Contronatura Festival

The Contronatura festival was founded in 2012 and is held in Guagnano, in the inland area of the Lecce province. This year it will take place on Tuesday, August 12, with a line-up featuring Real Estate, Mikky Blanco, Erlend Oye, Fitness Forever and Lawrence Arabia.

Alright, so tell us: how did the idea of a summer festival come about?

We've always organized concerts and small festivals, always in summer, very small-scale things. The dream was to be able to bring in foreign bands, but we couldn't afford it. Then a few years ago a regional grant came up, Principi Attivi, and with that 25,000 euros we managed to put together something decent. Summer is an inevitable choice because, as everyone knows, around here you only really live for two months a year, and only in August can you count on tourists, who are more likely to appreciate the music we bring.

When was the first edition, and how did it go?

The first edition was two years ago, in September 2012. We're proud of that debut, which boasted three great discoveries: Young Dreams (from Norway), Weird Dreams (from England) and the surprise of Elliphant (from Sweden), all three playing in Italy for the first time. Back then we had to stick to the terms set by the Region that funded us, and the terms were to work toward “extending the season,” meaning shifting the festival to late summer to avoid piling up all the events in August.

Choosing September worked against us because we missed out on the millions of tourists. But apart from that, everything was great: the Young Dreams' live set was magical, Elliphant's performance shocked quite a few Salento guys and inspired plenty of young girls, and finally the square in Melpignano (the town of the Notte della Taranta) was fantastic in its own right.

What has the audience response been like over these years? What are you expecting from the 2014 edition?

Here at home, people who follow indie music have always been a niche audience (to put it mildly). Other genres are known to do much better, let's say more visceral ones (another understatement). We and other local organizations are doing a really tough job of raising awareness, but it's slowly starting to pay off.

This year we're taking things up a notch, pushing our luck a bit more. But we're confident, because Erlend Oye is a familiar face and Real Estate have fans who genuinely love them. Mykki Blanco is a complete unknown around here, but his name could blow up any moment, just like Elliphant did two years ago.

Your lineup leans toward indie pop – last year it was Ducktails and Laetitia Sadier, this year Real Estate and Erlend Oye. How do you go about making these choices?

We try to dig through everything we love most. And that's indie-pop, dream-pop, electro-pop, alternative folk, but we're also wide open to rock, certain types of electronic music, r'n'b or alternative hip hop, as shown by our choice of Mykki Blanco. Then we ask the national agencies whether any of the names we like are actually touring, and we push hard to land them. We have to find the sweet spot between what we love, what might actually work in Salento, and what the powers that be will allow.

Aside from the festival, how would you rate the live music scene in Puglia over the course of the year?

Pretty depressing, obviously. But it's always worth remembering that up until 1990 this place really was like Afghanistan. So the handful of shows we do get are already something of a miracle. Bari, for what it's worth, manages better than Lecce.

Do you have trouble getting artists to come play at Contronatura?

At first we thought that was problem number one. A lot of agencies snubbed us early on, and we assumed that was the reason. But then, working with one or two really savvy promoters, we realized it could actually be done without much trouble. Artists fly in as far as Brindisi and we handle the backline for them. Sure, sometimes the flight stops in Naples, like it did for Real Estate, and we have to come up with some pretty absurd solutions to go pick them up. But it can be done. On the other hand, it's also true that Salento is having a real moment these days, and artists themselves get seduced by photos of the sea, the countryside, the friselle and so on.

There's been some controversy lately between Radar Festival and Padua's city administration. What's your relationship like with the local administration (and with the State in general)? What would you want from the "public sector" to make organizing the festival smoother and less of a headache?

In the past, before Contronatura, we hated local administrations. We genuinely met evil incarnate in those damn town halls. But there are exceptions. The people in Melpignano (the first edition), for instance, were absolutely lovely.

In any case, we now have very little to do with local administrations: on one hand we no longer get public funding, on the other we're out in the middle of the endless vineyards of Guagnano. Nobody bothers us. For now.

You've recently raised the festival's entry ticket price by two euros (bringing it to a still very modest 12 euros total). How economically sustainable is Contronatura Festival at this point? Do you receive public or European funding? If so, do you think you could do without it?

For the past three years we've tried to keep an outrageous pricing policy, with shamefully low prices (5 euros). That's the only way to draw in a thousand people or so, which is the minimum needed to fill the lawn at Sudestudio (our venue). Since we can't rely solely on music fans, who'd only number a few hundred, and since we're still attached to the idea of getting locals involved, we have to entice them too — they don't care about the bands, but they show up for the "situadzione". The only way to do that is to keep the price dirt cheap.

This year we went from 5 to 12 because costs have tripled. We need just over a thousand people to break even. And we'll make it! Obviously none of the organizers takes home a single euro, we want to make that clear. But who knows, maybe one day…

The number of summer festivals in Italy has been growing exponentially in recent years. At the moment, though, most of them are little more than concert series, nowhere near the concept of a proper Anglo-Saxon "festival". From your point of view, what's missing in order to scale up and aim for the level – in terms of number of artists and attendance – of a mid-sized European festival?

Dunno. It's absurd, especially because in Spain, say, they're musically as mediocre as we are, but they run circles around everyone else with their festivals. But let's reason it through, starting from our own experience: if here in Salento there was a proper venue, big and well-equipped, with a smart artistic policy and decent transport links, with the sea we have and the wind of tourism at our backs, we'd have everything we need to bring something like Primavera Sound here — like the Porto edition, say... In fact, for the damn Taranta they managed to pull off something big: in that case, it just took the will of one politician (who, by the way, came from a rock background, though sadly he stalled at CSI). So, to wrap up the syllogism, maybe, yes, it's always the fault of the ka$te!

What's the best moment you remember from past editions of the festival?

I've got one. One night, out and about with Young Dreams, we were all heading back to the car completely drunk. The legendary Gavin Poole, the sound engineer, English, starts pissing without a second thought right in the Piazzale della Stazione in Lecce. The bassist, Norwegian, looks at us and says "Can I do that too?". Us: "Sure, it's not like you're gonna piss on yourself!". Him: "Is not offensive to you?".

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