Live-Trips

All good things come in threes. Or to put it another way: less is often more. In the case of the Grammy-nominated trio PVA, who like Black Midi or Black Country, New Road hail from south London, this is definitely true. With acid, disco, industrial and club culture as their source of inspiration, Ella Harris, Josh Baxter and Louis Satchell let us feel the shrill lifestyle of techno, flashing light effects and the engine music down to our toes.

More than fourteen million people have watched on YouTube to date how the musician Monolink, high up on the Mayan Warriors' truck shining in a thousand colors at the Burning Man Festival, played towards the sky in the Nevada desert. Live, he combined guitar and vocals with electronic spheres of sound, and in front of him in the sand the dancers dissolved, like the sun in the rising night. Monolink's real name is Steffen Linck. And in recent years, as a singer/songwriter who enriches his compositions with electronic music, he has gained an audience between Fusion and Coachella Festival that is virtually in exponential growth. Now his second album is released, an intense experience that you can let get to you and dance off just as carefully. But in both ways, "Under Darkening Skies" tells of the impact of the world. After the sold-out 2018 show at Exil, Monolink comes back to Zurich for a big headline show at X-TRA.

You can turn it around however you want, overturn mathematical principles or ignore them: 1 + 1 add up to either 3 or infinity in the case of the Berlin trio Moderat! Let's track down the wrong addition: Moderat consist of the two dance intellectuals "Modeselektor" and the equally ingenious pop-electronicist and former Shitkatapult co-owner and John Peel sessionista "Apparat". Together they form a dancefloor force. Moderate sneak up on you, in a roundabout way, not in a 4/4 beat, perfectly arranged, balanced, dance music with pretension, dance music that is almost too quiet to dance to, but there is always dancing. Music as if by infinite hands - not overloaded, but strongly charged. There is nothing moderate about Moderat. /Mario Corpataux

If you love New Wave, you love Nation Of Language! Based in Brooklyn, New York, Nation Of Language inspires with its fine sense of synth sounds from the early new-wave and punk movements, sometimes reminiscent of Joy Division or New Order.

Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers met at college on the Isle of Wight, where they both grew up. The two decided to form Wet Leg after a long, dreary summer of wandering around fields and playing festivals with various bands. They played their set and then stayed for the rest of the weekend, listening to as much music as they could before returning to their regular jobs. "It was a pretty fun time.... I think it helped us figure out what kind of music we wanted to make when we finally formed Wet Leg," Hester summarizes.