This festival was arranged by Fylkingen in collaboration with Moderna Museet during the year that Stockholm was the Cultural Capital of Europe. Conserts were held during daytime at Moderna Muséet (together with some installations, exhibitions and perform- ances) and in the evenings at Fylkingen the local venue for mostly electro-acoustic music, located in the same building as EMS. The following artitists held conserts, installations or performances: André Stitt (Eng),Tetsuo Furudate (Jpn),Voice Crack (Swi), Key Ransone (USA),
Caroline Rye (Eng), Kent Tankred (Swe), Farmersmanual (Aus), Zbigniew Karkowski (Swe/Jpn),
Susanne Berggren (Swe), Kevin Atherton (Eng),Small Cruel Party (USA),Leif Elggren/Thomas
Liljenberg (Swe), Kapotte Muziek (Hol), Sören Runolf (Swe), Freundschaft (Ger), Mats Lindström,
Susanne Berggren, Dror Feiler (Swe), Goem (Hol), Mikael Stavöstrand(Swe), Ryoji Ikeda, (Jpn).
I didn't attend them all myself so i'll only tell you about the things i saw (there was also an extensive video-program screened but i managed to totally miss out on that as well...)

The first show i saw on Friday was Tetsuo Furudate which started out with some nice sampled nature-sounds and voices in japanese and swedish (lifted from some Ingmar Bergman movies!) but pretty quickly developed into some really pathetic theatrical 'deathnoise' with Tetsuo hitting his sampler and torturing a guitar, not a good start but later on Voice Crack quickly restored my faith in this festival. A custom made long table was litterarily littered with their 'cracked everyday electronics' and most of them was triggered with lights so  the duo activated them one by switching on a vast selection of bicycle-lamps creating a rich texture of crackles and pops, slowly growing in intensity. At one moment during the show one of them even played a theremin-kinda-thing with a flash- light, so this show was one of the most visually stimulating as well, the flashing red lights blinking in the dark creating a nice 'sci-fi' feeling to the proceedings. A highlight. Next highlight was Farmers Manual at Fylkingen, equipped with 4-5 computers, samplers, video-projectors and whoknowswhat, the four young austrians started off their quadraphonic multimedia-show which consisted of a lot of random live processing of soundfiles and video-projections that started of kinda soft but gradually developed into a streaming digital glossolalia of broken rythms, noise and various samples flying around in the mix. The guys instage did seem to enjoy themselves to the extent that they didn't  stop until after four hours! This did also make it feel less like a consert and more of a live sound/visual installation.  The first thing i saw on Saturday was Small Cruel Party who had decorated the center of the stage with a vase of flowers standing on the floor while the man himself was hiding in the shadows in the back of the stage. The sound of waves slowly faded in and after a while they had transformed into an organic sounding warm drone that almost started to get noisy at times. Then heavilly processed tribal rythms came in and slowly unfolded and all of a sudden half an hour had passed by and it was over. This was one of the few show during this festival that i had wished they could've lasted a little longer. Next thing up was Kapotte Muziek who surprised by not choosing to do their typical barely audible live thing and instead gave us a pretty noisy fiest of broken contact-mike buzz, various amplified objects, fieldrecordings and cd-players were manifulated and so on, a nice surprise. The peculiar thing with Freundschaft was that absolutely nobody had heard of them so it was a big mystery how they managed to get invited to the festival indeed. They offered up a pure wall of noise and technorythms with two vocalists screaming in megaphones and was rather uninteresting, also disappointing was Sören Runolfs uninspired set that never seemed to get where it aimed.  Sunday was 'minimal techno'-day in a way since i started of seeing Kapotte Muziek's Frans de Waard, Roel Meelkop and Peter Duimelinks once more but this time under their Goem guise delivering an extremely strict and pounding hypnotic set of minimal rythms and bleeping synth's. The guys onstage looked kinda bored so i sat with my eyes closed for most of the set which made the sensation even more intense. I missed most of Mikael Stavöstrand's show but managed to catch the last 20 minutes which consisted of digital clicks and drones that was occasionally puntuated with brief bursts of white noise which was surprisingly good. Maybe the most hyped event of this festival was Ryoji Ikeda's consert which was the closing consert as well. Standing absolutely still behind his digital mixer he played a selection of tracks from all of his records, in fact he played them straight from minidisc so there wasn't much of a performance but that was ok since you don't get that many opportunities to hear his music loud on a good soundsystem but the conclusion was that it sounded exactly as on cd - only louder than most people play their cd's at home.

All in all, i can say that personally i'm rather satisfied with this event - there were some pretty good conserts here (there were some really bad ones too but i don't feel like wasting time on writing about them). In comparison to the festival at Stubnitz earlier in the year this event felt more academic since it took place at MM and Fylkingen but it was nevertheless one of the more interesting events during Stockholm's year as Cultural Capital of Europe. RS