Up To Date Festival – electronics with ecology in the background

23-24.06.2023, Białystok

The fourteenth edition of Up To Date Festival is just over a month away. Yes, on June 23 and 24, we will be able to enjoy the most qualitative electronic music that will come to our country. More information below.

As every year, the festival will take place in Białystok, but we already know that it will not be the Municipal Stadium at Słoneczna Street. It will be a new – so far secret – location. Most importantly, greenery will reign, which is what Podlasie can offer us in various forms.

For people going to the festival every year, the date is probably quite a surprise. This year’s festival, so far closing the season of summer events, has been postponed to the end of June, which will allow the organizers not to worry so much about weather conditions and better adjust to the financial possibilities of visitors.

The festival of electronics in Białystok is already a tradition, but also a significant impact on the natural environment. Once again, the Białystok-based Electrum group, operating in the renewable energy, technology and information industry, comes to the rescue. As we know from the organizer, one of the long-term goals of the Up To Date festival is to further reduce the festival’s impact on the environment, and this year the festival will start working on a long-term strategy for its implementation. The first actions have already been implemented, i.e. reducing the number of flights by 15% and developing upcycling processes over elements of the stage design, thanks to which the carbon footprint of the event will be lower than in previous years.

This year, the festival was additionally associated with the Norwegian Monument festival. In addition to musical values, which will certainly appear without two, this combination will also bring visual arts to a higher level, which will make the participants feel the atmosphere even more. However, that’s not all. Thanks to this combination, an international conference on the responsibility of music festivals towards nature will be created. This unusual undertaking is a good start for more and more festivals to start thinking about such issues. The partnership of both festivals is possible thanks to the support of EEA Grants & Norwegian Funds.

For years, the organizers have also been trying to create various types of social campaigns, which each time have a wider impact. And it’s hardly surprising, because such projects as “Send a Postcard to Grandma” or producing a series of fairy tales for children created for the Children’s Clinical Hospital in Bialystok is a really unusual practice. My favorite, however, is the “Dont Worry Be Yourself” project, which focuses on taming the subject of mental health and open conversation about it in the world of electronic music.

But let’s move on to what excites every music fan from the very beginning: the line-up. These can be better or worse, but at Up To Date we have been convinced for years that artists are not chosen by people from round-ups. A strong and interesting line-up is one of their great advantages, and just recently we got to know the final set of artists who this year are to refer to the roots of classic raves with their sounds.

For some time now, the festival has also been leaning towards artists creating music on the borderline of ambient, electronics and experimental sounds. It’s no different this year, with concerts by, among others, Surgeon, The Transcendence Orchestra, Bvduba, Joachim Spieth or the Upsamma artist inspired by the laws of physics and biological phenomena (who will present live A/V together with Jonathan Castro). Diversified sounds and broader going beyond the limits of their genre will also characterize the techno scene this year. Błażej Malinowski and RTMTS will present the new project Keen Distress, in which they will focus on avant-garde sounds and glitched rhythms. The stronger part of the genre will certainly be demonstrated by Launaea, Aksamit (who will perform with Lara Palmer) or Azu Tiwaline, whose sense of rhythm is often a very crazy teaser. There will also be artists such as Chontane, Cranz, Gosha Savage, more underground sounds from Antenes operating on the Brooklyn club scene and L.I.E.S. Erika, who has been involved in the Ectomorph project since the 90s. Two artists from Kiev will also appear at the festival – Syncøpe, who turns her inspirations into an analog-digital mix of abstract, matte techno, and NFNR, who, in addition to moving in the world of electronic music, is also a theater and film composer.

In this multitude of artists, however, one cannot forget about those who have been specializing in playing and creating bass music for years. Teki Latex, a French DJ known for his eclecticism, who likes unusual combinations, will undoubtedly reign supreme, looking for common threads in all varieties of dance music. The b2b sets will feature DJ Bambi Uzi from Łódź and Nova Cheq, who publishes at Hooversound, as well as Glassz representing the Wrocław scene and Mad Miran, curator of last year’s Boiler Room Festival in Amsterdam. An interesting combination also seems to be the juxtaposition of artists ALLG and Gummi. What they have in common is a love for low frequencies, so it promises to be a pure mix of genres from bass to techno.

The festival had already announced a pool of artists whose achievements encouraged people to reserve the days of June 23 and 24 in Białystok. And they were: