The complete program of this year’s edition of the BAM (Barcelona Musical Action), Music at La Mercè and Living Culture Action, which will take place in the city of Barcelona from September 23 to 26 in various areas of the city.
Framed, as always, within the main festival of the city of Barcelona, the performances will take place in a long list of spaces in the city, with more than one hundred performances. For them you will have to book tickets through the La Mercè website –as of September 14–. Those tickets will be reserved, like last year, for spaces and not for individual performances.
We could extend a lot about the concerts, the stages, etc., but instead we will do a summary so that you get an idea of what you will be able to find during the four days of parties. We start with Music at La Mercè, which includes a total of forty concerts at the Greek Theater, Jardins del Doctor Pla and Armengol, Plaça Major de Nou Barris, Moll de la Fusta, Escenario Mediterràniament at the Plataforma Marina del Fôrum and the Teixonera-Vall d’Hebron sports complex. Oques Grasses, Joana Serrat & The Great Canyoners, Buhos, 31FAM, Queralt Lahoz, Stay Homas, The Crab Apples, Pau Vallvé, Renaldo & Clara, La Dame Blanche, Los Enemigos, Cristian de Moret, Senior and El Cor will be performing. Brutal, Power Burkas, Clara Peya, Judit Neddermann, Nueva Vulcano, Núria Graham, Carlota Flâneur, Carmen Linares placeholder image, Mariola Membrives and many more.
Regarding the BAM, which now has the direction of the cooperative of cultural services L’Afluent, will be more than thirty concerts that represent the alternative face of the festival. The venues are Plaça Joan Coromines, Antiga Fàbrica Estrella Damm, Moll de la Fusta Besòs and Moll de la Fusta Llobregat. Inside the BAM poster we can see Long live Belgrade, Rusowsky, Black rat, Affection, Hydrogenesis, Planningtorock, Sandra Monfort, Ed Maverick, An Uncontrollable Beast, Cabiria, Samantha Hudson, Bea Fight, The Hungarian, Issam, Juicy Bae, Santa Salut, Free Sis Mafia, Fulu Music, Wind Atlas, Bikôkô, Ulldeter O Lidia Damunt among others.
Now we only have to talk about Living Culture Action, which creates its poster from a participatory process from listening to more than a thousand proposals through various groups in the city. In your selection we will find proposals such as those of Marçal Calvet and Clara Poch, Alavedra, Tilde, White Solar Dog, Suzanna, Las Marikarmen, Flamenco Queer, Raquel Lúa, Lil Russia, Mechero, Kenya O Prince Osito & The Cleftones.
The program has more than fifty percent of formations led by women and not binaries. Likewise, the commitment to emerging talent is maintained with programs featuring the city’s music schools and proposals such as Sona 9 and El Brot. On the other hand, we remind you that some concerts can be seen live through betevé and BcnCultura. So if you don’t have a chance to stop by the concerts, you can always watch them from a distance. In any case, we recommend that you update the information in the Barcelona.cat website
To complete this article, we have interviewed two of those in charge of L’Afluent, new artistic directors of the BAM, specifically to Aïda Camprubí already Sergi Egea.
For those who don’t know you, what is the L’Afluent cultural services cooperative?
(Sergi) We are a cooperative that was born in 2017 as a result of establishing a whole series of projects around the Vol del Poble Nou room in Barcelona. From the first moment we already knew that having a concert hall was a very complicated activity, and more this last year and a half, that is why we knew that we had to do other things to be able to survive, so we established other projects related to the education, production and curation of music.
I have read that this year you consider as a year of transition between what the BAM was to date and the new orientation that you want to give it in the future. What exactly is this new orientation?
(Sergi) Our starting point is from the point of view of music fans and having lived through this festival for many years and wanting to add different layers to it in addition to the musical programming. We see it as an opportunity to be able to make politics beyond programming concerts. In this sense, we propose the decentralization of some scenarios so that they coexist with other more peripheral neighborhoods of the city, and we also want to take into account the agents who are programming throughout the year and who during these days have to close because the city is full of music. These are two of the lines of work that we have not been able to start this year, mainly due to the time factor since the contest was resolved in June and we had to prepare the poster in a month. That is why our project has been able to develop only in the programming and, in this sense, there will be much more presence of groups that usually have not had an opportunity and here, Aïda can contribute more.
(Aïda) Being a collective we have a very broad vision of the musical spectrum and of all the styles that make it up and that is why we wanted there to be a representation of many different musical styles, but ensuring that the people who carry them out are not the obvious people who are usually onstage. For example, if right now in urban music one of the genres that are most booming is the drillWe will try to ensure that the people on stage are a group of either women or non-binary people who work both from an ethnic group or from a feminist perspective. This year for example we will have a lot of deconstructed club, which is a stylistic branch that began in 2013 and to which we are going to give a lot of presence. We will also work with the large number of local scenes that there are and we will also do it with our neighbors. And we are not referring only to the Peninsula, we are also referring to Italy, France, North Africa and Latin American countries with which we are neighbors on a linguistic level. This is what we have tried to put on this BAM poster. Our vision above all is intersectional, that is, it is a vision that not only works on gender equality, but also works from an anti-racist stance, from an anti-class stance and from an LGTBIQ + position and tries to take into account all these identities.
You propose that the figure of the headliner does not exist. Do you think that it is a figure that has no place in a festival made with public money and that it is also obsolete?
(Aïda) As we have told you before, we work from horizontality and the headliner is a somewhat patriarchal structure, understanding it as a vertical structure in which there is someone who has power and exercises it over the rest. In that sense, we want to be horizontal and for all bands to have the same importance and for each one to come and see what they like later. The stages on this occasion will be organized on a stylistic level and that is why each stage, every day, has an idea in the representation, either of a scene, or of a musical current, so that the public can come and enjoy three concerts Tell them a story … So this year we will have punk, rock, rap …
I also see that you highlight the presence of Hidrogenesse on the lineup as if a bit of justice was finally done to them because they had never played at BAM or La Mercé.
(Sergi) When we started the programming work, we started to look for which bands had already played at the BAM before and our surprise was to see that Hidrogenesse had never played. It was something that we did not believe and we had to call them to confirm that they had never done it. The truth is that it was very strange to us that such an iconic and representative group as they are did not have this award, so to speak, from the city.
(Aïda) We are also very excited that that day before Hidrogenesse a group like Centauros plays, which is a band that is the generational continuation of Hidrogenesse. It is a queer group that makes beautiful, fun, dancing pop with very sharp lyrics and it is also a collaborative band that invites singers from the underground scene to get on stage. And just before there is Cabiria, a project that is more disco, but also draws on that electropop and that is more novel so, in a certain way, it is a kind of representation of what the history of this city is.
It is inevitable to ask yourself about the way in which the pandemic has conditioned you when programming.
(Aïda) We were very interested in making a BAM itinerary that invited the public to travel around the city and get to know neighborhoods but, of course, when there was a pandemic, mobility had to be reduced and that is why we decided to make thematic blocks so that people who are interested in knowing a specific style have that day to be able to do so. But boy, in the future when there is no pandemic our intention is to create different itineraries.
Do you know how it is planned to solve the problems that occurred last year with the gauges? I say this because, although all the seats were assigned by invitation, then many empty chairs were left.
(Sergi) This is an issue that worries us a lot, but it is beyond our powers since it depends on the different teams of the ICUB and the city council. It is true that they have assured us that there will be no empty seats like last year, and that they have designed a much more agile reservation system and with which they hope that this will not happen since the capacity will be variable and will be reviewed continuously.
Well, finally, I am going to ask you to recommend six artists who may not be very well known, but who cannot be missed in this edition of BAM.
(Sergi) I’m going to say Wind Atlas because for me it is a group that deserves all the respect in the world because its members are music activists who take risks in everything they do.
(Aïda) I would highly recommend to all the people who have their doubts about trap and urban music that they go to see Free Sis Mafia, which is that feminist group in Madrid that is doing drill.
(Sergi) There is a proposal that is Ed Maverick who is a well-known Mexican boy in his country, but this is the first time he has come and I am very curious to meet.
(Aïda) Ed Maverick has collaborated with C. Tangana as well as La Húngara who is an artist who seems to us of social justice that she is on the poster because she has nineteen albums and a very extensive career and many people like Bea Pelea or Samantha Hudson, who they are going to share the stage with her that day, they cite her as a direct influence. And then Sergi we have Antonia Jiménez for the first time.
(Sergi) Yes, one of the best flamenco guitarists in the world
(Aïda) And also queer and don’t miss it because she is going to present her show “Entre prima” in Barcelona for the first time.
(Sergi) And finally ISSAM, who is a Moroccan boy who was the first ragman to sign a contract with a multi in Europe, with Universal France.
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