Wilsonic Festival

Wilsonic 2009 Preview and Interview

Whenever anyone mentions a festival to me I think of one thing: mud. Mud on your face, mud oozing into your shoes, mud collapsing your tent, mud flying like snowballs between giddy festival goers, who then spend a good few hours sliding through it like children in snow at Christmas only minus the creativity: no snowmen. And that’s why I’ve never been to one. I like messing around in snow, but messing around in something the colour of excrement while listening to uninspired indie bands has strangely never tickled my fancy.

Thankfully Wilsonic, Bratislava’s premium cutting edge music festival, has never had that problem. Held every year in June on the banks of the Danube, it has more often than not been blessed with sunshine and, mercifully, interested barely any insipid indie bands. The festival was set up in 2000 with the intention of showcasing music from both central and Eastern Europe and the world, in an atmosphere that fuses a concert, a party and a club night. It is now the largest festival of its kind in the region. 

Attracting acts as diverse as DJ Food, Fennesz, Thomas Brinkmann, Matthew Herbert, Daddy G from Massive Attack and the Optimo DJs, the festival blends an eclectic mix of jazz, hip-hop, electronica, R&B and pop, as well as some of the more avant-garde regions of music. More importantly, since it’s in the centre of a city, you don’t have to stay in a cramped, overheated tent with someone who’s been your friend for years but is about to become your most hated enemy. You can sleep in a bed, in a hotel, with a shower and soap, and maybe eat breakfast with a knife and fork. You can keep your most cherished relationships intact.

Since 2004, as a warm-up to the festival in June, Wilsonic has put on a one-nighter called Micro-Wilsonic at the PKO. Indoors, there is not a fleck of mud in sight. This year the line-up included Max Tundra, Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, dub-step pioneer Shackleton and Bratislava’s own Longital. BratVegas caught up with one of the organisers, Tibor Holoda, to get the low-down.

Wilsonic has been going since 2000. Have you found the festival's popularity and reputation has increased over the years? 

Definitely. The reputation of the festival has grown immensely. We are now more known within the industry, and are also becoming more and more recognised by international audiences. We’ve had journalists come from as far away as the Dominican Republic to cover the event, and we were voted the second best festival to go to in June by Resident Advisor, which is a good sign.

So is it easier now to attract more well-known acts? 

Sure. The festival has many offers and requests from agents, management and even the artists themselves. It’s much easier to attract well-known acts now because over the years we have built strong relationships and a good reputation, which certainly helps. Still, at the end of the day, the festival is a business and artist fees are rising, which makes the booking process and building a programme pretty tough. 

Have you found the fans attending the festival are now coming from all over Europe and the world?

We get emails from all across the world asking questions regarding tickets and accommodation, etc, but traditionally most of the people who attend the festival come from Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic. International visitors don’t make up a significant portion of our audience yet when you compare us with the big international festivals. Having said that, I think we could be considered as one of the major events in Slovakia, and one that has the potential to attract more people from abroad. It’s not a big festival, but we’re not playing in the major league anyway, and wouldn’t want to. It’s a boutique festival for like-minded people. 

We've read that the goal of Wilsonic is to enable and maintain a dialogue between central European and internationally renowned artists. Do you think the local music scene is able to maintain a certain amount of individuality that stands out from the international groups that influence them?

If you’re making the assumption that there isn’t anything Eastern European, or Slovak in particular about the music we present, then you’re right, there isn’t. We are aware of that and we’re trying to help by giving artists a platform to showcase themselves and network with their more successful counterparts. We want Wilsonic to be a place where this corner of Europe annually shows its best fruits, and we’d like to help local artists reach the same level as the international ones that perform here. If some of them add something particularly local to their sound, a bit of goulash or whatever, then that’s great. On the other hand, modern music is part of pop culture, which is global. There isn’t anything especially Canadian about the Canadian minimal techno scene, for example. It’s a game of many factors, but it would be great if Eastern Europeans start to influence the global sound and set trends. There’s definitely a lot of talent that needs to be discovered.

The tagline for Micro-Wilsonic we noticed was 'reflecting future'. Is it more important for you to support less well-known acts or ones that represent new trends in music? Does originality come before accessibility? 

It’s a combination of both. We are trying to put the spotlight on Eastern Europe and its up-and-coming artists – hence the future – but we are also trying to focus on new, original, and innovative music coming from wherever it is coming from. There are acts where originality comes first, and acts that the audience demands. Nevertheless, we try to present artists that represent something innovative in the way they’re doing music, even if it’s accessible and popular. Music is an emotion and it’s rooted in a long human tradition. We don’t want to be futurists just for the sake of it. We want to feature music where worlds collide. We want to be at the cutting edge of pop but also show weird and experimental stuff. 

We read that the name Wilsonic is a fusion of Wilsonov and Sonic, the former being the name Bratislava was given for a short period following the First World War with the idea of it being independent from the countries around it. Do you think the festival manages to maintain the idea of independence from the world around it despite what must be harsh commercial pressures? We noticed the last event was sponosored by O2.

This year we are trying to get some money from the program of our Ministry of Culture, as we think that after those years we could be recognised as worth receiving this kind of support. I don’t see the world as a black and white thing – brands representing its dark, commercial side, and everything else as the white side, the good side. You have good companies and bad companies, just as you have good and bad people. We need funding and we would never have got to the stage we’re at now if we’d funded the festival on ticket sales alone. We’re trying to do our own thing, which is often hard because we don’t want to make big compromises. Then again, it’s good if there are companies that identify themselves with what we are trying to accomplish. So in the end, it’s more or less a combined effort. You have to give something in order to get something, but in the end that’s what life is about, isn’t it?

©Wilsonic©Rado Buransky

Micro.Wilsonic @ PKO, March 13

Knowing that Micro.Wilsonic would run til 6am and being less young than we once were, BratVegas missed the start and a fair few trams before we got there. Unfortunately this meant the chance to see Shakleton’s dubstep and Longital’s soulful electronica slipped by. 

©Rado BuranskyWe arrived in time to catch the last few songs by Styrofoam. He performed with a band who played layered, electronically underpinned guitar music that made us think they must’ve listened to a lot of early 90s British indie music from the pre-Britpop era when soundscapes were favoured over pop sensibilities. This type of music never travelled well back then, so it was refreshing to hear its influence had spread. It’s a pity we didn’t hear more of it and it’s a pity nobody else did, most of the crowd not turning up till later than us, missed trams and whatnot.

Micro.Wilsonic features mainly acts (as opposed to DJs) making electronic music. Making non-live music live is no easy thing. The magic that happens in the studio can be difficult to turn into a performance – what can be done when the music requires no more than pushing a few buttons, twiddling a few knobs? We’ve all seen far too many embarrassing ‘live’ performances on music TV. There’s nothing appealing about watching some bloke you don’t recognise mime mixing two records when there’s only one playing. When X-Press 2 appeared on Top of the Pops with their 2002 hit Lazy they appeared on stage in bed, without decks and with no attempt to fool the audience made. Perhaps the most successful example of a live electronic band is Underworld who have a proper front-man whose vocals and non verbal antics align him with the singers of top rock bands.  

©Rado BuranskyAlas, next act Max Tundra (UK) was not quite a proper front-man. There was a lot of tongue-in-cheek over-the-top dancing, which was like watching somebody trying to impress their friends with a comic impression of a clubber who’d taken too much ecstasy. We found the ironic cheers of "go Bratislava wooh" a touch patronising too. As for the music, it had its moments, but for the most part it was too quirky, wandering into areas that sounded like demos from 80s Casio keyboards and Atari games. We guess this was meant to display wit, but to us it just displayed a lack of passion. Incorporating So Long, Farewell from The Sound of Music confirmed this was more a novelty farce than a performance. If the creator of the music doesn’t take it seriously, it’s hard to see how anybody else can be expected to.  

©BuranskyAfter all that we were a little nervous the next act would be equally gimmicky. Huoratron is a solo project of Fin Aku Raski, which began as an experiment to make electronic music from 2 Gameboys. The danger of such projects is that the concept will always be more interesting than the product. Fortunately, the project was interesting enough. Huoratron’s heavy, electro-house got the crowd going, though perhaps not as much as the man himself, deliriously bouncing and beaming irony free. Perhaps the sound got a bit samey, like the over use of kick drops, but when people were dancing all the way no one was complaining.

©Rado BuranskyFinally we saw Joe Goddard DJing, famous as one of the original line-up and half the creative driving force of Hot Chip. His band emerged in 2003, making a distinctive indie-electro crossover sound. That may sound unremarkable in the current climate, but at the time it was a rare and innovative hybrid. Their first album Coming on Strong was innovative and wry. It had an unusual combination of sounds that made for an interesting listen but had no killer tunes or dance-floor anthems. From the 2nd album (2006’s The Warning) this all changed – its two singles Over and Over and Boy From School had more pop hooks and a more dance-floor orientated production.  

We were expecting a DJ set aimed at getting the place moving and we weren’t disappointed. The music was not pop but was accessible, taking in soul, funk and jazz influences with beats changing from four to the floor to broken. It was melodic and varied. Music to be taken seriously, but not in the stern humourless way that minimal, techno and progressive scenes are prone to having. Goddard’s band were a reaction against this attitude in dance music, so it’s perhaps no surprise that this was how it sounded. As us and the rest of the crowd happily danced away we’d have to say it was no bad thing too.

For more information on the festival, go to http://www.wilsonic.sk

Thanks to Rado Buransky for the photos, to see more of his work go to http://www.buransky.com