We already announced this year’s dates for Eufònic festival (remember: from 24 to 27 August, in La Ràpita, Amposta, Tortosa and other towns of Terres de l’Ebre!), and now we are adding the first names of the line-up. 15 artists (music, performances and installations) representing a third of the line-up.

The Pavelló Firal and the Centre d’Art Lo Pati take center stage in this first batch of names: the frenetic electronics of the Congolese collective Kokoko! -sung in a mixture of languages and with the ancestral rhythm as motor- in counterpoint to the French Flore, another vision of electronics, exploring bass music, techno and psychedelia, along with the WSK‘s visual work of. Also there we will have the technopop of the Chilean girl based in Valencia Soledad Vélez (we adore her!), with a new album in Subterfuge that makes us fly.

The Església Nova will host the deconstructed folk of the Basque Verde Prato, one of the great names of the contemporary revision of folklore (spoiler alert: in Montsònica we have dedicated an entire program to this). And the Mercat Vell points out some of the lines of this year: the poetry to the rhythm of industrial techno-ambient Da::ma (the project of the poet David Caño and the producer Mauri) and the hypertechnological pop of Hadren, new promise of the Barcelona scene that defies any label. In addition, two live-coding projects: the British Sam Aaron, who returns to Eufònic after that legendary set of algorithmic techno, and Barcelona’s QBRNTHSS, with his rough atmosphere of broken beats.

In Eufònic there are always proposals that link artistic creation with the environment. For now, we can talk about the main installation of this edition, the Norwegian Jana Winderen will take the magnificent Centre d’Art Lo Pati of Amposta with a sound proposal curated by Arnau Horta that draws inspiration from the sound of the waters of the Delta. In a practically opposite way, the master Antoni Arola will grow the La Ràpita’s narrowest alley, the “carreró de Missa”, guiding us by the light.

More work around water? The proposals in artistic residency in Balada, arising from the Eufònic/Lo Pati call, deepen this relationship: the Portuguese installed in Catalonia Joana Moher wants to «map» the waters and the soil; the Irish Jo Kimmins will present a piece of immersive and aquatic video; Llúcia Pla (from Amposta) and Maria Grandmontatge (from Bilbao) will investigate about what we know very well (and everyone keeps reminding us), “the hours of mosquitoes”. All of them will be seen in the Matadero of La Ràpita, new space in which we started last year.

The latest addition to the aquatic theme is one of the new projects of this season: in collaboration with Agencia Cultural Española, we have invited the Navarran artist Merche Blasco -until recently based in New York, now in Berlin- work for three weeks at the Delta gate. And she will do it in the lake of l’Encanyissada to try to find out what the waters under our feet awake in us and hide from us.

We’ll finish this announcement with more music: on the final Sunday, after our traditional closure at the beach by noon, we’ll join our friends of the Jornades Musicals a l’Ermita de la Pietat d’Ulldecona to close the summer to the rhythm of hardcore-techno-punk and rural electronics with Nerve Agent, a band from Albacete that has all the much-needed attitude to face the times in which we live.

The rest of the program will be announced soon, as well as the first release of tickets.