MIRA 2018 – Announcing dates, first acts and Early Bird passes

09.05.2018

MIRA 2018 is here! Today we announce the dates of the new edition – set to take place on November 8, 9 and 10 – as well as the first acts of the line up, and are also releasing a limited number of full festival passes at a reduced price.

 

Get your Early Bird Full Festival Pass for 50€ (plus fees) at www.mirafestival.com/tickets before they sell out!

 

From the 8th to 10th of November we will take over Fabra i Coats again for the eighth edition of MIRA, and we can now unveil the first names of the line up and the graph campaign, made by Ugly Studio and inspired in the ASRM phenomenon. We have legendary pioneers, widely recognised stars and new artists to whom to pay close attention to. For the time being, and until the next announcement, we already have a wonderful and exciting selection of artists who will perform in several of the festival’s most recognisable spaces and formats, with A/V shows, VJ sets and 3D Sound shows.

The list is led by German band Tangerine Dream, one of the most pioneering electronic groups of the last 50 years, with their latest album, “Quantum Gate”, released in September 2017 on the kscope label with great success. Along with the live visual work of British artist Patrick Dunn, their performance at MIRA will mark the premiere in Spain of the show “Quantum of Electronic Evolution”, a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in their latest creations as well as their great works from the past.

Masterfully bringing together the menacing jungle and melancholy ambient since the early 1990s, Germany’s Christoph De Babalon is a pioneer whose vision remains as clear as ever. In an exclusive performance for MIRA and accompanied by visual artist Marta Verde live, this show will mark his return to Barcelona after 10 years without performing in the city.

No one in this world sounds like the Swiss-Tibetan Aïsha Devi, a unique artist whose sonic arsenal has made her a figure to be reckoned with. Devi will present the new A/V show that accompanies the album “DNA Feelings” (Houndstooth, 2018), world-premiered last Saturday at MIRA Berlin and with the live visual work of Frenchman Emile Barret, where together they create an emotionally and spatially disturbing audiovisual event.

Rival Consoles returns to MIRA with a sound that, after a decade in business, is still as fascinating as ever. His new and expressive album, “Persona” (Erased Tapes, 2018), combines acoustic and electronic instruments, film drones, thundering drums and ambient passages, and will take him to the stage through a dynamic live A/V show that focuses on his more clubber sound and features self-programmed visuals.

El Sueño de Hyparco, a legendary Madrid project formed in the mid-1980s by Antonio Dyaz, will play exclusively for the audience of MIRA and for the first time in many years the seminal “Ambientes Hormonales”. In collaboration with the live work of visual artist Alba G. Corral, “Deconstructing Hormonal Environments” will be a performance based on new pieces developed from the original sound material.

The excellent Australian producer, singer-songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Carla dal Forno, one of the most interesting voices when it comes to navigating contemporary electronic pop, will be accompanied by the French visual artist Ludovic Sauvage, in what will be her first live show in Barcelona.

The lineup of the 3D Sound Room by SON Estrella Galicia already has its first confirmed artists. The Germans Wolf Müller and Niklas Wandt will present their first album “Instrumentalmusik von der Mitte der World” (Growing Bin, 2018) in Barcelona. Their energetic show, consisting of synthesizers, samplers, loops and effects, and a full drum set along with a wide range of percussion instruments from around the world, uses the live loop to create a hypnotic experience.

The Swede Varg, a completely unpredictable and prolific artist who has released dozens of albums, comes to MIRA where he will focus on the techno side of his multifaceted production, adapting it to the room’s environment and exploring its limits through crushing basses for the body and relentless breaks.

Tapan, formed by Serbs Nebojša Bogdanović and Goran Simonoski, will perform live with his first album, “Europa” (Malka Tuti, 2018), a work inspired by the current refugee crisis and in quartet format with Jamal Al Kiswani on saxophone and flute and Fedja Franklin on drums and percussion, connecting industrial electronics, Balkan jazz improvisation and the unique pulse of oriental percussion.

As far as the strictly visual section is concerned, the Spanish creative coder Marta Verde, who specialises in new media and digital technologies applied to the performing arts and performing for the first time at MIRA, opens this list with the VJ Set, which she will present in real time and created specifically for Cristoph De Babalon’s live show.

New graphic campaign by Ugly Studio for MIRA 2018

The extraction of sound and its different recontextualisations: The concept is focused on the potential that objects have to produce sounds. Many of them, sometimes imperceptible, are ignored by most people in their day to day lives. Nevertheless, they are the raw source material for a wide range of experimental music.

As the Internet continues to occupy more and more space in our lives, phenomena begin to arise, such as ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response): a virtual experience that, through the use of binaural microphones, exploits the sonic capacity of any type of object and is exposed online to an increasingly curious fetishist audience.