L.E.V. Matadero, Festival Of Visual Electronica And Extended Realities, announces line up of live shows for its fifth year

Tickets are available at the web sites of LEV Festival and Matadero Madrid

Matadero Madrid, center of contemporary creations belonging to Madrid City Council’s Department of Culture, presents L.E.V. Matadero‘s fifth year.

The Festival of Visual Electronica and Extended Realities, organized by Matadero Madrid and curated by Datatron platform will take place between September 21 and 24 2023, in a collaboration with Cineteca Madrid ando Naves del Español en Matadero, with the participation of Casa del Lector, Central de Diseño and MAD Madrid Artes Digitales.

In 2023, the festival comes back to Madrid to bring us the newest experiences in the field of audiovisual experimentation. The event will take place in several spaces of Matadero throughout four days, and the attendees will be able to enjoy incredible sonic, visual and digital worlds created with cutting-edge technological tools by some of the most creative national and international minds of this artistic field.

This year, the line up of live shows and audiovisual performances will take place at Central de Diseño (DIMAD) and Auditorio de Casa del Lector, where renowned experimental creators and new values of this field will showcase their groundbreaking and essential works. The line up of live shows offers a broad range of concepts and formats: undisputed visionaries of electronic music such as Oval; true explorers of new technologies, who generate their own creative devices, such as NSDOS, Kom-om-Pax, Verbose, or Zan Lyons; collaborations of artists who blend their works to reach new dimensions, such as Kataryna Gryvul & Alex Guevara, CoH meets Abul Mogard, or Venus Ex Machina & Xtrux; female creators who combine tradition, folklore or classical music with current sounds, such as CORIN or Rocío Guzmán; unpredictable, powerful live shows by LustSickPuppy, Halina Rice, or Beatrix Weapons; projects with a strong presence of artificial intelligence in their creative process, by Lorem or Riccardo Giovinetto; and audiovisual explorations with a protest element, like the ones by Joakim, addressing current affairs such as the preservation of the environment.

Besides the live shows, the extended reality experiences will be featuring L.E.V Matadero once more in the sections VORTEX, formed by virtual reality and VR Cinema experiences, and Ciudad Aumentada, with urban experiences of augmented reality. Plus audiovisual, immersive and performative installations, to be announced soon, which will complete the line up for its fifth year in Madrid.

Audiovisual performances at Auditorio Casa Del Lector: Oval, Riccardo Giovinetto, Venus Ex Machina & Xtrux, Zan Lyons, Lorem
The opening act will be Markus Popp aka Oval, one of the most prolific and influential creative forces in the current electronic music scene. This visionary composer, who championed software intuition over his own role in music creation almost 30 years before the current trend of using AI in writing music, will bring us one of his extremely evocative live shows, with visuals by Robert Seidel, an outstanding Berlin-based artist.

The following act will be FEMINA by Riccardo Giovinetto, an audiovisual performance in two screens, where Renaissance paintings transform into a flux of constantly changing images. The sounds and images of this performance are reciprocally conditioned in this imaginary journey of an AI, which explores the idea of virtue and the gaze which defined that era, the painters’ era, which focused mainly on the female figure.

This section is closed with project Venus Ex Machina by English composer and producer Nontokozo F. Sihwa, whose otherworldly music is based on futurism, posthumanism and the phenomenology of radio communications, combined with the audiovisual work of the Taiwanese multimedia art lab Xtrux, specialized in 3D animation and club culture, colliding two creative universes from two very different areas of the planet, in a unique audiovisual live show specially curated by L.E.V. for this occasion.

On Saturday September 23, there will be two live shows (afternoon and evening) with the audiovisual work of Zan Lyons and Lorem. The amazing shows of violinist, producer and filmmaker Zan Lyons have been critically acclaimed around the world. His new project, to be showcased in the festival, explores a new multi-sensorial concept named by his creator as Interactive Visual Audio, a combination of music, video games and films. With a Playstation gamepad, a mysterious character on the screen and the visual effects are manipulated in real time, while the abrasive sound design follows them in perfect synchronicity.

Afterwards, Lorem, a project directed by Francesco D’Abbraccio, creative co-director of Krisis Publishing, will showcase their new audiovisual performance Tesh, based on a daring script combining dream transcriptions and strange literature created with systems of automatic learning. A hymn to imagination as a way to escape from realism, something that hampers our language and how we experience the world.

Live Shows and audiovisual erformances at Central Diseño: Rocío Guzmán, Kataryna Gryvul & Alex Guevara, Nsdos, Coh Meets Abul Mogard, Joakim, Konx-Om-Pax, Beatrix Weapons Ft. Ruido.Frio, Verbose, Corin, Halina Rice, Lustsickpuppy
On Thursday September 21, Central de Diseño (DIMAD) at Matadero will host a session of three live shows, starting with SONADA by Rocío Guzmán.
The first self-published album by this artist from Jaén invites us to imagine an Andalucian folklore made by machines. Popular songs for robots and drones, combining rumba, electronica, lyrical singing, continuous music, flamenco y science-fiction soundscapes.. 

Afterwards, Ukrainian composer and sound artist Katarina Gryvul, whose work combines classical organic sounds and ambient electronic music, and Peruvian digital artist Alex Guevara will bring us a collaborative performance full of catharsis and emotional freedom.
An immersive, intense experience of distorted visuals and a fragmented, chaotic nature, including recordings of Katarina’s anxious breathing during the first panic attacks she suffered when Russia invaded Ukraine.

His alternative gaze and the way he reinterprets technological tools has turned French artist NSDOS in one of the most important techno-hackers of his generation. He has not used conventional technological tools or software to create this project, as he prefers to develop his own devices: from futuristic instruments created with old audio converters, to Gameboy emulators or metal parts assembled into surrealistic machines. At L.E.V. Matadero he will showcase an interactive, audiovisual show of augmented dance and music, with spacey, immersive sounds.

On Friday September 22, legendary electronic visionaries CoH (Ivan Pavlov) and Abul Mogard (Guido Zen) will arrive at Central de Diseño with a supernatural alchemy of subtle analogical stuff and digital energies taken from their amazing debut for Houndstooth. This first collaboration of the two artists, born out of a casual encounter in a festival in Slovenia in 2019, is focused on new and surprising perspectives of their individual works, wildly singular and highly revered.

Parisian artist Joakim will be the next act of the day. A psychedelic journey in a modern Noah’s ark with Second Nature, an audiovisual performance combining a 3D soundscape, multiple videos, smells and lots of greenery, blurring the line between natural and artificial, to makes us reflect on our relationship with nature in this era of big environmental challenges.

Scottish artist Konx-om-Pax, especially interested in researching the processes of modular synthesis and generative art, develops systems to fuse music and visual arts, which has been the key element in his works in the last years. This session will be focused on the last issue of his project System Works AV, especially for the ones who enjoy totally immersive experiences.

The last artist to play on Friday 22 will be Beatrix Weapons, one of the riskiest names in the avant-garde music circuit in Spain. With her universe of deconstructed IDM and digital frequencies, this multidisciplinary and disruptive project searches for a celestial vision by distorting darkness. Her contribution to the festival is an audiovisual performance, in collaboration with 3d artist Ruido.Frio.

On Saturday September 23, the last session of live shows at Central de Diseño will be featuring Cýra, a project to materialize experientially the track record of Verbose, the alias of Carlos Bravo, a Madrid-based artist from Galicia. An audiovisual performance audiovisual born out of the artist’s experiments with electromagnetic field recordings and the pixel mapping technique, using his own home-made lighting system, before and during his staying at Matadero’s Artistic Residencies Center in 2022.

Traditional forms blend with hyper digital sounds to create new imaginary worlds in the productions by CORIN, moving between IDM, grime, EBM, trance, and baroque ambient. With a classic piano training, she tries to create a sound space where western classical music can hybridize with contemporary electronic music and non-western artistic expressions. At L.E.V.Matadero she will play an audiovisual live show around her latest album Lux Aeterna.

London-based artist Halina Rice, well-known for her eclectic, vibrant, experimental ambient dance music, will showcase her project New Worlds, and her immersive audiovisual environments. Her always sold-out live shows have been described as “part rave, part art-happening”..

The icing on the cake of the live shows on Saturday 23 at Central de Diseño will be LustSickPuppy, a chaos curator born and raised in Crown Heights (Brooklyn), who invokes spirits through shared rituals. Their shows, raw and unpredictable, combine punk, gabber, drum n bass, rap, glitter and blood in equal parts. Live liturgical raves where they are in control of the audience to take them to a journey of a lifetime.