ARTEFACT music festival day 1

POWELL

Belgian live debut!

The club music Oscar Powell wanted to hear didn't exist, so he made it himself. He's now released six EPs and a compilation of the stuff, and it's the most inventive and hard-hitting dance music I've recently heard. His tracks combine the attitude of post-punk with the physicality of techno and the adventurous spirit of experimental music. Powell's drums are a meticulously crafted mess, which makes dancing to his tracks both fun and challenging. "I'm really trying to do something different."
Resident Advisor 

The British producer Oscar Powell wanted to hear music that didn’t exist so he decided to make it himself. He is part of a small group of musicians whose music is a style on it’s own. He was influenced by Ike Yard, DNA and James Chance, but also by bands like Suicide. He mixes modern club music with no wave and post-punk without any mercy. For his track Insomniac he used a sample from an old recording of Big Black. After asking Steve Albini for sample clearance, the latter expressed his disgust for dance music: ‘I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you're into, and an enemy of where you come from but I have no problem with what you're doing...’ Adventurous, straightforward and experimental techno with a post-punk attitude that smacks in the contemporary club culture. Together with his best friend Jaime Williams he runs the label Diagonal with interesting leftfield artists such as Russell Haswell and Regis. This will be the premiere of his live set in Belgium.

FIS

The work of the Oliver Peryman, better known by his Fis moniker, never ceases to evade description. With a rich background in D&B and techno, there are undeniable tendencies towards beat-oriented music present in the sound. However, to only focus on these would be to misdescribe Fis entirely. There is something more mystical and elemental at work throughout his work, and his music takes clear inspirational cues from nature.
Straylandings 

The Berlin-based New-Zealander FIS is a pleasant addition to the label Tri Angle. His amorphous and ambiguous sound palette with abstract drum is drenched with heavy bass structures. On his debut The Quicksand Is Going Now he buries beats in a dense and grainy mass. 

SAGAT

Just as the identity of Brussels is unclear, forever shifting and very much alive, so is the sonic world SAGAT conjures up, moving the listener into forever unexpected syncopations and melodic elements that seem to tell the story of human flesh being fused with fiber optics. SAGAT doesn’t score a soundtrack to his memories of Brussels, he makes the music as he lives in the city, traversing it on a daily basis. Not many people can pin down the elusive mix between all the seemingly contradictory elements that make up the city, but SAGAT has caught this essence for long enough to present it to you, before it crumbles and reconfigures into his next productions.
Shape

The Brussels-based sound designer Sagat is a member of the Bepotel collective. His latest record Melting The Earth Onto The Body Without Organs proves that electronic music can sound very warm and tactile. Exciting groovy rhytms dive into darkish dub. Sharp funk is brought in techno frequencies. Reverb and delay sound creamy like butter. A new but at the same time familiar sound.