Green ZOO Festival 2023

Friday, May 12, 2023 - Saturday, May 27, 2023

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  • Friday, May 12, 2023 - Saturday, May 27, 2023
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The 13th lucky edition of the Green ZOO Festival will be a 3 weekend series of Krakow concerts. Green ZOO Festival is an annual urban festival focused on good alternative music organised in Krakow since 2011. The festival usually takes place on weekends between mid-May and June at several traditional concert venues. While the festival has hosted more than 100 concerts by musicians from all over the world, Green ZOO’s main mission is to integrate local musicians with those coming from abroad, as well as DJs, journalists, photographers, graphic designers, promoters and other artists, and above all regular concert-goers, during the festival’s events. As a result, there is no clear division between concert performers, audiences and people from the independent media, art world and music industry.

Schedule

  • 12 May, 8pmJozef Van Wissem
  • 13 May, 8pmPagan Idol
  • 13 May, 9:30pmhage-o
  • 19 May, 8pmXiu Xiu
  • 20 May, 8pmRita Braga
  • 20 May, 9:30pmCudowne Lata
  • 21 May, 8pmDymny Sour
  • 21 May, 9:30pmZwidy
  • 26 May, 9pmDJ Nebaz
  • 27 May, 8pmThe Reptilian Government
  • 27 May, 9:30pmTegnaputan

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According to the Quietus “Jozef Van Wissem is possibly the best know lute player in the western world. To get into his world is to surrender to the inevitability - and time-lessness - of a strange music created at its own pace, in a manner wholly of its creator's making. He sets the listener into a private world, looking out through a glass darkly, such is the intense quality of music. Brevity, simplicity, directness is the key.”

Van Wissem is ‘both an avant-garde composer and a baroque lutenist, and thus no stranger to dichotomy’ (New York Times). He has been ‘pushing the lute’s agenda out of the academy and into more accessible circles’ (Pitchfork). He's performed over 1200 solo lute concerts in churches and at concert venues around the world, including prestigious rock festivals like ATP and Primavera Sound, playing his all black, one-of-a-kind baroque lute custom build for him. The titles of his works often have a Christian-mystical appeal. Van Wissem moved to New York in 1993 and studied lute with Pat O'Brien. In 2013 he won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for best score at the Cannes Film Festival for "Only Lovers Left Alive". Van Wissem has released four records with the film director Jim Jarmusch.

He was commissioned to compose a sound piece for Hans Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors” (1533) by the National Gallery. In December 2017 he was invited to perform the madrigal depicted in Caravaggio’s painting ‘the Lute Player ‘(1596) at the Hermitage museum. In 2020 he re-leased “Ex Mortis” inspired by the Book of Special Grace written by the German nun Mechthild of Hackeborn and her sisters in the 1290s. On the record he sings with Jarboe (Swans). The title “Ex Mortis” he had inscribed on the neck of his third unique black lute, especially built for him. Jozef Van Wissem toured all Europe extensively in 2021 as soon as it was possible, confirming himself as one of the most requested artists.

Xiu Xiu announces plans to release the devastatingly macabre, appropriately cacophonous new album, titled Ignore Grief, due for release on March 3, 2023 on Polyvinyl.
The current iteration of Xiu Xiu includes existing members Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo, now joined by old friend and new member David Kendrick (Sparks, Devo, Gleaming Spires). The announcement is marked by the confirmation of Spring 2023 Europe dates, and the release of the album’s menacing first single, “Maybae Baeby.”

Jamie Stewart shares: “In ‘Maybae Baeby,’ the singer's viewpoint is of a young person hiding in a fantastical conversation with a tarantula in order to escape a physically abusive parent. We were hiding within this fantasy of a fantasy, following the model of the late 1950s sub genre of ‘Teen Tragedy Songs,’ to try and find a way to come to terms with a number of staggeringly horrendous events that occurred to people close to the band over the last 2 years.” The release of “Maybae Baeby” is accompanied by an unsettling video directed by the band’s Angela Seo, who shares: “The video is, for better or worse, about literal isolation, all the things we tell ourselves to should do or not do, forcing open a small crack and crawling deep into it, even if we know we shouldn’t, just to get away to somewhere else, even if it’s worse.”

This is a record of halves. Angela Seo sings on half of the record. Jamie Stewart sings on half of the record. Half of the songs are experimental industrial. Half of the songs are experimental modern classical. Half of it is real. Half of it is imaginary. The real songs attempt to turn the worst life has offered, to five people the band is connected with, into some kind of desperate shape that does something, anything, other than grind and brutalize their hearts and memory within these stunningly horrendous experiences. The imaginary songs are an expansion and abstract exploration of the early rock and roll “Teen Tragedy” genre as jumping off point to decontaminate the band’s own overwhelming emotions in knowing and living with what has happened to these five people. What none of this record does and despite the oft repeated assertion, what Xiu Xiu has never done, is attempt to superficially shock the listener. Instead, Xiu Xiu has spent twenty years grappling with how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and to reorganize horror; there is no other word for it other than horror.

The motivation for writing Ignore Grief to be about a child who was sold into prostitution by his mother, a junior high student who was kidnapped and murdered, incessantly choosing alcohol and cocaine over one’s family, becoming lost in the bleakest, darkest aspects of cultish spirituality and committing suicide as means to escape and protest a life of violent sex work, is because the members of Xiu Xiu themselves are deeply shocked. Old friend and new member David Kendrick (Sparks, Devo, Gleaming Spires) joins Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart through whatever this may be and whatever it may mean and why ever it may have occurred. The point of aesthetic examination is to see if there is any way to come out the other side or if there is even any reason. In either case there may not be, but to simply turn away would be yet a further act of destruction.

“I had now lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was the truly decisive incident of my life. I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came into contact with a human being.” - Osamu Dazai

Source: press release

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Alternative music, live concerts.

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