TAURON NOWA MUZYKA
Katowice, Poland | August 22nd-25th
As the English summer fades and the festival options begin to thin out, we had one big question to answer: what the fuck are we going to do with our lives now? The way we saw it was either sit and stew in our bedrooms with a big bag of the devil’s lettuce and finally get into that HBO series everyone’s been banging on about, or we could catch the next budget flight to Poland and absolutely ‘ave it at the country’s most cerebral celebration of electronic music.
We chose the latter and, jeepers, are we glad we did. Tauron Nowa Muzyka Festival is now in its 8th year and attracts a modest, mostly domestic, crowd of around 8000 people. The festival’s former industrial setting provides an exciting backdrop to an intricately curated dance-centric line up, showcasing a host of international artists on the forefront of today’s massively expanding, increasingly intelligent, electronic music scene.
From our digs in the local town of Katowice it’s a short walk to the festival site along a major main road, lined with revellers. While we do get that slight nagging sense we might be walking into the opening of a trashy teen horror flick directed by Eli Roth, our fears are put to rest and we begin to hear the pulsating, familiar sound of distorted bass and the distant clack of computerised snares emanating from a nearby field. After grabbing our bearings and a quick bite to eat, we make our way over to the Little Big Stage where we kick off our night with a set from Darling Farah whose distinct brand of techno quickly fills the tent. We’re then over to catch UK man of the moment Jon Hopkins, with new album Immunity sounding intimidatingly huge and fully justifying his main stage billing.
Next up is the evening’s highlight in the form of Zebra Katz who is joined by the insatiable Redd Foxx. Zebra Katz channels the spirit of Grace Jones with his towering figure and camp demeanour whilst managing to ooze swag like a seasoned G. The crowd can’t get enough of his energetic stage antics and when Ima Read drops you can barely see the action for all the hands reaching towards the larger than life art-rap fashionista who has been mesmerising us strutting about the stage like it’s a catwalk. After a fairly disappointing set from Amon Tobin as Two Fingers and a downright boring hour of a masked Squarepusher (a gimmick we feel is probably better left with French robots and Iowan nu metal bands) we end our night stomping wildly to the breakcore genius that is Venetian Snares. After finding ourselves chewed up and spat out by the, kinda surprising, mosh pit we trek back down the highway, stopping only to admire the shadowy low mist that has engulfed the vast fields and made the Polish landscape look like some kind of mythical shire from a Tolkien novel. Back at the hotel and we, somewhat inexplicably, manage to persuade the understanding staff to let us in to the spa for a half cut sauna and a jacuzzi, where we can’t help but wish we hadn’t forgotten our Cubans and Cristal, before we head to our room a bit of a heads down.
With the festival itself not opening its gates till 7pm, we took some time out of our hectic relaxation schedule to explore the local delicacies of Katowice, although we’re not sure that pepperoni pizza strictly counts as local. After taking a few happy snaps of the crumbling, storybook, unmistakably middle European buildings that line Katowice’s ancient streets we made our way down to the site with the sun setting just in time to catch the opening acts of the night. First up we find ourselves enraptured by Gregor Schwellenbach playing twenty years worth of the Kompakt Records back catalogue with a string quartet and his piano. He entertains the crowd between tunes with stories from back in the day and brilliant one liners like “Who needs melody when you’ve got a kick drum?” He plays a host of classics including Michael Mayer’s Mantasy, which sounds fantastic completely re-imagined as classical music. As the evening draws on we gravitate over to the ever-reliable Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, their eight-piece orchestra lighting up the main stage to an enthused audience who, mostly, can’t keep their jaws from scraping along the floor. Syria’s sweetheart Omar Souleyman who is, for some unexplained reason, playing on the Numbers showcase stage between the likes of Jackmaster and Spencer, is experiencing some tech issues tonight, but nevertheless the crowd can’t help but be enamoured his relentless cool, everyone shuffling to his one-of-a-kind Eastern interpretation of a very Western genre.
Moderat, on the other hand, seem to be experiencing no difficulty whatsoever with their elaborate visuals and compelling stage presence. The main stage is at its busiest as the German trio play an inevitably exciting set made up mostly of tunes from their latest offering II. It’s impossible not to wonder if they’re genuinely amongst the most exciting live prospects around right now, and the euphoric sense of excitement glowing from the audience reaffirms that they really know what they’re doing. Robag Wruhme is the final act of the night, and the final act on the festival site this weekend, and he capably pulls us through to 6am.
Perhaps this would be a good point to mention that the second day was one of our team’s birthday, and as such the next few hours got pretty wavy. All we can really remember is trying to drive a Formula 1 race car in a shopping mall (no, seriously), stumbling upon our new favourite clothing brand ‘Hipster for Life’ and giving a homeless man what we later realised was about 20 quid. Finally, at 11am, we found ourselves curled up in bed with a family bucket courtesy of the colonel and the murmur of a Polish pop song radiating softly from our TV as we drifted off to sleep before facing our final day.
With bleary eyes and thrumming heads we made our way into town for some food and a few drinks in the town centre. The festival site itself was now closed but the organisers had set up one final treat for the punters who had bought a full weekend pass. In a vast, beautiful Polish orthodox church in the city centre we found our throbbing skulls being soothed by the mellow sounds of Darkstar. Pretty soon we had forgotten all about the previous night’s debauched antics and felt like were on the edge of religious epiphany until – ironically for a festival sponsored by Poland’s largest energy supplier – all power was lost. Nevertheless the band pulled out a blissfully chilled set.
We later headed to an afterparty in a local jazz club for DJ sets from Chilean Diegors and the Czech Republics Lucas Han. The wind down vibe was utterly exultant and the young crowd seemed dazzled by the weekend they’d just experienced. With a cutting-edge line-up and a beautiful location near a hip town with nightlife that could rival most major British cities, Nowa Muzyka is a festival that deserves all the buzz it gets and you can bet your last szloty it will only get better.
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Words: Billy Black
Photos: Clark Merkin
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