Weekender

From August 25th to 27th, Weekender will celebrate the end of summer, in various venues in the beautiful town of St. Vith in Belgium. Weekender is a new boutique festival featuring a diverse lineup of eclectic listening music and two big club nights. Using venues in St.Vith like Triangel for clubbing, Kino Corso for concerts with visuals, Kuckuck for concerts, DJ sets and improvised live radio, Waldbaden for afternoon DJ action, Alte Post for adventurous concerts & DJ sets, the St. Vitus church for a special organ performance, Büchelturm and the Greenhouse along the RAVeL bike path for installations and performances, Weekender aims to be a late summery dive into diverse musical vibes and more.

LINE-UP
With the lineup now complete, here is a very incomplete overview of what to expect.

Straight from Omar-S' FXHE label comes HiTech, cutting fast tempos with smudged strings and city-at-night romance into an exhilarating mix of ghettotech and footwork. MC Yallah, an affiliate of the quintessential Nyege Nyege crew, and Debmaster will provide fierce MC'ing combined with rugged riddims. German house music legends Lawrence and Isolée keep on defining a very forward-thinking version of club music very much their own. Isolée just released his new album Resort Island. Dan Nicholls is a member of Goldie's and Squarepusher's touring bands and has performed with vocalist Maja Ratkje and trumpeter Arve Henriksen. His music exists at the crossroads of jazz, ambient electronica, vanguard classical music, and experimental abstraction. He will also perform with Julian Sartorius and Louise Boer as their joint project continually collects sounds and images as they go, weaving them into an ever-growing palette of possibilities. They recently delved deep into glacier riverbeds and high into mountain forests to capture improvised sound and video. The legendary Aksak Maboul musically set Belgium on the map many years ago. Their inimitable mix of post-punk, free jazz, alternative pop and minimalist chamber music still rings true today.

Eera's sonic textures are hard and soft, light and dark. She has a new album coming up on Big Dada. Member of the acclaimed alt-pop band The Pilotwings, Jonquera explores guitar music, dub, dark ambient and acoustic techniques and is getting more and more noticed for his versatile compositional and performative work. He will also play with the avant-folk Acidiatz, conjuring up mediaval refrains, spells and musical bewilderment. Maxime Denuc released the acclaimed hypnotic organ-based club music exploration Nachthorn in 2022, even getting noticed by techno legend Richie Hawtin. He will be presenting a new robot-driven organ project.

Memotone, part of our collaboration with Accidental Meetings, leans towards a free-form approach, exploring jazz, drone and more meditative musics, also showing a keen interest in sound design and textural experimentation. The Dwarfs of East Agouza are Maurice Louca, Sam Shalabi and Alan Bishop, an improvisational band combining repetitive North African drums, free jazz guitar inspired by West African traditions and motorik acoustic bass. Italian drummer, composer and experimental musician Andrea Belfi blends the acoustic with the electronic, conjuring up energetic and hypnotic performances defined by rich and immersive soundscapes. Ojoo Gyal blends diverse elements into an engaging and infectious mix. Spinning old-school dancehall at its most futuristic and distorted, dub, reggaeton, dembow, grime, breaks, jungle and excursions into noise, illbient, musique concrète, and more.

There will be installations presented by Frédéric Le Junter and Lukas De Clerck and Vincent Caers. Le Junter, builder of sound objects shaking up conventional luthiery, will be inaugurating a new installation, as part of Meakusma’s installation series. He will perform especially for this occasion. Lucas De Clerck and Vincent Caers will be presenting Greenhouse Conversations, turning the greenhouse on the RAVeL bike path into a large glass instrument. The Greenhouse Conversations project will be an inauguration of sorts of the greenhouse as a space for installation work, as the previous inauguratory event we had planned for 2021 was cancelled because of Covid.

Weekender also includes some people local to St. Vith and around. soFa Elsewhere has been digging tirelessly through a large spectrum of musical genres since late last century, now also active as a producer with projects such as Mameen 3, CCCVVV, Nyati Mayi & The Astral Synth Transmitters, Psychedelic Digestion Therapy and more. Melokan Fusion is the new band of kora player Oumar Konté, combining drums and bass, and is a mixture of traditional and urban music, blues and rock 'n roll. The Revolte Kollektiv will be present featuring club music-drenched sets by Grazon b2b Stinny, Maxbar and Gedankentief.

Legendary Cologne record store A-Musik will be onsite offering a selection of records tailored to the festival and beyond.