Bandura, sound art and audiovisual performance: Lviv's Jam Factory holds its first music festival

Lviv's Jam Factory Art Center is holding its own music festival for the first time — JAM MUSIC FEST. It takes place on Sunday, 30 August, and is dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian electronic music.

The programme was published by the organisers through UP.Kultura.

This is not a mixed bill for one evening but three different ways of working with electronics — from audiovisual performance to the bandura in a new arrangement.

An art centre that decided to become a stage

Jam Factory Art Center is known mainly for exhibitions, so a music festival of its own is a step in a new direction. Tellingly, the first subject chosen was neither pop nor rock but electronics and experiments at the crossing of genres and artistic practices.

It starts at 18:00 on the art centre's stage. That is a convenient format, incidentally: the concert ends well before curfew, and the venue is already built for complex light and sound.

Why Zavoloka is the key name on this bill

Kateryna Zavoloka has worked in Ukrainian experimental electronics since the 2000s — her name stands next to Tomato Jaws and Gorchitza in the list the present-day scene grew out of. Her return to a Lviv stage is not nostalgia but a rare chance to hear that line live.

The Krut and MANU set is just as interesting: the bandura in an electronic context stopped being an exotic touch long ago, but joint programmes built for a single evening are still rare here.

As ONE//FM wrote earlier, Ukrainian electronic music needed thirty-five years to reach the big stages — and Zavoloka appears in that history as one of the anchor names of the 2000s.