Since 1995, Alanis Morissette has been one of the most influential singer-songwriter-musicians in contemporary music, earning her vast critical praise and seven Grammy awards through deeply expressive performance.
Grammy Award winning recording artist and songwriter, Leon Bridges, brings to the stage all elements of his career spanning experiences, inspirations, and award winning catalog of songs with every performance. From working as a dishwasher and busking on the streets of his beloved Fort Worth, TX to being signed to a major label and performing at the White House for Former President Barack Obama within a two-year span, Leon has continued to push the boundaries of his career.
Jamie xx’s music speaks in rangy textures of soul, gospel, hip-hop and every mutation of the purity of house music, twisting its way into a new sub-genre since 1986. With traces of break-beat and clipped techno throughout his rhythm tracks, Jamie seems to hit a tangent somewhere between rave's blaring air-horns, a riff from an old, dusted-off New Romantic curiosity and the sweep and ballast of a classical string solo. Afflicted by a fastidious, perfectionist approach to making music, today he has become one of the major DJs at the sophisticated end of the global nightlife spectrum.
The Guerrilla Girls are anonymous artist activists who use disruptive headlines, outrageous visuals and killer statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture. They believe in intersectional feminism and human rights for all. With interventions and exhibitions all over the world, their art has been shown up and down the totem pole reaching esteemed establishments such as the Tate Modern, Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), and all under one self-proclaimed motto: ”Do one thing. If it works, do another. If it doesn’t, do another anyway. Keep chipping away!”
Since they broke through into the Australian music scene more than a decade ago, Tash Sultana has been nothing less than a musical force.The gender-fluid multi-instrumentalist, producer, singer-songwriter, engineer and entrepreneur has carved out every step in their musical journey over the last 15 years, which has taken them from performing open night mics all over the country, busking the streets of Melbourne to releasing platinum records, accumulating billions of streams, nominations across the globe, to winning awards and selling hundreds of thousands of concert tickets worldwide.
Made up of Ishmael Butler (“Butterfly”), Craig Irving (“Doodlebug”) and Mary Ann Vieira (“Ladybug Mecca”), the trio Digable Planets burst onto the music scene in 1993 with their Grammy-winning single“Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”,carving out a unique style of jazz-informed Hip Hop. Today after over 30 years of melding Jazz samples, and complex rhymes, touching on everything from the nuances of city life (Where I’m From) to abortion rights (La Femme Fetal), the band continue to cast a wide-ranging, genre-bending influence, leaving an indelible mark on music.
Bob Moses the Vancouver-bred, Grammy nominated duo consisting of Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance brings a sound meshing guitar licks, a moody smolder and a dash of dance-floor ambience with lyrical depth and classic songwriting to be performed live at FORMAT.
JR is a French artist who has the largest art gallery in the world by exhibiting freely in the streets. Using his own artistic practice as inspiration, JR created the Inside Out Project - a participatory art platform that helps communities worldwide make a statement by displaying large-scale black and white portraits in public spaces. The Inside Out Photobooth will be at the festival, inviting everyone to take their portrait and see it pasted in a large mural that will come to life throughout the weekend.
Poolside returns to the stage as a live band for the first time since 2019. Their signature Daytime Disco sound is elevated to new heights by a formidable 7-piece ensemble comprised of accomplished veteran players who have left indelible marks on indie rock and electronic music over the course of the last two decades.
Ragnar Kjartansson
Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson draws on the entire arc of art in his performative practice. The history of film, music, theater, visual culture and literature find their way into his video installations, durational performances, drawing and painting, as he attempts to convey sincere emotion through pretending and staging.
The National
Throughout their twenty-three year career indie-alternative band The National have sold two million albums worldwide met with critical acclaim and established themselves as mainstays of arenas and festivals with sold-out performances and headlining slots around the world. The National consists of Matt Berninger, Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner, Scott Devendorf and Bryan Devendorf.
A learner, Brooklyn based Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they), grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. The author of several books, she is also and adjunct instructor, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and has been the recipient of multiple artist awards including the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.
Franc Moody is a collective made up of countless musicians, guest vocalists, producers and animators led by two ringleaders and songwriters: Ned and Jon. A curious and captivating London duo, their songs feature elements ranging from salt shakers and mugs, dripping radiators, to the sound of someone zipping their flies, and their own families playing strings, casting tunes one could label ‘contemporary funk’, awash with electronic inspiration, human touches, and throbbing grooves.
UK born and based Jeremy Deller studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He has been producing projects over the past two decades which have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. He began making artworks in the early 1990s, often showing them outside conventional galleries.
Sudan Archives is a lovelorn songwriter, powerful vocal performer, and experimental beatmaker. Captivating audiences at festivals around the world with her hybrid sound, the artist first emerged as an avant-garde violinist channeling her playing through loop pedals and has gone on to reveal a magnetic take on modern R&B that’s unlike anything else you’ve heard.
The music these two brothers make evokes expansive plains and rough wildernesses, saguaros and surfs, spaghetti westerns and Morricone soundtracks, Lynch and Jarmusch. With their guitars they travel through landscapes haunted by vaqueros, cancioneros, wanderers, fugitives, lovers, family—and whatever ghosts their listeners bring to the music. Together, they generate what Estevan calls a “deeper, darker energy” defined by complex arrangements, sophisticated playing, and most of all their very close relationship.
Currently one of the hottest DJ’s and producers in today’s underground electronic music scene, the eccentric, green Mohawk wearing Green Velvet is a music industry legend & trailblazer who bears a constant presence in the industry since his launch of Relief Records in 1993. At electronic music festival and sets all over the world, his presence is almost inescapable, as crowds sing along to his most notable songs: Bigger than Prince, Flash, La La Land, Lazer Beams, Live Stream, Preacher Man, Shake and Pop, Sheeple, Suga, and Voicemail.
Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist. She builds bridges between disparate communities through performance and immersive installation to counteract fear with a collective sense of empowered radical acceptance. She has shown at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Times Square Arts, The High Line, Artpace, and festivals such asRiver to River and South by Southwest. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, House of Trees, and poet Anne Carson among others.
The California-born, Texas-raised artist Madeline Edwards has a unique ability to transcend musical boundaries and blend of jazz, soul, gospel and country music, experiencing a remarkable rise, performing on some of the genre’s biggest stages and earning widespread accolades since breaking onto the scene at the 55th CMA Awards.
'Heart of Brick' is a theatrical dance show conceived by serpentwithfeet, featuring new music from his upcoming album. Choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and directed by Wu Tsang.
Arriving on the scene in 2014 with her mixtape Laugh Now, Die Later, Kari has created her own lane of southern rap infused with psych, gospel, pop and hip hop weaved with her thoughtful and playful lyrics.
Amos Cochran is an Emmy nominated composer, musician, and sound artist based in America whose work has been showcased at the Sundance, Berlin and Toronto Film Festivals returning for the second time at FORMAT after two showcase performances last fall.
NW Arkansas local Danielle Hatch is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the female body's relationship to the built environment, notions of artificiality and power structures, through site specific installations, sculptures and performances. Utilizing materials related to home-making and home building she explores what lies underneath the surface of domesticity. She has a BA in architecture from Wellesley College and an MFA in Spatial Studies from UC-Santa Barbara.
Myron Elkins didn’t set out to become a full-time musician. After graduating from high school, the then 17-year- old instead became a welder in his hometown of Otsego, Michigan and had every intention of making that his career. However, fate had other plans. Now, at 21 years old, he’s poised to become one of music’s most intriguing new artists, crafting sharp observations informed by his working-class upbringing, infusing his music with rich personal experience.
Jon Rafman was born in 1981 in Montreal, Canada. His artistic practice spans film, sculpture, photography and installation, incorporating the rich vocabulary of virtual worlds to create poetic narratives that critically engage with the present. His works have been featured in prominent international exhibitions, including the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and many more.
Mandrake - Part of the Mayan Warrior collective, founder and captain of the legendary M.N. Roy club in Mexico City. He will take us on a journey with a unique sound that can tap into the most demanding audiences, a perfect combination of ominous elegance, that goes from deep sounds to maximum joy and sci-fi pleasures in elements of Indi Dance, Techno, and New Wave. He is one of the key players in the wake of the Mexican electronic scene of the last decade. Mandrake is at his most comfortable providing sounds for dance floor killers all night long.
German electronic music duo Digitalism - made up of Jens Moelle and İsmail "Isi" Tüfekçi accidentally paired up in 2004 in a Hambourg record store. Today - the humble duo are making waves across Europe - with re-edits from White Stripes ‘Seven Nation Army’ to "Digitalism in Cairo" by The Cure - bringing them to FORMAT for this year’s edition.
After playing the cello at the age of 7, the Bordeaux native Dombrance could have become one of those neurotic solo prodigies who had to take Prozac in order to play in front of the elite. But fortunately, at the blessed age of the first pimples on the T-zone and the silky fuzz above the upper lip, he made his first revolution: he dropped the guitar, under the influence of grunge and Pink Floyd. Even if he doesn't care about politics as much as trigonometry, he understands that making people headbang will be his vocation. So he left Alain Juppé's city to join a sound engineering school in Paris in 1998, just in time to admire "Zizou president" on the Arc de Triomphe.
Uman was born in Somalia and grew up in Kenya. She emigrated to Denmark in her teens and arrived in New York City a decade later, with the new millennium. Uman's varied migrations and encounters with heritage influence her bold gestural work. Geometric fashioning of color and all-over vigor lend a shamanic aura to her pattern-based work. Exuberant, seemingly freestyle markings are influenced by the Arabic calligraphy she studied as a child. Similarly, her distorted self-portraits, talismanic found objects and silhouette image of camels, birds and vessels merge abstraction with figuration, while reflecting her East African desert heritage. Widely traveled and self-trained, Uman's practice explores gender and cultural fluidity through paintings, drawings, sculpture, while remaining spiritually engaged and instinctive.
Toiletpaper is a magazine and creative studio founded and run by artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. Toiletpaper Studio's practice includes creative work and direction for several projects such as multimedia advertising campaigns, editorial projects, product design for brands, capsule fashion collections, exhibitions around the world. In addition, Toiletpaper produces and sells online various products, including posters, calendars, books, furniture, wallpapers, clothes and a brand new beauty line: Toiletpaper Beauty.
Simon Parmeggiani is a San Francisco-based artist and award-winning creative director with a penchant for all that is surreal and uncanny. Under the artist name ‘Neptunian Glitter Ball’, he brings to life a surreal AI world that seamlessly intersects with everyday life, infusing it with fun and unpredictability, while offering a glimpse of what things could look like, in a slightly shifted, glitchy dimension.
To Vivie-Ann, being BLOND:ISH is about more than being a DJ. It’s about energy, breaking down traditional barriers between artist and fan, uniting her community through pillars of purpose on a road paved with music, wellness, eco-activism and tech. Creating sounds that heighten your senses, open your heart and make you feel good, her expert selections are transformative, transcending typical genres, be it live or recorded.
Raised as a Baptist in Greenville, South Carolina, Lane discovered music as an outlet for creative expression at an early age, dropping out of school at 17 to move to Los Angeles, then New York, and then Nashville to launch her songwriting career. She has released three albums -- her 2011 debut Walk of Shame, 2014's All or Nothin' and Highway Queen from 2017. Aside from steadily releasing new music of her own and touring the world, she was featured on "Breaking Up Slowly" on Lana Del Rey's 2021 album Chemtrails Over the Country Club and contributed to Spiritualized's Everything Was Beautiful.
Make no mistake, Johnny Nicholas feels the music, from blues to rock and everything in between. His credentials? Impeccable. Conviction? Immeasurable. And chops? If an instrument’s got strings, keys, or reeds he can play the hell out of it. A consummate songwriter, he is blessed with a warm, toasty growl of a voice that can roll from rumble to croon and back again with seductive ease. As befits a soul who’s spent a lifetime soaking up the flavor of such vibrant music scenes as Ann Arbor, Chicago, South Louisiana and Texas, his music is full-spectrum Americana — a rich gumbo of not just blues, but cajun, swing, folk, and barrelhouse rock ’n’ roll.
Alias behind the collective made up of Eli Subrack and Christope Hamaide-Pierson - return to FORMAT with their adult playground of sorts - providing an interactive oasis of colors and shapes that encourages the audience towards playfulness, respite, and inclusivity.
Sparkle City Disco are Nashville’s premier vinyl disco DJs. The duo - Jonas Stein and David Bermudez - formed one fateful, bourbon-filled night at classic Nashville dive Foobar. Jonas, raised on punk and having toured the world playing in rock bands, had a slightly different upbringing than his counterpart David, whose schooling forbade dancing. The two did, however, share the desire to spin classic vinyl disco '45s, and the pair cut their teeth DJ'ing every Friday night at Foobar until their popularity demanded they take the show on the road.
The Disc-o-lypso Crew brings forth their fresh blend of tropical sounds with a carnival energy - stirring up an invigorating jamboree on the dancefloor. Expect an intoxicating tropical melting pot of funk, soca, disco and afrobeat with a sprinkling of house to keep you on your toes.
Sir Woman is the new project from Wild Child / Glorietta singer Kelsey WIlson. The 9-piece Soul/RnB ensemble combines retro funk, sublime grooves, and Gospel vocals that has helped make them "Band of the Year" at the 2023 Austin Music Awards, and pack concert halls all over the country.
E+C: Esrawe + Cadena, with over 25 years of experience and an extensive and diverse list of clients and projects in Mexico, North, Central and South America, is more than a highly creative strategic-design-firm; We think of ourselves as a real multidisciplinary workshop that brings together design expertise, market experience, solid research, analysis and good old-fashioned creative talent. A Conceptual Laboratory offering total –Emotional Design– solutions through visual strategies for effective and unique product positioning and holistic design solutions.
Angel White is a singer/songwriter from Dallas, Texas whose music blends R&B, Pop, and Western influences in a new and unprecedented way. Spending his formative years busking on the streets of Deep Ellum, Angel learnt the power of his voice and how it could touch the people around him, taking his listeners to specific spaces where western landscapes are equally beautiful and dark in their vastness.
Arushi Jain is a modular synthesist, singer, producer, radio host and engineer whose compositions are inspired by Hindustani classical ragas, explored in an aesthetic that is contemporary and current. With an unorthodox vision of a centuries-old tradition, both electronic and resolutely DIY, ancient ragas from North India are re-imagined with the tools and technologies of a qualified synthesist and technologist - bringing a unique reinterpretation of the artist's two contrasting worlds colliding.
Beyond The Struttopshere is a sonic collaboration between two London - based DJs channelling their considerable musical production experience and boundless love of cosmic, chugging dark disco. Their trademark sound combines resonant chugging basslines with reverbed guitar riffs, syncopated arpeggiators, cosmic synth work, vintage vocal samples, Italo drum fills and psychedelic 303 sequences. Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride!
Through their music and choreography, the Arndt brothers celebrate, destroy, and re- invent their kinship, exploring the boundaries of duality, theatricality and sensuality. Faux Real quickly earned a reputation for their wild and unhinged avant-garde rock performances, and their mix of absurdist Frenglish poetry and Stooge-esque pop. Ever since 2020, Virgil and Elliott have been orchestrating the fantasy meeting between Foxygen and Animal Collective, between indie-pop and 2000’s MTV. Everything, in their bold productions or their way of using keyboards, betrays a fierce desire of modernity, which easily takes the adhesion.
Renowned for their exciting and eclectic DJ performances, Fort Knox Five bends genres as they use a broad range of musical elements in their composition of highly original music blending live instrumentation and electronic. With founding member Steve Raskin as the principal DJ and frontman for the group, these sets have proven to be irresistible to club goers worldwide, rocking parties with infectious grooves that effortlessly move from funk, bass, and hip hop to prime time house and breaks.
Award-winning Austin, Texas-based Hot Club of Cowtown may be the world’s most globe-trotting, effervescent string trio, who’s original songs and joyful retakes of everything from hoedowns to American songbook standards blend the traditional Western swing of the 1940s American southwest with European hot jazz influences of the same era.
Museum Of Love is Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany. Mahoney is best known as the drummer in all-conquering NYC band LCD Soundsystem, while Dennis got his studio chops as an intern and assistant engineer at Plantain Studios in the West Village at a time when DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy was in permanent residence and a whole scene was emerging from Manhattan. It’s worth noting that both Dennis and Pat both come from an art background originally, Mahoney is a sculptor, while Dennis paints, and there’s a strong visual element in the Museum Of Love sound.
Atelier Sisu is an award winning Sydney-based art practice, led by Peruvian sculptor and industrial designer Renzo B. Larriviere and architectural designer and artist Zara Pasfield. The pair works with a multidisciplinary team to create experiential environments, installations and unique sculptural architectural pieces. Atelier Sisu believes in the democratization of art, bringing art out of the gallery and into the everyday public realm; exploring the space between cultural institutions and the urban fabric.
Zach Springer has been selected to design the 2023 FORMAT Festival Gateway! "The Wheelway" intertwines our community's love for biking, creativity, and technology, creating a memorable and inviting first touchpoint for festival attendees.
The blend of interactive kinetic design, engaging light installation, and meaningful tribute to our local biking culture ensures an unforgettable introduction to FORMAT 2023.
DJ mescaleros producing and playing Americana Dance Music – acid-fried, funk-fuelled and 70s cosmic country rock-infused Desert Disco and Outlaw House for modern dancefloors.
Meet Honey Montana (Andres Torres), a Colombian-born DJ who has made a name for himself in the eclectic music scene in New York. With his passion for Latin music and world beats, has created a unique style that seamlessly blends various genres and rhythms to create an unforgettable sound experience. Andres grew up in Colombia, where he was exposed to a wide variety of Latin music styles from a young age. As he grew older, he began to explore world music and discovered a love for blending different cultures and sounds.
Playtronica Berlin Station is a satellite of Playtronica, an international collective that bridges education, art and technology through interactive musical experiences. PBS explores electronic music in a playful and accessible way, using Playtronica sensors, electronic and electro-acoustic instruments.