The seventh instalment of Futuresounds – Adelaide’s own, electronic music festival – brings to the forefront the breadth and depth of variety within the local electronic scene.
“Something we’ve always wanted to highlight is what a rich scene and such a varied scene of electronic music we have happening in Adelaide,” Futuresounds co-founder Patrick Lang says.
In 2017, the event presents a massive line-up of acts at Crown & Sceptre to celebrate and demonstrate Adelaide’s colourfully diverse, electronic music culture. “You’re going to see three different stages with upwards of 25-plus local acts right across the genre spectrum of electronic music,” Patrick says.
“We have everything from full live bands to solo performers and we tend to split them off into their own stages.”
By highlighting the range of talent within the local scene, Futuresounds leaves almost no style or form unplumbed, featuring acts from sub-genres such as electro-pop, bass, house, ambient and dance.
Featured acts include Hunt, Auguste, Mio, Only Objects, Eraser Description and Fugue State.
Apart from showcasing terrific homegrown talent, Patrick also works to overhaul electronic music’s public image, which he says is undergoing a crisis of misperception. “It’s something we came up against when we started putting on shows was that everyone had this typical idea in their head that when you think of electronic music, you think of dance music,” he explains.
“We love dance music, but we also love songs and songwriters and we noticed there were all these people coming up who were utilising electronic means to get their songs out.”
Futuresounds also places an emphasis on aesthetics and providing an encapsulating sensory experience for its festival audiences.
For this year’s event, Patrick says they are taking full advantage of the available space at Crown & Sceptre to transform different areas into their own worlds. “It’s a really unique venue in that being a heritage-listed pub it’s got a bunch of really unusual spaces in it and it’s a really good chance to activate a few spaces that aren’t commonly used for live performance,” he says.
“There’s the more traditional band room, but we’ve also repurposed a couple of different spaces to create really unique environments. We’re trying to make sure each of the stages are dressed in an interesting way. It makes you feel like when you step into one of the areas, you’re stepping into a different world.”
Futuresounds VII Festival takes place as part of Umbrella: Winter City Sounds at Crown & Sceptre (Adelaide) 15 July.
