Elevate
Elevate Festival
1st-5th March 2023, Graz
- All information regarding the program, including the timetables, is available here.
For two years, the Elevate rehearsed its role as a summer festival, now the Graz music and discourse festival is returning to its usual date as the start of the local festival season: from March 1st to March 5th, various locations in the city, from the Graz Folklore Museum to to the Orpheum, from the Forum Stadtpark to the mausoleum of the cathedral and the Schlossberg caves Dom im Berg and Tunnel, once more to stages for advanced pop, uncompromising club music and socio-political discussions.
That discourse program is the motto of this 19th edition of the Elevate „(Unlikely) Alliances“. The opening speech, traditionally on Wednesday, will be held this time by the German-Swiss bestselling author Sibylle Berg; this time, instead of a musical main act, the Slovenian star philosopher will end the evening on Sunday evening Slavoj Žižek with a lecture on “Only A Catastrophe Can Save Us”.
On the days in between, experts like the climate activist discuss Lena Schilling and the art and cultural theorist Jörg Scheller regarding Activism, alliances and social movementsand the philosopher Lisz Brain goes together with journalists Raimund Loew to the question: Does politics make you evil?
As usual, the music program of the Elevate spans an arc from thinking to dancing, from losing oneself to hard-hitting full contact with the present. The opening in the Orpheum on March 1st. is performed by the Belarusian musician’s virtuoso accordion compositions Yegor Zabelov rounded; the next day, the Canadian-Taiwanese film music composer and electronic experimenter brings to the mausoleum Alex Zhang Hungtaiformerly Dirty Beaches, together with saxophone cinematic sound scores, before the New York power electronics icon Margaret Chardiet under her alter ego in the Forum Stadtpark Pharmakon a cathartic noise performance. Anyone who has ever seen Pharmakon live knows: you will never forget this experience.
Elevate Friday at Dom im Berg is traditionally dedicated to dancing and freaking out. For this purpose the Brainfeeder Breakbeat Jazz Berserker became The Gaslamp Killer invited as well as the Italian tribal techno punk duo Children of Brazil. Anyone who has not yet experienced a spiritual awakening in the beat thunderstorm of these two can then turn to the Swiss-Nepalese-Tibetan musician aisha devi build, which organizes almost shamanistic rave rituals by means of folkloric techno and engaging songs.
In the meantime, on the fog-shrouded tunnel floor, one can look forward to the Greenlandic’s trance and techno escapades Courtesy.
On Saturday evening, the Orpheum becomes the pop main stage, when the local post-punk synth poppers Tents open in Graz and the Russian musician Kate NV conjures highly idiosyncratic toy synth-pop out of her Buchla synthesizer. And then there are Panda Bear und Sonic Boom, who released a wonderful collab album called “Reset” together in 2022, apart from their regular bands Animal Collective and Spacemen 3 – not exactly nothing either. Sun-drenched, bubbling pop with a psychedelic touch and a huge heart for the music of the Beach Boys and other sixties heroes, including harmonies.
Saturday night at Elevate resonates with techno veteran Luke Slater in his Planetary Assault Systems-robe, with a glamorous showcase of Ugandan Nyege Nyege collective and the truly unrivaled noise-feedback-loop pop(?) explosions of the homegrown trio PLF (Peter Kutin, Luke King, Freya Edmondes) once once more up to hard-hitting heights. The festival year is finally starting, it’s finally Elevate once more.