Festival starts in the evening, and the first night took place in the club called Cinema. We enjoyed the laid-back and relaxing glitch-ambient set of Mapstation and David Szczesny, harsch techno-ambient primitivism of Aabzu duo, subtle and refined minimal techno of Pole and very jumpy, bouncy ecstatic techno set by Thomas Fehlmann.

Second part of the event took place in a very cozy hall at International Exhibition Centre. Very european style: people sitting wherever they want or even lying on the floor, non-smoking, listening carefully and enjoying great visuals. And they definitely were great, as in charge for most part of the night was Nikita Tsymbal with his unique live video show - all visuals were created in real-time, as two cameras captured his hands, manipulating needles and strings, scissors, pens on paper, fabric and other objects. Raw video stream was simultaneously processed in the computer, and the result was simply astonishing.

Probably the most notable musicians were Kapital Band 1 from Germany (the duo of drummer Martin Brandlmayr and Nicholas Bussmann with laptop, playing clicks'n'cuts on top of live drums); other German project Institut Für Feinmotorik - the performance consists of 8 turntables with all kinds of objects on them (scratched and mutilated CDs, papers, stickers, abrasive, ribbons, etc.), but not the records! This set was very spectacular, but a bit too monotonous and noisy - in 10 minutes you were wishing to leave the room immediately just to escape extremely loud and harsh noises.

Motor performed in the middle of the night. The show was intimate, quiet, subtle and atmospheric - the crowd noise and whispering talks of audience blending with the music produced a very calming effect and extraordinary relaxing state of mind.

The journey was a definite success: nice spring weather, a lot of great music, a lot of walking around the wonderful city of Kiev. Huge thanks to all organizers and participants of the festival.

All photos by Victor Victorov, Maria Kantor and top-40.org.
Field recordings by top-40.org