KrakowInformer.com

Cracow Screen Festival 

     Cracow Screen Festival may me the youngest of Krakow music festivals, but it seems that this is the way a good music festival should be. For rock’n’roll should always be the screaming, energetic and naughty little kid that behaves inappropriately in all those dull and serious places: and thanks to it taking place in the middle of the Krakow Old Town, the Cracow Screen Festival does just that. One more thing, though: by saying rock’n’roll we didn’t mean the musical genre – rather the general approach – for the Cracow Screen Festival is a pretty eclectic affair.

The Cracow Screen Festival was conceived in 2007 as an event that would start the ‘Festival Season’ in Poland. Its date was therefore set to the first days of May (a ‘long weekend’ as the Polish call it, with holidays on May 1^st and May 3^rd). One of the first problems about it was… the name: for a long time now the Krakow authorities have used ‘Krakow’ instead of ‘Cracow’ as an international name of the city – and it seems most foreigners are used to it. But still, the organizers insisted on a Cracow Screen Festival instead of a Krakow one.

As for the second word of the name of the Cracow Screen Festival – and the disturbing suggestion that the performances might actually be played out on a screen instead of live – we guess this is more about ‘Old Krakow as a Screen’ sort of thing: the concerts are accompanied with visualizations on the Old Town edifices as well as for example cash machine screens or TVs in the Krakow Shopping Malls.

The Krakow Screen Festival takes place on two of the city’s historical squares: the Plac Szczepanski (surrounded by the Old Theatre, the Palace of Arts and the Bunker of Arts) and the Plac Jana Nowaka-Jezioranskiego (the one with the Krakow Train Station and the Galeria Krakowska Shopping Mall), which are close enough to go from one concert to another on foot, yet far enough for the music to sound clear.

And now for the most important thing: the music. The Cracow Screen Festival covers several music genres from good old rock’n’roll to electronic music. The first (and, so far, only) edition of the festival in 2008 was highlighted by the elegant artrocker Brian Ferry and the trance music legend Underworld. Among other international stars of the Cracow Screen Festival were the energetic Juliette and the Licks, lead by the energetic ‘Natural Born Killer’ Juliette Lewis, cirKus – a Stockholm-based project formed by some of the members of Massive Attack, alternative blues-hip-hop band Mattafix and the depressive yet beautiful sounding quintet from Belgium called… Krakow. As for the Polish stars, they included Wilki – one of Poland’s most popular pop-rock band, the young alternative punk-rockers from the Cool Kids of Death, the difficult-to-pigeonhole-yet-always-popular Pudelsi or the electronic musician and producer Smolik (once dubbed ‘the Polish Moby’).

The 2009 edition of the Cracow Screen Festival will take place on May 15th and 16th, with an opening event a week earlier, on May 8th. Musicians such as Travis and Notwist have already been confirmed.