For the last eleven years, the Costa Azahar has been turned into the most appreciated and animated place of Spain. The holiday-goers, the tourists along with the artists and the locals, all gather in Benicàssim for its beaches, its parties but most of all for the annual celebration of music, art and creativity that is the FIB Heineken (Festival Internacional de Benicàssim).

The FIB Heineken: four days by the end of July where the newest bands, decided to gain fame and experience, are confronted to the best talents from today’s music scene. It’s an experience as magic as it is concrete that leaves the spectator with a marvelous souvenir and a new particular cultural wealth. The notoriety of the bands that played for the past years at the FIB contributes to the fame of the festival. Music fans were already given the chance to see bands and artists like: The Cure, P.J. Harvey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Los Planetas, Pulp, Björk, Blur, Suede, Radiohead, Devendra Banhart, Muse, Placebo, Fatboy Slim, Cycle as well as Moby, Goldfrap and much more. As you would have guessed, you are given you the opportunity to live, dance and sweat to the live music of the best artists of the contemporary pop/rock scene, and to remember the classics yet discovering tomorrow’s hits.

As art is not only music, we want to make sure that every single one of you will find at the FIB what you are looking for. We also organize short-movie contests, dance, theater and sculpture contests so that the FIB becomes for everyone the opportunity to create and express themselves: the two keywords of the festival. The curious and the amateurs may attend to Cultural Expansion classes in order to being sensitized to the various forms of arts.

Coming to the FIB is not only about being passive listening and looking at your favorite band, it’s about being active and participating to that special, creative and inspiring, mood that will motivate the new bands, the older ones and hopefully even you, to take a step forward and to build up to a new culture and sensibility that will lead us to the tomorrow. We do have one request though, it’s that you have fun.

Known for being the most famous festival in France, and surely one of the most influential in the whole Europe, Les Eurockéennes de Belfort have been confirming its reputation every time more for the past 18 years. With a diverse selection of bands and four scenes where already played the most famous artists, the French festival managed to mobilize up to 95 000 people, and is decided to keep going further.

The normally quiet peninsula of Malsaucy, close to Belfort, is turned each year by the beginning of July into THE place where every music fan has to be. This major festival, which started as a little local pop party, now touches a lot of diverse music styles and subcultures such as rock, heavy metal, hip hop, electro, reggae, Latin music, world music and of course… pop. Veterans and beginners coming from all parts of the world gather to represent every genre. As an example we can name, amongst the past participants, artists and bands like The Chemical Brothers, Cake, IAM, Cali, Garbage, Queens of the Stone Age, Bloc Party, Tom Zé, Franz Ferdinand, Sonic Youth, Rage Against The Machine, The Cure, Pixies, Slipknot, Ben Harper, PJ Harvey, David Bowie, Morrissey, Radiohead or Kraftwerk.

The region of Franche-Comté, within the support of Regional Council, will welcome bands and orchestras for this Unpopclassik project to built up this next edition of Les Eurockéennes de Belfort festival.

Such an occasion is not to be lost. Les Eurockéennes de Belfort offers a unique opportunity to have fun and open oneself to the new musical trends. Those who came before keep that souvenir of sweet musical craziness, just like a dream though it’s not, it’s a full immersion in the best of world music.

Organized by ROSA (Dansk Rock Samrâd Saltholmsgade), organization working for the development of rock in Denmark, the Spot festival is dedicated to promote and expand this musical genre in Northern Europe by discovering and looking for the new artists of tomorrow. Music professionals as well as amateurs now consider SPOT, the annual festival set in Aarhus, as a Danish reference and the country’s most influential festival.

SPOT’s goal is to discover new bands with personality, musical integrity and that special something that turns an artist into a success and that helps building up to a new sound. New bands are therefore given the opportunity to test their abilities live and maybe to start a career while the mood is guaranteed by some of the previous participants that gained fame and notoriety on the way. With roots in rock music, the festival has been growing up to open its scenes to new genres and styles so that everyone’s artistic appetite is fulfilled: pop, jazz, R&B and hip hop, folk etc. The most important is to experiment live music and the nine scenes of the festival allow to more or less ninety bands to take a chance and give their best during the ten days that lasts the festival.

One doesn’t come to the SPOT just for the music. With that constant desire to take the Danish music industry to a new level, professionals of the industry give everyone the chance to participate to workshops, classes and lectures.

Preparing the future, the SPOT festival is a gathering point between the artists and the public, the professionals of the industry and the media, all that in the name of music.

The 12th edition of the SPOT will begin by the beginning of June.

The most talked-about festival in Belgium is not a festival like the others. It’s been more than twelve years now that the famous venue of Brussels, the Botanique, has been opening its doors each year to an impressive list of bands and artists to celebrate music. The keywords of the festival are: creation, exploration and eclecticism.

More than forty concerts are spread out in eight days and last year, the 120 bands that played gathered a crowd of more than 30 000 people. The goal of the festival is for tomorrow’s influential artists to make a name and get in touch with their public. In that concern, the bands play in relatively small theaters in order to create an intimate contact between the actors and the people.

For the very last night of the festival, a theme is picked up so that, by buying only one ticket, the music fans can go from concerts to concerts to see all the bands that are relevant to that theme. Besides music, the festival also celebrates disciplines such as dance, photography or tagging and the best DJ´s are there to set the mood.

Amongst the highlights of the previous edition, we can name the worldly famous Björk, Cake and Archive, but also various French-speaking artists such as Venus, De Palmas, Vive La Fête, Brigitte Fontaine, Jane Birkin, Yann Tiersen etc.

Les Nuits Botaniques is not your typical festival, and while it will once again enlighten the nights drawing people from all over Europe towards the capital of Belgium, it will surely immerse its public in the middle of today’s music scene.

It seems that “On My Mind”, title of the first single from their last album “Little Heart Attacks”, brought good luck to The Sunday Drivers. From hits to hits and through many festivals, the band from Toledo turned itself, in very little time, into the most promising band in the European rock scene.

After having conquered the public’s heart on the major European rock scenes, the bands returns to Spain for the next edition of the International Festival of Benicàssim.

Often compared to Blur and Oasis, The Sunday Drivers mix pure rock with sounds from the sixties and seventies to get to a result that is modern and dynamic. Don’t be surprised then if, as you are getting driven by Jero Romero’s versatile low voice, you recognize samples from the mythic Beatles, Bob Dylan or even ABBA.

The band started slowly in the little Spanish town of Toledo. Carlos, the drummer, and his cousin Miguel, bassist, got together along with their schoolmate Fausto, now guitarist, and they started to play at local gigs. Quickly they welcomed Jero who surprised them all with the power and depth of his voice. However, the band really took off when they got invited by music festival Pop Madrid to perform in their party in Moby Dick in 2002.The Sunday Drivers got such a success that they immediately recorded their first self-titled CD in May of the same year. In 2004 they released their second album, “Little Heart Attacks” and the band left Spain for a while to conquer Europe.

Strengthened by their numerous performances, The Sunday Drivers are now part of that closed circle of “live artists”. Get ready because they are the next rock sensation!

“François Trufaut with a rock n’ roll band”, those are the words that rock sensation Iggy Pop used to define Mathias Melzeu, ex film student, and his four musicians when the band did the opening part of his 2002 concert.

More than just a rock band, Dionysos, named after the drunky god, is a concept: a surrealistic world, an acoustic sound where the voice of Mathias wanders between violins and guitars. In a few words, Dionysos is an immersion in a cinematic mood of shadows and fogs with extravagant characters, it’s an invitation to travel between the conscious and the unconscious. The band’s influences vary from Tim Burton to Nirvana, Björk to The Cure.

In 1993, four schoolmates gathered to start a band in Valence (France). They recorded their first studio album, “Happening Songs in 1996 ” right after having welcomed the first and only girl of the band, Elisabeth Ferrer, violinist and keyboarder. Their first radio hit was the song “Wet” but Dionysos gained the media attention thanks to its numerous live performances. Then the band recorded more albums like “Haïku” and other poetic treasures like “Western Sous la Neige” or their last studio album “Monsters in Love”, album that could make envious Lewis Carroll himself.

“Monsters in Love” was produced by John Parish, P.J. Harvey’s producer, and also includes a duet with the band’s favorite The Kills. A travel, that’s exactly what it is, a travel between the extremes, laughter and tears, seriousness and fantasy and to describe his work, Melzeu couldn’t help but referring to movies, comparing the album to Charlie Chaplin’s movie “The Kid”.

They say the place you grow up in influences you for a lifetime, whether that’s it or a God-given talent but what transmitted to Teitur the poetry and sensibility that show through his songs certainly deserves its share of credits.

At 17 years old, Teitur left his homeland of Faroes Islands, a group of Danish islands in between Scotland and Iceland, to make a career in music, sing and write his own lyrics, looking for inspirations by traveling the world. His career starts when he signs a deal with Universal to play guitar and sing in a small band. The musicians go to record and play in Los Angeles, Spain and Denmark and gain a lot of experience, experience that leads Teitur to his very own solo debut, “Poetry & Aeroplanes”.

The album allows him to build himself a solid reputation in Europe as well as in North America, and the acoustic sound of his songs, driven by a suave voice and thoughtful lyrics, manages to conquer his own public. But what’s even more impressive is the talent that the guy shows on stage. The Nordic is very well known by all of the most influential music festivals in the whole world, he went on tour throughout the US and Canada along with folk sensation John Mayers and even got his very own world tour in 2004.

The public, the medias and the industry are affirmative; he is without a doubt one of the most promising new talent in nowadays folk.

Up and ready for new challenges, Teitur is heading back to the studios to record his new record that should see the daylight in Spring 2006.

“Angels fly with wings, we are no angels but we like to fly in total freedom”

In 8 years, the Belgium rock band made his way to success and won the repect of the public and the industry thanks to its suave melodies and its introspective lyrics. The foursome achieved that status after going through a not-so-easy journey.

Venus started in 1997. After being the sensation of Benelux in 1998, the band was given the chance to record their first LP record “Royalsucker” to introduce its sound and instruments (like the violin) to a wider public. Much to that success, they made an unexpected move: while other bands would have quickly wrapped a second album, they toured Belgium with a successful theatrical representation of the album, “Kiss From the Ghost”. While achieving awards such as “Best Rock Act” in the Printemps de Bourges festival, the band released in 1999 the album “Welcome to the Modern Dancehall”, second album pop/rock. Follows “The Man Who Was Already Dead”, a live version of the previous album whose songs have all been rearranged to give to the rock tracks a more acoustic and classical sound.

Venus, whose name was chosen as a tribute to the Velvet underground’s song “Venus In Furs”, then went to tour France and Italy to come back with their last studio album “Vertigone”. A more personal sound that could be compared to Radiohead, but the comparison only restrains the pleasure. “Space, sincerity, time, details, fear and freedom”, here is the genesis of the album according to Marc Huyghens, lead singer of the band.

Venus went back to the studios in September 2005 to prepare their next album. “The Red Room” (temporary title) should be released in spring.

“Therapy, redemption or happiness… check the appropriate answer.”

Los 10 discos esénciales según los Sunday Drivers

		The Beatles - The White Album
2		Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde
3		The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
4		Led Zepplin - Led Zepplin II
5		David Bowie - The rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from Mars
6		The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
7		Ocean Colour Scene - Moseley Shoals
8		Teenage Fanclub - Grand Prix
9		Paul Weller - Stanley Road
10		Wilco Yankee - Yankee, Hotel, Foxtrot

Los 10 discos esénciales según Thomas, coordinador del proyecto

		R.E.M. - Out of Time
2		Madonna - American Life
3		Nick Cave $ the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads
4		Angelo Badalamenti - Mulholland Drive (film score)
5		No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom
6		The Cranberries - Bury the Hatchet
7		Devandra Banhart - Cripple Crow
8		Nirvana - Nevermind
9		Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
10		The Rocky Horror Picture Show - The Rocky Horror Picture Show

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