L.E.V. Matadero 2019: Spain’s premier audiovisual festival comes to Madrid with stunning results

For the past 12 years, L.E.V. – Spain’s cutting-edge digital arts extravaganza – has taken up residence in the country’s northwest fishing city of Gijón, filling the repurposed Universidad Laboral de Gijón building complex with a notable stream of international and local artists dedicated to pushing electronic music forward. This year, for the first time ever, it descended on the capital of Madrid.

Madrid is home to a small but thriving network of promoters, artists, labels and fans all working hard to sustain a leftfield music scene against the odds. June’s city council swing from the political left to the right doesn’t bode well for the future of the arts, but there’s still plenty to get excited about. The recently launched online radio station Radio Relativa is doing an important job in helping to platform local artists, while underground music events are still taking place every week, even in spite of the limited amount of clubs and venues.

Situated in the southern suburbs of the capital overlooking the Madrid Rio and promoted by the Government of Culture and Sports Department of the Madrid City Council, in collaboration with public and private entities, the Matadero centre is an essential part of Madrid’s contemporary arts landscape. Formerly a slaughterhouse, the chillingly beautiful interior has gradually been transformed into a sprawling multidisciplinary hub that provides a variety of services, including a space for site-specific art, a hub for documentary film, and a theatrical exhibition space/concert hall, Nave 16, which came alive this past weekend for L.E.V (an acronym which translates in English to visual electronic laboratory).

James Ferraro christened the cavernous Nave 16 venue on the Friday night, calmly premiering a piece of generative music composition inspired by his “opus into ecocide and planetary divorce”, Requiem for Recycled Earth, to a serious and focused crowd. Live oboe and flute added an earthy dimension to Ferraro’s electronic dramatics, MIDI choirs and crashing cymbals, with the instruments’ respective tones sounding both like a lament and an exultation. Amorphous visuals from Canadian digital artist Maotik hinted at environmental destruction and mirrored the festival’s commitment to conveying the “natural synergy between image and sound”. This concept was amped up during the subsequent performance from Berlin-based Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa, whose audiovisual practice gives equal attention to sound and light and who that night bathed the crowd in a visceral multi-sensory experience that made stops at floodlit techno and blissful ambience, all amplified by the festival’s immersive Soundscape sound system.