- People stood in aisles, sat in chairs and filled every pocket of free space inside Katowice's National Symphony Orchestra Of Polish Radio for the opening night of this year's Tauron Nowa Muzyka festival. They were there to see Apparat, who was debuting Soundtracks, a new live show of music written for film and theatre. Throbbing electronics were delivered with an orchestral swagger as Sascha Ring and his collaborators, Transforma, made full use of the venue's wonderful acoustics.
It was an auspicious start to a festival that's been running annually in this heavily industrialised corner of southwest Poland since 2006. Katowice's blue-collar heritage is immediately visible when you enter the festival grounds: a defunct mine shaft tower looms over the site, which these days has a strong cultural focus. In an area where coal was once dug from the earth, there now stands a symphony hall, a museum and the new International Congress Center, an impressive complex with a sloping, grass-covered roof.
Following the opening concert, the festival properly kicked into gear on Friday. On the main stage, located inside the International Congress Center, Fatima and Nils Frahm showed why they're such popular festival bookings. Fatima and the Eglo band buttered up the crowd with a parade of songs from her first album, Yellow Memories, before Frahm did what he does best, performing emotional music with humour and dexterous skill. After them, the festival's headline act, Tyler, The Creator, lurched between soporific stoner mode and limb-flailing bursts of aggressive energy.
Over on the LittleBig stage, the evening's bill—Dopplereffekt followed by Autechre and Objekt—felt like a nice bit of programming. First, Dopplereffekt performed live. Gerald Donald and his unnamed female counterpart faced each other while playing keyboards to a backdrop of stark, Cold War-era visuals. It was engrossing stuff, at least until Donald's equipment malfunctioned about three-quarters through the set. The duo squabbled on stage for a couple of minutes before departing in a huff. It can happen to anyone, but the incident certainly peeled back a layer or two of their carefully constructed mystique.
Autechre had no such problems, dishing out an bewildering sonic assault in total darkness, before Objekt closed out the stage with a rally of sharp arpeggios and tough broken beats. While this was happening I went to the RBMA stage to see Sherwood & Pinch. The duo has put together an engrossing live show that smears classic dub atmospheres into more contemporary drum patterns, with Sherwood presiding contentedly over a large mixing desk.
The lineup on Saturday felt considerably thinner than the previous night. Whereas Friday had flown by, Saturday felt like more of a slog. Still, it provided an opportunity to catch some lesser-known acts. Klaves, Funkstörung and Die Vogel—who were all solid, not spectacular—warmed up the RBMA stage for DJ Koze and Robag Wruhme. DJ Koze provided the festival's best DJ set, ebbing and flowing between well-known tunes (his own "XTC" was a highlight) and a few curveballs. Both Koze and Wruhme seemed to revel in the extended set times—each played for a pleasing two-and-a-half hours. The Juan MacLean were the biggest draw on the LittleBig stage, reminding everyone that they've amassed a catalogue of absurdly danceable tunes this past decade.
There was much to admire about Tauron Nowa Muzyka festival—queues were short, food and drink were cheap, the atmosphere was largely vibrant and the festival site was absorbing—but at times the lineup felt a little too safe, especially for an event geared towards fresh sounds ("Nowa Muzyka" means "new music" in Polish.) The gauntlet has been thrown down by another Katowice festival, OFF, which has also been running since 2006 and this year boasted an electronic music programme more daring than Tauron's. It'll be interesting to see how the two festivals match up in 2016.
