Music line-up: AV shows and folk tradition revisited
News
The festival's main themes are auteur cinema and contemporary means of expression. This year's interdisciplinary line-up features concerts and visual arts shows created outside mainstream industry, paying special attention to underground artists. Boasting concerts by the dark wave and post-punk group Somos La Herencia (with visuals by Espírituescalera) and Vera Fauna, one of the most exciting new bands in Spanish pop.
The film programme is complemented by an interdisciplinary music line-up, characterised by the hybridisation of artistic expressions. The festival pays special attention to artists outside mainstream circuits, focusing on those which merge sound and visuals, as well as on those updating folk traditions and taking them in exciting new directions.
Pela del Álamo explains that "Curtocircuíto's interdisciplinary programme as a whole is made up of national artists with the aim to support to one of the sectors hit the hardest by the pandemic". Thus, this year's edition pays special attention to local bands, with a special focus on underground music. All of them have a common denominator: they are part of a new scene of artists working on the fusion of electronic, folk, and industrial music.
Madrid band Somos La Herencia will be opening the festival with a concert featuring visuals by Espírituescalera. Their music is a hybrid of post-punk angst, contemporary experimental electronica, atmospheric dark-wave, and a touch of pop via witch-house, coalescing into a kind of trance somewhere between art performance and rock music ritual. Confrontational and raw, their songs deal in grief, sorrow and all that is dark. They have recently released their debut Dolo (Humo Internacional, 2020), a sonic prayerbook that is destined to be the OST of an era. The concert will be preceded by the AV show of artist Óscar Martín.
Vera Fauna is one of this year's Spanish pop revelations, taking the heritage of Andalusian rock from the 80s into a psychedelic haze. In 2020 they released their first album, Dudas y flores, which was very well received, building rapport with their fanbase. The full-length slow-cooked debut includes lockdown anthem Los Naranjos, as well as songs that revisit hits from the past as seen through millennial eyes, like Colorada.
An example of Galician folk music hybridisation and renewal is Crnds & Álvaro Chior & Fransy González. Crnds' first solo work, Cernadas, is characterised by integrating elements of traditional Galician folk with the timbral language of experimental electronics. Performed for the first time during the latest edition of Mutek Festival in Barcelona, on this occasion the show will feature multidisciplinary artist Álvaro Chior (who combines sculpture, sound and filmic language and has exhibited his work in institutions such as the Reina Sofía National Art Museum) and Fransy González, one of the most representative voices of traditional Galician music.
Verde Prato is a specialist in bringing the past into the future. She is an exponent of a generation of young artists who are recovering the Basque tradition, taking it to surprising and exciting new places. Ana Arsuaga sings in Basque and revisits her homeland’s folk music via popular and liturgical songs, employing vocals and electronics in an impossible cross between Mazzy Star or Nico and Mikel Laboa. She has just released her debut album Kondaira eder hura (That Beautiful Story), recorded and produced by Jon Aguirrezabalaga (We Are Standard).
Cruhda, who will be performing together with Galician visual artist Adataberna, is also a specialist in revisiting her own feelings from the darkest side of folklore, starting with his roots in Meco (Madrid). In her lyrics one can perceive sadness, sorority, death, and nature, enveloped in danceable otherworldly sound. Her debut Íbera Morte is one of the most exciting Spanish electronic albums to come out recently. Galician artist and sound researcher, electronic musician, and composer Artur M Puga, will be opening the concert.
Severine Beata & Loopitas are also an example of inter-disciplinary symbiosis. This live AV show by multi-instrumentalist Severine Beata (flute, saxophone, synthesizer, drum machines and vocals) and cartoonist, performer and audio-visual creator Beatriz Sánchez mixes sound improvisation and projected images under an umbrella of retro-futurist unreality, Dada reminiscences and experimental performance.
This concert will be opened by Ivankovà, the solo project of Irene de La Cueva, who has been part of bands such as Yocasta or Difunta Calva together with Cruhda. Irene started using mantra and repetition to create a certain atmosphere as a form of emotional self-healing back in 2005, aided by her voice, a keyboard and electronically processed organic sounds.
Curtocircuíto - Santiago de Compostela International Film Festival is organised by the City Council of Santiago de Compostela and financed, among others, by the Diputación de A Coruña, AGADIC and the ICAA.