In 2019 London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF), ‘the capital’s most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music’ (The Guardian), returned for its eighth edition in seven years.

Teaming up with the Serpentine Galleries, experimental choir collective Musarc, Australian curatorial force Liquid Architecture and cult new imprint Ignota Books, and returning to the epic, subterranean Ambika P3LCMF 2019  presented its most ambitious programme yet, exploring the witchy turn in art, poetry and music.

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LCMF 2019 took inspiration from the 2017 Witchy Methodologies conference at the ICA, curated by Anna Bunting-Branch, from the words of poet Holly Pester and books of philosopher Silvia Federici and from the Eavesdropping programme of Liquid Architecture.

Rooted in the ideas of Federici and Pester, Witchy Methodologies  explored rituals and reenchantment, doubling and transformation, gossip and eavesdropping, hauntologies and orreries, mysticism and technomancy, showing how these procedures – which seek to disrupt and queer the norms of learning and labour – are being used by artists working today.

LCMF 2019 will age you, haunt you, feed you gossip. We'll eavesdrop on onanists, play with mud, dance with ghosts, turn TVs into hearths. There will be bloodthirsty crows, (Soma)tic incantations, Soviet erotica and deep meditation. The dead will be divined, orchestras teased, dinosaurs consulted, spells cast, pianists hypnotised, audience entropy monitored, state murders exposed.

Nine bold new commissions (from composers, artists, choreographers and poets), a major new opera, a troupe of Bulgarian mummers, visits from three pioneering outsiders of electronic music, three generations of radical poetry, five extraordinary art films and another audacious set of orchestral premieres... 

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LCMF was founded in 2013 to provide a home for the promiscuous music lover. It is currently run by writer/curator Igor Toronyi-Lalic, composer/conductor Jack Sheen and curators Irene Altaió and Inês Geraldes Cardoso.

LCMF 2018 was the seventh festival in six years, following critically acclaimed editions in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017 and the world's first retrospectives of the composers Julius Eastman and Bernard Parmegiani.

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For press, advertising or sponsorship enquiries, contact: lcmf@lcmf.co.uk



Special thanks to artist Emily Tilzey for designing the LCMF logo