LCMF 2022
THE BIG SAD
15 – 19 June
Fireworks Factory at Woolwich Works
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This year, being broken takes centre stage. We cry, we pine, we crack up and rage; we smile vacantly into the middle distance; we hole ourselves up in bedrooms; we fail to sleep; we scroll.
Melancholia is ‘the fundamental passion of the hyperreal order’, writes Alex Mazey in his book Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021). A passion born of an infatuation with the fertile and forlorn plains that exist between reality and desire. A passion for the heroic fail. For the artistic ruin. For the simulacra. For what Baudrillard called the ‘vertiginous seduction of a dying system’.
Exploring Sad Boys, sweet melancholy and the affective turn, through 9 new commissions and 18 premieres, in music, dance, poetry and film – through requiems, cryogenics labs, meme poetics, Gaelic psalms and the sound of the ancient Mayans – THE BIG SAD will show how the tools of relinquishment and ruination, how states of loss and exhaustion, can be turned on their head, spur recovery, intimacy and joy. Allow yourself to fall into ‘the mists and drizzle of its downer haze’ (Mazey, Sad Boy Aesthetics).
Melancholia is ‘the fundamental passion of the hyperreal order’, writes Alex Mazey in his book Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021). A passion born of an infatuation with the fertile and forlorn plains that exist between reality and desire. A passion for the heroic fail. For the artistic ruin. For the simulacra. For what Baudrillard called the ‘vertiginous seduction of a dying system’.
Exploring Sad Boys, sweet melancholy and the affective turn, through 9 new commissions and 18 premieres, in music, dance, poetry and film – through requiems, cryogenics labs, meme poetics, Gaelic psalms and the sound of the ancient Mayans – THE BIG SAD will show how the tools of relinquishment and ruination, how states of loss and exhaustion, can be turned on their head, spur recovery, intimacy and joy. Allow yourself to fall into ‘the mists and drizzle of its downer haze’ (Mazey, Sad Boy Aesthetics).
‘The capital’s most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music’
The Guardian
‘London’s most important festival’
The Wire
The London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) was founded in 2013 to provide a home for the promiscuous music lover. It is currently run by writer/curator Igor Toronyi-Lalic and composer/conductor Jack Sheen.
In 2021 LCMF became a charity (no. 1193409). Its board of trustees are:
Richard Wyatt (chair)
Selvi May Akyildiz
Valéry Grégo
Elaine Mitchener
Igor Toronyi-Lalic
LCMF 2019 was the eighth festival in seven years, following critically acclaimed editions in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018 and the world's first retrospectives of the composers Julius Eastman and Bernard Parmegiani.
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Special thanks to artist Emily Tilzey for designing the LCMF logo