More Music Hall at Tauron Nowa Muzyka Katowice – new stage and new artists!

The 13th edition of the Festival will mark the debut of a special, dedicated stage presenting music, dance and visual arts. It will host performances by well-known electro, ambient and psychedelia artists supported by world-renowned dancers and VJs. More Music Hall is an independent project of More Music Agency, the organizer of Tauron Nowa Muzyka Katowice. The multidisciplinary stage will be constructed inside the International Conference Centre in Katowice and promises to deliver unforgettable experiences.  

Tauron Nowa Muzyka Katowice has been delighting audiences with diversity and abundance of themes for years. Besides providing excellent entertainment, it will kick off summer holidays with an opportunity to interact with art. The purpose of the new stage located at the ICC building is to allow the festivalgoers to immerse into a few art disciplines at once.

“More Music Hall won’t be a typical festival stage – its size, multimedia, set design and special stands will allow the audience to observe visual art. Each of the presented projects is unique and hard do display in another space, they all require greater concentration. It’s definitely more than just a stage, more than just music. I can reveal that we are working on another incredibly interesting performance the format of which will make a debut at our Festival and join the lineup for this stage” – says Adam Pomian from More Music Agency, the organizer of the Festival.

The headliner of More Music Hall will be Australian composer Ben Frost, who permanently resides in Iceland. His work is based on the contrast between classical harmonies, minimalism and noise inspired by punk and metal. Frost’s throbbing musical textures emerge out of nothing and slowly merge into huge, incomprehensible structures. Besides composing operas and producing music for movies (“Sleeping Beauty”, “Super Dark Times”), series (“Fortitude”, “Dark”) and theatre shows, he has also collaborated with various musicians, such as SWANS, Colin Stetson, Tim Hecker. Ben Frost will share the stage with MFO, an Austrian visual artist famous for his projects for the National Opera in Paris.

Additional thrills will be delivered by the performance of James Holden & The Animal Spirits. The Brit is a well-known DJ but over the last few years he has been focusing on developing the sound of his own band. It’s a powerful combination of electronics and traditional instruments, which draws from various genres such as kraut rock, spiritual jazz, folk and trance. Custom-made modular synthesizers, exuberant drums and a brass section guarantee a long psychedelic trip during their live concerts. At the Festival, they will perform together with an acclaimed British dance artist, Lucy Suggate.

Another highlight will be the performance of the Wolfgang Voigt pres. GAS live project. This German producer has been active on the music scene in Cologne since the beginning of the 1990s. He is the co-funder of the iconic Kompakt label. Dedicated to ambient, GAS is Voigt’s most popular project – and he’s already had over 30 of them. It was brought to life in the mid ‘90s thanks to numerous experiments with looping microsamples, which created endless elegies. As described by the artist himself, GAS is “a vision of sound between a French horn and a drum machine hit, it’s Wagner playing glam rock, it’s Hansel and Gretel on LSD”.

Germany will have another representative – Burnt Friedman. Just as Voigt, he is one of the most highly regarded musicians on the German electro scene. His career has been lasting for over four decades. He is the founder of the Nonplace label and the Flanger band (together with Atom ™) and has collaborated with the likes of Jaki Liebzeit (Can), David Sylvian and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi. His goal is to fight audience’s prejudice towards the authenticity of programmable music by presenting fantastic tribal rhythms covered in electro-jazz-dub sauce. Electronic music composer and sound artist from Teheran Sote will perform at the Festival twice. We have already announced his solo gig, but he will also appear on the More Music Hall stage together with his band to present their “Scred Horror In Design” album. Sote is famous form juxtaposing electronica with traditional Persian music, creating unique sound structures that combine thousands years of history with the latest technology. During the Festival Sote will be supported by musicians Arash Bolouri (santoor) and Behrouz Pashaei (setar) and joined by Tarik Barri, a visual artist who became popular after his collaboration with Radiohead and Monolake.

The More Music Hall stage will also welcome an enigmatic Serbian composer, Abul Mogard. He spent most of his life working at a plant and focused on music only after he had retired, with the purpose of reconstructing the sounds of the environment he spent the previous decades within. His music palette encompasses synthesizers, Farfisa organs and devices that he has built over the years with his own hands. The lacily woven sound structures are overflowing with deep emotions and resemble the records of Fennesz or Tim Hecker.

The lineup for this year’s edition of Tauron Nowa Muzyka Katowice has expanded to 45 artists from 19 different countries. The list of invited musicians includes representatives of every continent besides Antarctica, which perfectly reflects the global character of the 13^th edition of the festival.

This year’s Festival programme already intrigues with diversity and abundance of genres, but that’s not all! There are many exciting announcements still to come!

2 and 3-day tickets at a lower promo price will only be available until the end of March! On April 1 the price goes up by 30 PLN! The price of 4-day tickets remains unchanged.