There is so many definitions and ambitious articulations of what contemporary music really is, that the “truly” part of the KRAA festival’s description is a bit ironic. But also very true – because Slovak adventurous, revelatory and genre-challenging music is alive and kicking. Come, discover and concentrate on it during the annual festival that starts in A4 this Saturday – the 3rd of March.
The fifth edition of the festival Kraa is expected to be a musical marathon. Nine Slovak projects will be introduced in one evening – all of them viable, original and not yet that widely known and yet so worth to get to know. The Kraa festival makes sure that each edition brings their visitors different, fresh and non-repetitive selection of music acts. In five years Kraa welcomed 50 various projects – which is an impressive score for a small country festival.
As well as the festival Next, Kraa tries to look for projects that don’t fit into traditional genre categories. It’s not gonna be rock, nor jazz, neither metal – mostly it’s artists experimenting with their instruments, musical form and its rules, finding routes between genres along the way. If insisting on framing them, we could talk about weird folk, ambient, improvised music, noise. The Kraa festival was never a fan of genres, we understand music in its most free sense, freer than what we usually hear around us.
This Saturday night we present nine projects: the duo Brada, that was nominated to RadioHead Awards 2017 in the category Experimental music, and other performers acknowledged by the award – the duo Matra or the project Line Gate.
Other acts you can look forward to are the project Mrkva – Bolka by Jonáš Gruska or Džumelec – a folk project by Košice based visual artist Erik Sýkora. We will also welcome a project by female artists, called Jano Doe. The collective Urbsounds will be represented by performer Urbanfailure and a duo of sound designers EGA + Tatratank will introduce a new project t16c.
The variety of Kraa program can be discovered through the festival’s website Kraa.sk – which is also a database of Slovak experimental and non-mainstream musical project. Each year the site maps the new happenings and records of this area in Slovakia – this year it was more than 90 new records. Even though the segment is hard to define and impossible to put borders and genre limits on – there’s a live and impressive progress in all it’s nondefined boxes.
The Saturday night in A4 will be long! Bring your open mind, sense of humor and be ready for surprises. We are looking forward to all of you.
Performers:
БРАДА, Džumelec, Jano Doe, Line Gate, Matra, Mrkva/Bolka, t16c, urbanfailure, Vrtačky po desáté hodině