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Festival Novas Frequências

7 Dec 2011-11 Dec 2011

The many faces of experimental electronic music line up at Oi Futuro

Aaron Richter

This event has finished

Musically speaking, dubstep may have already taken the decade by storm, but while the original raw power of the London sound crosses over and becomes diluted, so it spawns a fistful of offshoot styles and approaches. Some are interesting, some unlistenable, but on the pulse as ever, the curators over at Ipanema’s Oi Futuro have gathered some of these disparate strands under the guise of a festival, Novas Frequências (New Frequencies), for four nights in December.

All of which provides the perfect introduction for anybody still left in the dark by this somewhat inaccessible sound. For those more familiar with the outer reaches of alt-bibles like The Wire and Fact magazine the artists may already mean something, for everyone else, sample five debut performances and become indoctrinated in the ways of the weird and wonderful world of the experimental music front line. Opening up with the sparse, chilled soundscapes of American duo Sun Araw on Wednesday 7 December, the Mexican Murcof takes to the stage on Thursday and the UK’s Andy Stott on Friday night. The Mancunian’s moody, dubby ‘death disco’ should make for interesting listening on a summer’s day in Ipanema.

Two Americans round things off, with the delightfully-monikered Com Truise and his self-styled ‘mid-fi synth-wave, slow-motion funk’ on Saturday and on Sunday, prolific 24 year-old Mark McGuire closes the festival with a dose of krautrock-inspired minimalism. Specialist, certainly, but an intriguing package.

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