The 27th Ring Ring, an international festival of new music, will be held in Belgrade, at the Jewish Cultural Center “Oneg Shabbat” and Studio 6 of Radio Belgrade, from May 17 to 21, 2023.
The Ring Ring festival continues on the path it has been on since 1996, giving space and time to contemporary, different and unconventional music. Towards the end of its third decade of living, as well as working on enriching the Serbian cultural life with rare content, the 27th Ring Ring brings a lot of new, fresh ideas and current events from around the world.
The program will include nine concerts by local and foreign musicians and various collaborations and projects. Artists from Germany, Japan, Denmark, Slovenia, USA, Iran, Croatia, Argentina, Sweden, Holland, Austria, Serbia and France will perform, among them some of the veterans of the European and world scene of improvised, experimental, free-jazz and avant-garde acoustic, electronic and acoustic-electronic music, such as Otomo Yoshihide, Thomas Lehn or Franz Hautzinger, who themselves have already performed at the “Ring Ring” festival as part of other bands and projects.
The festival will also host excellent musicians of the younger generation, who are just developing their careers or appearing in some completely new projects. Such bands with mostly younger artists (some younger than 30) include: TiTiTi, /kry, IRK Performing Reflection, and Jesper Nordberg Trio, who will release their debut album “TRIO” on the opening day of the 27th Ring Ring.
The concert of the young Croatian artist Ivar Roban Križić and his group IRK Performing Reflection is realized through the EFFEA project, another European project involving the “Ring Ring” Association.
Chris Pitsiokos also belongs to the young generations, whom we will listen to in a duo with three decades older Otomo.
Besides allowing its audience to listen live to representatives of contemporary music from various parts of the world, Ring Ring also gives a nice space to local performers. This time, we will listen to the band Muzika iz unutrašnjosti, which in the last two years has been honing its artistic expression with regular performances in the famous Belgrade club “Ciglana”. Also, for the fourth time at the festival we will listen to the Serbian pianist Marina Džukljev, an increasingly recognized name on the international scene, now in an exciting collaboration with the Slovenian trio TiTiTi.
Collaborations are precisely one of the characteristics of the Ring Ring festival, both ad hoc and some quite fresh, but also long-lasting ones, such as we will listen to on May 20 at the concert of Thomas Len and Marcus Schmickler, an analog-digital electronic duo that is active since the first meeting, in 1998, while both artists cherish their numerous other, separate projects.
Perhaps the most intriguing collaboration that will mark this year’s program is a combination of the experimental rock band PoiL and the artist Junko Ueda, a famous interpreter of Japanese medieval epics with the satsuma biwa instrument, and the Buddhist vocal tradition shomyo. The French-Japanese project PoiL Ueda released the self-titled album in early March, and now their schedule is full of concerts around the world, attracting more and more attention from the audience, media and festival organizers.
The ticket price for a single evening (from May 18 to 21) is 800 dinars. The price of the complete set of festival tickets is 2,800 dinars. Admission to the first evening (May 17) was free and required advance registration in order to be placed on the list. Given that the capacity of Studio 6 is limited, and a large number of interested people have already registered, the organizer informs the audience that they cannot accommodate more people, except for those who have purchased a complete set of tickets.
Tickets can be purchased via the Tickets.rs website or via email ringringfestival@gmail.com.
The festival is organized by the Ring Ring Association and the Music Information Centre of Serbia, and is supported by: City of Belgrade, EFFEA/European Union, Goethe Institute, Austrian Cultural Forum, Zavod Sploh, Jewish Cultural Center “Oneg Shabbat” and RTS/Radio Belgrade 3.
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