The sixth edition of the Monopol Music Festival (MMF), a musical documentary film program and concerts that is presented as part of the content of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, and which will be held between March 22 and 31 , will feature this year about twenty documentaries, nine concerts, showcases and a meeting between writers and journalists who address the history of contemporary music from their work.
Enric Montefusco, leader of the extinct Standstill, will open the musical section with a concert at The Paper Club (Calle Remedios 10 – Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) on Saturday, March 23, in which he will premiere his imminent album, Diagonal, for the first time. which will be published on April 5. The Catalan artist will open the MMF together with the Tenerife band GAF & La Estrella de la Muerte.
Víctor Ordóñez, director of the MMF, and Luis Miranda, director of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, presented the contents of this sixth edition, and of a programmatic line that continues to be faithful to the essence of its founding principles, the is committed to quality and avant-garde musical projects, with special emphasis on emerging figures, but also offering top-line artists, demanded by a demanding public who will be able to enjoy the visit of projects that have never visited the islands or whose absence for many years they needed an immediate update.
In this section we find Nacho Vegas, who will present his latest record work, Violética (Marxophone, 2018) on March 29 , who returns to the Canary Islands almost 15 years after his last concert in Gran Canaria in October 2004, and will do so accompanied from the promising voice of Alice Wonder; or Enric Montefusco, who will come to present his project alone for the first time.
The concerts will complete the popular open-air event in the Plaza de Santa Ana (Saturday, March 30, free admission), in which Mucho, a project by Martí Perarnau IV, will share the stage and which also comes presenting a new album, Is there anyone in House? ; the Gran Canaria band Lajalada, led by Belén Doreste (Bel Bee Bee); the Dutch combo EUT, a group with an extraordinary projection and that exudes a kind of synth pop that does not dispense with danceable guitars and that MMF is betting on in its first festival in Spain; and Delafé, with showman Óscar D’Aniello pulling like never before from a repertoire that is part of the best of Spanish pop of this century. The local band Ant Cosmos closes the list of artists in the musical section.
As for the screenings, the selection also contains the variables that have made the MMF an inescapable meeting for those who love the two arts that meet each year at the Monopol Cinemas: excellent film productions with music as the main argument, in which mythical biographies are reflected and movements of the most alternative scene are captured.
In this sixth edition, the documentaries –which will begin screening on Friday, March 22- include titles such as Black is Black , reverse pull ups, which details the brilliant success of Los Bravos, a seminal Iberian rock band; In Songs of a Revolution Nacho Vegas, who will present the documentary, travels through popular music the corners, towns and villages from which the proletarians who rose up in Asturias during the 1934 Revolution came out, singing popular songs that still remain in the memory; Eat that Question is, as a collage of interviews and television appearances, an approximation to the character who was hiding behind Frank Zappa, and who draws a cohesive profile of the artist in his own words;Conny Plank: Potential of Noise is the musical and human portrait of Conny Plank, the visionary producer who pushed the German avant-garde of the early 1970s (Kraftwerk, Neu !, Harmonia, Cluster, Guru Guru et al) from his farm in Cologne. converted into a recording studio; Lawrence of Belgravia introduces the eccentric ex-leader of the sumptuous Felt and Eighties Denim, a misunderstood genius, artist cursed by definition, one of the most eccentric and particular composers of the indie generation; On the Sky relives the golden years of funk and disco from the bowels of one of its main references, the group Sly Stone & The Family; with I am the Rumbawe delve into the life and work of the king of the genre, the late Peret; Suede: The Insatiable Ones , a film directed by Mike Christie, tells the story of the English group that pioneered britpop; Zurda discovers us one of the pioneers of punk in Spain, founder of groups such as Escorbuto Crónico or Guerrilla Urbana, references of the genre in La Laguna; Queercore tells the story of a countercultural movement that arose to combat gay gentrification and punk homophobia in the mid-1980s, an anarchic and transgender scene whose message continues to war; Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington DC(1980-90) visits the heroic stage of Dischord Records, the Washington DC label, and the hardcore community that built it. A critical documentary through bands like Minor Threat, Teen Idles and SOA, Black Market Baby and Faith; Callas dives into the turbulent existence of the bel canto diva; Cassette shows musicians and music lovers like Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Daniel Johnston, among others, talking about the humble cassette as an instrument of romantic conquest, as a way to distribute underground music, and of course, as a training format. musical both for them and for a whole generation; I Am ThorHe investigates in a peculiar group, a kind of Schwarzenegger of hard rock who wanted to combine bodybuilding, metal rock and mystic-Nordic vaudeville in a single band / figure. Thor could have been the new Kiss; the Slades of Valhalla; Milford Graves Full Mantis is shot by two students of the musician and percussionist Milford Graves and introduces us to the complex world of beliefs and spiritual visions of what was one of the forerunners of free jazz in the sixties; Mabangi / MIA brings together two decades of home videos that reveal MIA’s life, first as a refugee in London fleeing the war in Sri Lanka and then as a pop music star; Shut Up & Play the Pianoit is a journey filled with megalomania and piano music by Chilly Gonzales, from the punk scene in Berlin to the philharmonic orchestras; In the Middle of Norway addresses the double life of Jorge Martí Aguas, lead singer of The Red Room, who, when winter comes, leaves his musical side aside to return to Norway, where he lives with his wife Ingrid Øverås, affected by a chronic illness -Myalgic encephalomyelitis. To bridge the pay gap between Spain and Norway, Jorge works night shifts at a center for Alzheimer and dementia patients; The Will Have to Kill us First; that takes us back to 2012, when jihadists took over northern Mali and banned all forms of music. They destroyed radio stations and threatened with death those who dared to challenge them; and Whitney, a documentary by Oscar-winning Kevin MacDonald that sheds light on the troubled life of the late Whitney Houston.
A musical and film program that will also have extra activities closer, more intimate and of great value to the viewer, in which artists related to the tapes or concerts will intervene or to present a documentary, such as Nacho Vegas, which will attend on 29 March to the projection of Songs of a Revolution as a prologue player; Enric Montefusco, who will present his book Carne de Cañón , together with a special acoustic showcase; Jorge Martí, singer of The Red Room, who in addition to introducing us to the band’s documentary, In the Middle of Norway , will star in another of the MMF’s musical moments; or the group Legacy of Peret, Peret’s grandchildren, who will also perform songs by the Catalan artist during the screening ofI am the Rumba.
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