We’ve come a long way since our first Fertilizer outing: 53 bands – as diverse as Norway’s Nils ?kland trio to Britain’s very own Blak Twang or Germany’s real leading ladies, Chicks on Speed; 21 gigs in lovely venues like The Spitz (soon to be sadly missed) and Cargo, and 1 club weekender in the Big Chill Bar (who will ever forget the varnished pretzels?). And, each time we’ve popped up with a new offering, we’ve made a whole lot of new friends, more and more of you wanting yet more Good Shit.
This year’s Fertilizer sees us heading East – back to our old haunts in London’s East End and over to Eastern Europe to uncover the very latest underground sounds from Gdansk to Warsaw. And for the first time we'll be taking Fertilizer on tour in the UK.
Following our mission to Poland last year to discover the best music bubbling under the mainstream (it’s a hard life, but someone has to…) we’ve been busy putting together our signature genre-busting mix of jazz, ambient sounds, hip hop and postrock psychedelia which should leave you in no doubt why Poland is our musical destination of the year.
Check out the full listings below... Na Zdrowie!
Fertilizer Festival 2009 -Good S*** from Poland
"The Fertilizer festival is a short, sharp blast of air from another planet" - The Guardian
/// LONDON PROGRAMME ///
Wed 13th of May
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Fertilizer Music Forum @ Rich Mix
'A meeting of professionals from UK distributors, promoters, festivals and funders such as Arts Council England as well as IAM representatives, Polish labels, managers and musicians.'
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British Polish Jazz Collaboration - Pink Freud & Pete Wareham, Contemporary Noise Sextet @ CARGO
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FILM - 7.30pm Rich Mix Film screening - The Wedding
Thurs 14th of May
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Fertilizer Tour @ CARGO
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Saturday 16th of May ------------------------------------------------------------ ----
Male Instrumente @ Hoxton Hall (2 x 60 Minute Performances @ 3pm and 6pm)
'Małe Instrumenty (Small Instruments) is a band looking for new sounds using unique instruments - they use small instruments both those with professional origin as well as those made for children or naive in its nature and their collection also contains items which are not really instruments but they do make a sound!'
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FILM - 4.00pm - Rich Mix film screening - ‘My Nikifor’
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Sunday 17th of May ------------------------------------------------------------ ----
FILM - 4.00pm - Rich Mix film screening - ‘Extras’
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Mitch + Mitch @ CARGO
'Mitch & Mitch have caused havoc with their extraordinary show in countless cities across Poland (among them the historic ‘suicide gig’ at the Country Picnic festival in Mragowo in 2005) and Western Europe (the I.D.E.A.L festival in Nantes, France, or the supermarket tour of Portugal to name just two occassions).'
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SOUND POSTCARDS EXHIBITION - 11 – 17 May @ Rich Mix
During 60s and 70s communism in Poland, at a time when vinyl records hard to get, sounds postcards became extremely popular. They looked like standard postcards on the back, but on the front an analogue recording was engraved in a thin layer of laminate. Sound postcards were usually made by tiny firms, and the recording quality was extremely low, but very often they represented the only available possibility of having access to hit songs from The West. In the late 70s, the cards were replaced by cassette technology.
The designs on the front of Sound Postcards ranged from the primitive and weird, to the very beautiful. For Unsound, Rui Silva and Mat Schulz, two foreigners who have spent time living in Poland, have collected hundreds of cards, to put together an exhibition. This exhibition not only reveals the forgotten artistic merit of these cards, but allows the public to listen to songs on the cards transferred into mp3 format, drawing attention to the way that sound recording technology has changed across time.
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/// FERTILIZER ON TOUR 2009 ///
13 May - NORWICH Arts Centre
http://nnfestival.org.uk
01603 766400
14 May - LONDON Cargo
http://cargo-london.com
15 May - BRISTOL Arnolfini
http://arnolfini.org.uk
0117 917 2300
16 May - OXFORD The Academy
http://ocmevents.org
01865 305 305
17 May - LIVERPOOL The Picket
http://liverpoolphil.com
18 May - GATESHEAD The Sage
http://thesagegateshead.org
0191 443 4661
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