the club charts overnight in 2015. The track appeared on the Russian label трип (Trip), whose releases are overseen by Nina Kraviz. With "Happy Earthday" he will be releasing a new album just a few weeks before his Elevate gig. At Dom Im Berg he will stage the LP as a self-deprecating AV spectacle. Bjarki borrows a good part of his sound from nature: as a peace-loving sound hunter, he collects lava stones in Iceland, which are mixed as kick drums with recordings of rippling waterfalls and the beat of deadwood drums. The result is a mixture of Sigur Rós and techno and it is danced to all over the world. "For me, nature is everywhere" says the young Icelandic man about his back and forth between volcanic islands and disco balls. Paula Temple also moves between sound research and techno. With her massive hybrid sets, the Berlin-based music producer is considered one of the most uncompromising DJs of all. In return, she hooks up turntables with live electronics. Her label Noise Manifesto, which bears the sympathetically revolutionary slogan "Distort Sound/Norms", is organized as a cooperation. The idea behind it: As hierarchy-free and process-oriented as possible, i.e. without binding publication pressure, artists from all over the world work in a common laboratory on innovative sound productions. Paula Temple's angularly hard, usually lightning-fast beats tower up to phantasmagorical illusions of danceable noise. Her EPs tend to carry titles like "You Cannot Kill A Soul By Killing The Body" or simply "Gegen" - psychedelic dark industrial techno between dreams and trauma.

Euphoria and World Peace - 25 Years of Kompakt, Jayda G's Jaydaisms & Dorian Concept at the DayTime-Party at the Orpheum

Michael Mayer, Jayda G and Dorian Concept are this year's three guarantors for smiling faces on the new Orpheum-Daytime Stage, which was inaugurated last year. The focus lies on music that, as a mediator between worlds, opens the hearts of all those who enjoy dancing in the afternoon. Jayda G, the marine biologist with funk in her blood, mixes hypnotic dancehall quotes with soul and old-school tunes. The music from Austria matches: Dorian Concept, the pop hip hop trap wunderkind, presents his latest album (which Flying Lotus chose to put out on Brainfeeder) with Korg keyboards and all kinds of live electronics. In a chamber music one-man ride through the music landscapes of the last decades, jazz borrowings from the 60s bubble into the wide open basins of 70s funk fusion, only to end up in the digitized sounds of the 90s via an extended detour through neo-prog rock of the 80s - all within the means of the present - "The Nature of Imitation" is the name of the record that will come to the stage at Elevate as a live concert. Before the night is turned into day in the Dom Im Berg, Michael Mayer joins behind the decks. The founder of the legendary German label Kompakt is regarded as a master of euphorically clever DJ sets that can't be settled anywhere other than in between. Wild, melancholic Italo disco is paired here with minimalist sound architecture. In Michael Mayer's universe, techno kitsch has just as much of a place as art music does - anyone looking for clear categories here will be lead on; in circles, once around the world, to acoustic party rondos that turn all opposites into a simple one: We are here & we are loudly reconciling.

The Quiet Sounds - Instrumental Electronics in the Mausoleum

Because parties are beautiful but exhausting, there is already a room for music at the interface of sound art and chamber music for all friends of softer sounds on the second Elevate day. The Graz Mausoleum, which should have been inaugurated in 2018 by multi-instrumentalist & Efterklang collaborator Peter Broderick, can finally look forward to him in 2019. The cold front, which swept snow and ice over the British Isles as the Beast of the East, led to a flight cancellation, which Peter Broderick's journey to the previous year's edition of the festival also fell victim to. Now the venerable and morbid aura of the Graz Mausoleum can be pleased to welcome one of the most prominent figures of the London-based avant-garde label Erased Tapes to Graz. Together with the previously announced vocal composer Stine Janvin, who presents her light sound show "Fake Synthetic Music", Broderick will immerse the mausoleum in a meditative, chamber music ambiance. Also present: New York pianist Kelly Moran. Her album "Bloodroot" was voted one of the 20 best avant-garde albums of the year by Rolling Stone Magazine in 2017. In the Mausoleum, she plays excerpts from her latest album on the prepared piano, recently released on Warp Records bearing the title "Ultraviolet". The whole thing will be visualized through animations by the New York media artists Dave & Gabe.

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