This month, Eleonora, from MOB, have interviewed Andrea Aisa Vega, founder of Espacio Redo and Romain Clement & Mario González, founders of Blastsound. Coworkers, then friends and now collaborators, they worked together for the Pressplay Festival Ermua, a month long festival initiated by Espacio Redo and taking place in Ermua, a small town located in Basque Country. This festival mixes human rights, education and music in order to understand the world we live in and to build solidarity. Solicited by Andrea, Romain, Mario and Steeve (=Blastsound) organised the closing party of the festival.
Let’s look at what this collaboration looked like.
Our goal is to discover musical treasures and understand the social context surrounding the cultural movements we focus on.
Hey Romain, so can you tell us a bit about Blastsound?
Steeve, Mario and I gave birth to Blastsound in 2016. We create musical expeditions into the heart of subculture. Our goal is to discover musical treasures and understand the social context surrounding the cultural movements we focus on. On our next odyssey “Yallah frequencies!” we will travel through Middle East, looking to deepen into the underground electronic music stage. Last December we explored Turkish psychedelic rock from the seventies, and on our first expedition “GhettoWitches”, we looked to spot the new generation of female Mc’s, which are renewing rap and hiphop culture. Blastsounds, basically aims to create a community of art lovers, willing to share and discover unique cultural experiences.
And Andrea, what about Espacio Redo?
Espacio REDO is a working group specialised in the analysis, training and consultancy related to the global world. We believe that in this global world, the culture generated by digital medias is key and that it is the cement of society. We integrate the human rights as principle and universal value to interpret our individual and social reality. More concretely, we analyse contemporain topics often related to human rights, women, conflicts or poverty. The link between all the different topics that we analyse is culture. The PressPlay Festival – Ermua is therefore a cultural festival that enables us to explore and question many topics at once, and to rethink and redo our society.
Everything is planned to gather a large audience ready to share values, talk about human rights and discover new musics.
What is the PressPlay Ermua Festival? What will be going on there?
A: A lot of workshops, masterclasses, concerts, exhibitions and documentary films. Everything is planned to gather a large audience ready to share values, talk about human rights and discover new musics. We also want to give to the public the opportunity to deeply feel part of the event. That’s why we organise workshops where participants can learn from what they love to then share what they loved. It’s the best advertising we can ever have, no?
What kind of crowd can we see at this festival?
A: It attracts a very diverse crowd. From adults to young people, they are all looking for something new and different. For us the very young public is the most rewarding one. With kids, a real exchange is created and they teach us much more than we can teach them.
The idea to collaborate for the PressPlay Festival came out here at MOB.
How did the idea of the collaboration with Blastsound come out?
R: The idea to collaborate for the PressPlay Festival came out here at MOB, after we discovered our common passion for music and more widely, culture. From a conversation to another, we realised that we really wanted to organise a small event inside the festival. This is when Andrea offered us to design the closing party.
So what was your suggestion?
Mario: For the closing event, not only we decided to invite musicians that we loved and wanted to make discover to others, we also wanted to have a discourse and bring the audience to think about something. And we wanted to talk about women artists. That’s why the event took the name of “Underground sounds: a trip through the feminine flow and the jamaican sound system”. To do this trip, we divided the night in four parts. At first, we discovered through video some hip-hop made by women. In the second part, we organised hip-hop masterclasses where the dancer Raquel Koroma taught some moves to the attendees and did a presentation with local female dancers. Then, we invited to collective to do DJ sets. The first one was Eskina Feminina and the second one was Righteous Way Soundsystem.
Was the night a success?
M: Yes, as we were able to produce not a show, but a live experience to the people of Ermua, and to promote underground and countercultural movements.
Will there be a PressPlay Ermua festival 2018?
A: The world is in constant progress. Everything is continuously growing and changing. So we will again have many things to talk about during this year edition and we hope to see you there!
R: And before that, you can find out about all how events through Blastsounds meetup group.
