Magneet Festival 2013, 23 August – 15 September

Magneet Festival lays claim to being ‘the first crowdsourced festival of its kind in Europe’. Inspired by Burning Man – the annual self-reliance experiment, whose 2013 edition commences in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert from Monday, 26 August – and seeking to add to such established endeavours with a specific focus on contemporary trends and technologies, Magneet developed out of an idea which the artist Jesse Limmen put into practice several years ago at the Landjuweel Festival in nearby Ruigoord. As part of the festival, Limmen asked members of the audience for some physical contribution – be it a song, a poetry recital, an improvised dance, any spontaneous creative performance – in return for a free beer.

Extending across four weekends from August to September, Magneet Festival aims to advance this concept of audience participation. Indeed, the ‘Magneet Philosophy’ is summarised as ‘No Spectators, Only Participators’: the festival’s potential audience members are encouraged to become the festival itself. People can sign up to the Magneet website via their social media accounts, then pitch initiatives for performances, stalls and workshops. Provided the idea is achievable, visitors to the site are then able to vote for their favourite initiatives, with the festival’s organisers helping to make them a reality.

So Magneet Festival features a diversity of musical artists and musical sets, dance, outdoor theatre, performance art, and art installations; a range of stalls selling everything from vintage food, smoothies and churros to jewellery and feathers; and practitioners offering a shave and a beer, a new life for old clothing, and how-to lessons in graffiti. While this variety is a characteristic of the festival, each day is given a broad theme, with focuses on jazz, hip hop and R&B, techno and electronic music; a day devoted to the colour pink; and one day set aside for walking barefoot on the festival’s artificial sand.

Magneet Festival is located on the eastern tip of Amsterdam’s Zeeburg island. As is the case with Burning Man, the festival has a ‘leave no trace’ policy, meaning everything constructed over its course must be dismantled and the area left as clean as – if not cleaner than – it was prior to its use. Visitors can set up tents at the nearby Zeeburg camping site. The festival’s grand opening is this evening; and the festival will continue across every Friday, Saturday and Sunday until Sunday, 15 September. Tickets cost €12.50 a day; or €75 for unfettered access.

http://www.magneetfestival.nl/

Music This Weekend in Amsterdam (09-11.08.13)

The return of one of the internet’s most cherished guides after almost one month’s absence owing to holiday and so on.

Friday

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Paradiso: The B-52s + Jett Rebel – 7.30 pm (Great Hall); Balloon – from midnight

Melkweg: Dropout – from 11 pm (Old Hall)

Sugar Factory: Jeff Moore & Friends – from 11.55 pm

Winston: Fucked Up – 8 pm; Electrorated – from 11 pm

Concertgebouw: Maarten Hogenhuis Quartet – 7.30 & 9.30 pm (Choir Room); Isabelle van Keulen plays Piazzollo’s Tango Nuevo – 8 pm (Small Hall)

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Saturday

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Paradiso: Bassline x Appelsap Special – from midnight

Melkweg: Black Flag – 7.30 pm (The Max); Encore – from 11.59 pm (The Max & Old Hall)

Sloterpark: Loveland Festival – all day from 11 am

Sugar Factory: Joey Daniel All Night Long – from 11.55 pm

Winston: Payback – from 11.30 pm

Concertgebouw: Steve Reich: Ligconcert Drumming – 8 pm (Great Hall)

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Sunday

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Paradiso: Prince & 3rdEyeGirl – 7.30 pm & midnight (Great Hall); Café Paradiso – from 8 pm

Sugar Factory: Wicked Jazz Sounds Club Night – from 11 pm

Winston: Sneeky Sunday – from 10 pm

Concertgebouw: Maria Juncal: ¡Celebración! – 8 pm (Great Hall)

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Note: Many venues – including De Nieuwe Anita, Trouw, OT301, OCCII, Muziekgebouw, Bimhuis, and North Sea Jazz Club – take a break for a month during the summer, from late July until mid-late August.

Music This Weekend in Amsterdam (12-14.07.13)

The return of one of the internet’s most cherished guides after a few weeks’ absence owing to holiday and so on.

Friday

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Paradiso: Rickie Lee Jones – 8.30 (Great Hall); Jonathan Wilson – 9 pm (Bitterzoet); Bixiga 70 – 10.30 pm (Small Hall); Dirty in Demand – from midnight

Melkweg: The Black Seeds – 8 pm (Old Hall); Balans @ klinch – from 11 pm (Old Hall)

De Nieuwe Anita: Amsterdam Beatclub – from 8 pm

Trouw:  SWTBOX (The Persuader, Psycatron, etc.) – from 11 pm

OT301: aciiiiiid!! – from 11 pm

OCCII: MKM! (Chastity Potatoe, Human Heads, Acrid Lactations, DJ Stront) – 9 pm

Sugar Factory: Extravert feat. Luis Leon – 11.30 pm

Winston: Mundo Park, velvvet & Try Acrobatics – 8.30 pm

Concertgebouw: The Yuri Honing Acoustic Quartet – 7.30 pm (Choir Room); Masaaki Suzuki: With Mendelssohn to Scotland – 8 pm (Great Hall); The Yuri Honing Acoustic Quartet – 9.30 pm (Choir Room)

Muziekgebouw: Tangomarathon – 9 pm

Bimhuis: Lee Konitz Quartet – 8.30 pm

North Sea Jazz Club: Tillery (feat. Rebecca Martin, Gretchen Parlato, Becca Stevens) – 9 pm; Late Night Live – 11.30 pm

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Saturday

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Paradiso: George Thorogood & The Destroyers – 7.30 pm (Great Hall); RVLVR – from midnight

Melkweg: Encore – from 11.59 pm (The Max & Old Hall)

De Nieuwe Anita: Warm Soda – 9 pm

Trouw: Trouw Loves Nachtdigital – from 11 pm

OT301: Persephone (with Sandrien, Mirella Kroes, and Mattikk) – from 6 pm

OCCII: Beyond the Realms of Doom III (Mater Suspiria Vision, Fifth Era, Tonal Verges, etc.) – from 10 pm

Amsterdamse Bos: A Day at the Park 2013 – from midday

Sugar Factory: I hear U – from 11.55 pm

Winston: Archetype + Momma Knows Best + Barren Grounds + 2 Years To Apocalypse – 8.30 pm

Concertgebouw: Isabelle Faust and Pictures at an Exhibition – 8 pm (Great Hall)

Muziekgebouw: Tangomarathon – 7 pm

Bimhuis: Brazilian Summer Sessions – 8.30 & 10.30 pm

North Sea Jazz Club: Gregory Porter – 9 pm; Late Night Live – 11.30 pm

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Sunday

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Paradiso: Café Paradiso – from 8 pm; Moon Duo – 8 pm (Small Hall)

Trouw: Trouw On Sunday – from 9 pm

Sugar Factory: Wicked Jazz Sounds Club Night – 11 pm

Winston: Sneeky Sunday – 10 pm

Concertgebouw: Farewell Radio Kamer Filharmonie: Mendelssohn – 2.15 pm (Great Hall); Boddé and Van Vleuten – 8 pm (Small Hall)

Muziekgebouw: Tangomarathon – 7 pm

Erykah Badu, Nas, Blondie, and YouTube at the Concertgebouw

After headlining last Friday at the Cognac Blues Passions Festival, in Cognac, in the Poitou-Charentes region of France, Erykah Badu will perform at the Melkweg in Amsterdam from 9 pm tonight. She will be succeeded by Nas, who will appear at the same venue at the same time tomorrow evening. Following last year’s acclaimed Life Is Good, Nas has reportedly been working on a new album. He suggested back in April via Twitter that he was set to unveil the project’s title, but has thus far remained wordless. In the meantime, he has announced a new clothing line, called HSTRY Clothing – in collaboration with Grungy Gentleman, debuting this autumn, and utilising ‘buttery leather, flannel, fleece, wool and neoprene in innovative ways’ – and features on Jay-Z’s Magna Carta…Holy Grail, released across the last week.

Nas has been performing a series of concerts in Germany and at festivals across Europe; after Amsterdam, he will make his way on to Les Ardentes in Liège, Belgium, and to the Wireless Festival, which has moved this year to London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Nas will be supported at the Melkweg by Coely, the Antwerp-based, Belgian-Congolese rapper, who recently released her EP Raah The Soulful Yeah.

Elsewhere, tomorrow evening over at Paradiso, Blondie will perform. The group announced a new album in March; to be entitled Ghosts of Download, they have been debuting songs from it in concerts over the past couple of months. Blondie will appear on stage at Paradiso from 8 pm.

An interesting event will take place this evening at the Concertgebouw, as part of the venue’s Robeco SummerNights: a diverse series of concerts endeavouring to extend the boundaries of classical music performance, to entwine other musical genres, and to encourage wider audience participation, running nightly until 31 August. Members of the public, and potential audience members, have been asked to submit to uploadklassiek.nl YouTube videos relating to classical music: be these videos comic or otherwise inspired, of the concert hall or recorded at home. A selection of these videos will be shown, presented by Dagan Cohen, and accompanied by Daria van den Bercken on piano, in a concert called ‘Upload Klassiek: Youtube in Het Concertgebouw’. The concert will commence in the Concertgebouw’s Small Hall from 8 pm.

PITCH Festival 2013

PITCH Festival takes place across today and tomorrow at Amsterdam’s Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek. Seventy-five artists, from a diversity of genres broadly centring upon electronic music, will perform across six stages: the four indoor venues of the Gashouder, Westerunie, Transformatorhuis, and Westergasterras, and two outdoor tents, the larger Westertent and the smaller Ostertent.

The festival is now in its third edition. Friday’s headlining acts, performing this evening, include Dizzee Rascal, James Blake and Azealia Banks. JETS, Mykki Blanco, Jon Hopkins, and the especially excellent How To Dress Well – whose Love Remains and Total Loss are two of my favourite releases of recent years – are among those other artists featuring. How To Dress Well will appear on the Westerunie stage from 3.45 pm.

Tomorrow’s highlighted performers include Disclosure, Jamie Liddell, and Trentemøller. They will be supported by, among others, Chvrches, Omar Souleyman, Ghostpoet, and AlunaGeorge.

PITCH begins today at 2.30 pm. Tickets are available online or at the venue, costing €45 per day, or €80 for a weekend pass. The festival’s website is at: http://pitchfestival.nl/

Here’s a video of How To Dress Well performing ‘Suicide Dream 1’ at the Boiler Room:

Over het IJ and Amsterdam Roots: Location Theatre and World Music Festivals

Two festivals held their openings earlier this evening in Amsterdam.

Over het IJ Festival features location theatre, with more than twenty productions showing in outdoor locations over the next eleven days, until 14 July. Most of the emerging artists and practitioners are Dutch; there are productions concerning the French Revolution and the Russian poet Boris Rhyzy; and many are rooted in music theatre, drawing upon a diversity of music from classical to dance. Some of the performances are interactive, engaging the audience and utilising facets and tools of social media; others are produced especially for schoolchildren.

The festival is based at the NDSM shipyard to the north-west of the centre, across the IJ lake, where there will be food and drink for attendees; but performances are located elsewhere too – on both banks of the IJ, including at Amsterdam Centraal. Productions range in length from 15 to 120 minutes, with tickets priced from €3 to €22.50. The website for Over het IJ is at: http://www.overhetij.nl/en/

Amsterdam Roots Festival is now into its 16th edition. The festival hosts musicians from around the world for four days across five locations in Amsterdam, culminating in Roots Open Air, which takes place on Sunday in Oosterpark. The festival was begun by the Tuareg guitarist Bombino, from Niger, who performed earlier tonight at the Melkweg. The Cumbia All Stars will play at the same venue tomorrow evening; with André Rio from Brazil at the Muziekgebouw on Saturday. Roots Open Air will commence on Sunday from 1 pm, with eighteen acts playing across several stages until 10 pm.

Rokia Traoré headlines this edition of the festival – perhaps fresh, possibly tired from her recent performances in Desdemona as part of the Holland Festival, and last weekend at Glastonbury – and will feature on Sunday from 7.30 pm. In addition to the music, there will be dance workshops, a range of activities for children, and an extensive food market across Oosterpark. Tickets for Roots Open Air cost just €7.50 for the day; full information relating to the festival can be found at: http://amsterdamroots.nl/

Julidans 2013, 2-13 July

Julidans, a summer festival for international contemporary dance, begins its 2013 edition in Amsterdam this evening. With an emphasis on provocative and experimental new choreography, organised by the Julidans Foundation, the festival will progress over the course of the next couple of weeks, until Saturday, 13 July.

Julidans will open with a work by the Swedish choreographer and filmmaker Gunilla Heilborn, created for the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, and entitled Alaska. Other performances will feature choreography by Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater, Tao Ye’s TAO Dance Theater, and the Akram Khan Company; with premieres in the Netherlands of Gisèle Vienne’s Showroomdummies #3, Mathilde Monnier’s Objets re-trouvés, and Olivier Dubois’s Tragédie. Performances will take place in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg, Melkweg, Paradiso, Theater Bellevue, Vondelpark Openluchttheater, and Bijlmer Parktheater. Two events at Paradiso over the coming weekend, under the name ‘I Like To Watch Too’, will showcase fourteen short pieces by young practitioners.

Alaska will show tonight at the Stadsschouwburg’s Rabozaal from 8.30 pm; with a repeat performance tomorrow evening at the same venue. For a full account of the Julidans agenda, visit: http://www.julidans.nl/page.ocl?PageID=10

French Restaurant Week, 1-14 July

Deriving from Restaurant Week – which now takes place twice a year across the Netherlands, having proven resoundingly popular amongst members of the public – today marks the start of French Restaurant Week. As the prefix indicates, the endeavour involves French restaurants, one hundred of whom are offering a three-course gourmet menu, plus apéritif, for the fixed price of €30 per person.

The hundred French restaurants throughout the Netherlands who will take part include the top fifty French restaurants in the country as determined by DiningCity, the event’s organisers. Fifteen of the participating restaurants are in Amsterdam: Antoine, VandeMarkt, A La Ferme, and Bouf are among those who feature.

French Restaurant Week in fact runs for two weeks, until 14 July. Tables can be sought and booked at: http://www.franserestaurantweek.nl/lang/en/cities/nederland/restaurants

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Patti Smith & Her Band at Paradiso

Patti Smith began her latest tour of Europe last week in London, with two dates at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, followed by a performance in the Purcell Room of the Southbank Centre as part of this year’s Meltdown festival, curated by Yoko Ono.

I first saw Patti Smith live in 2005, when she served as the curator of Meltdown. In the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, prefaced by Cat Power, Smith performed for the first time a musical setting of The Coral Sea – her extended prose-poem impelled by and dedicated to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom Smith lived and shared an impassioned relationship in the late 60s and early 70s in New York; and which was published in book form in 1998. Smith sung her poem in front of a shifting seascape background, accompanied by Kevin Shields, of My Bloody Valentine, on guitar.

Smith is to play two shows in Amsterdam, tonight and tomorrow at Paradiso. The current iteration of her band includes original members Lenny Kaye on guitar and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums; the longstanding Tony Shanahan on bass and keyboards; and Jack Petruzzelli on guitar and bass. The tour proceeds from last year’s Banga, Smith’s eleventh album, released to significant acclaim; and after Amsterdam, it moves on to Germany, Finland, Sweden, France and Italy, before returning to the UK.

Patti Smith & Her Band will play at Paradiso from 8.30 pm on both evenings. Tonight’s performance is sold out; but there are tickets for tomorrow, with more information at: http://www.paradiso.nl/web/Agenda-Item/Patti-Smith-her-band-1.htm