Q&A by Artists
Jakob Lindhagen & Vargkvint:
You’ve been organising this festival since 2017, and even did it during the lockdown years. Can you tell us about your drive to keep this festival going, even when the odds are against you?
On the one hand, the last two years developed very suddenly into an existential challenge for us, both as musicians with an affinity for the stage and as organising curators. On the other hand, we once again came to the realisation of which aspects of discipline and freedom ultimately remain essential in music.
For our creative work, the most important elements were, are, and remain encounter and exchange with like-minded colleagues and friends. In 2020, we were on the verge of giving up on all our projects, including the Q3Ambientfest. But apparently no one wanted to really believe or even accept that, because baffled enquiries and requests soon started coming in from our immediate environment – quasi, locally – and from around the world. Parallel to that we were fortunate enough to receive heartening encouragement from the city of Potsdam, without whom we most certainly would not have been able to manage everything. So we want to take this opportunity to give a big warm thank you to the Potsdam cultural institutions and their farsighted cultural-political strategy which recognised the potential of our musical movement and its direction early on and for their ongoing support from our second edition in 2018 until today.
Especially under the paralysing effects of the pandemic, we were understandably surprised and very happy to be given the chance to put ourselves to a new creative test. And somehow we were also suddenly “in our element” as we faced the question of how our festival could be transposed into the virtual sphere in order that it could take place. So we asked the artists, tentatively, if they could each send us an exclusive music video in which they played a live set. The reactions were overwhelmingly positive, such that in the end we ourselves felt encouraged to record a set at a venue, including a spontaneous improv with the lovely Laure Boer.
So that’s how the Q3A was finally able to take place in the lockdown years, and since then this video approach has become a permanent part of the program – “to make a virtue out of necessity”… In this way, we are able to integrate interested artists for whom it’s not so easy to come to Potsdam and show the recorded sets alongside some music films on the big screen. That something like this is even possible is due naturally not least to a high level of flexible ability and trust from our colleagues, and it just shows once again this strengthening mutual will that makes an understanding relationship beyond the bounds of the pandemic possible in the first place. As once walled-off GDR children, we remember times when, despite all difficulties and impossibilities, solutions wanted to be found and were found.
Can you tell us about the process of curating the line-up?
With the curation, we focus primarily on music projects that are searching for an original personal language. It is of secondary concern whether the protagonists are already established artists or still emerging experimental projects. Both are important to us! A “healthy mix of both” is for us the golden mean, and it’s been nice to see that some of our now better-known colleagues took their first brave steps upon our stage. So we’re also interested in, especially in these early exploratory stages, the trying out of new playing techniques and sounds.
Of course we also like to – as we said – invite more well-known colleagues, for they too, and not seldom, bring new input, change the perspective on processes that have begun to gather dust. Still – as in all genres of art – established artists unfortunately always bring with them the danger of routine, and we are, above all, about keeping our eyes and ears open, to illuminate with interest and attention the growing things and changing processes. We have not lost the hope that through all these different and at the same time authentic musical approaches, we can also possibly better understand and creatively reflect the larger relationships that shape, change, and in their contradictions hold together our world.
We hope that our approach comes across, so to speak, so that everyone feels encouraged to get in touch with us, to explore ideas and visions and, in the best case scenario, to transfer the artistic results of this process onto the stage.