We are glad to present a short guide to music events during this year’s Era New Horizons Festival. We chose five most attractive performances that will take place at the Festival Club located in the Wrocław Arsenal. Read more

This should be interesting for you if you’ve come to town to look for a job. Economic crisis or not, companies in Wrocław are hiring – and big-time at that. Capgemini, a major French company, is seeking to employ 100 engineers and consultants here, and Opera Software, a Norwegian company known for its web browser, is looking for programmers. It seems the people in Wrocław are doing a good job – the employers are happy and looking for more. Give yourselves a round of applause, give your CV a boost – and go get those jobs before somebody else takes them!

RadioWroclove started at midnight, June 1. The first broadcast programme was “The Wisest Man in the World”.

RadioWroclove.com is the first English-speaking station in Poland that broadcasts round the clock. The place we reach you from is Wrocław – the city of meetings that has always been open to a mixture of cultures, languages and religions. The city that spins the most twisted – but the most fascinating – stories imaginable, and where the people are still trying to work out the true meaning of the word “identity”.

RadioWroclove deals with a wide range of issues, sometimes seriously, more often not. Bitter-sweet, sweet-and-sour, sour-Polish, Polish-Polish, Polish-English, English-Swedish, Swedish-Asian, Asian-Czech, Czech-European, European-traditional, traditional-modern, modern-analogue, analogue-digital, etc, etc, etc. Anything, really. As long as it’s interesting.

We want to reach you, wherever you are, be it Wrocław, Dublin, Seoul or Bhutan. As long as you understand – or really want to understand – English (the fact that you can read this is a good sign). And have access to the Internet.

You want to visit Poland, on business or just to get away from it all – we’ll help you get your bearings and keep you up to date with what’s latest in culture, arts and entertainment here. You’re planning to come specifically to Wrocław – or Prague, or Berlin, or any major city of this part of Europe for that matter – we’ll be there for you. Currently visiting the area? Excellent – there’s no better way to learn what to do and where to go while you’re here than download RadioWroclove.com on your laptop. Or perhaps you are an English-speaking resident here, an expat or simply a student learning the language – that’s even better. We’ll keep you posted without making you dig for info in countless sources or boring you to death. You don’t fall into any of the above categories? Don’t despair. If you just enjoy listening to something dynamic and enjoyable without risking brain damage, plus you appreciate good music – welcome aboard!

Speaking of music. We’re into positive tunes that don’t irritate but keep you awake. We play old and new numbers that commercial stations don’t because… well, because they are commercial stations.

Do we speak perfect English? Probably not, but who does, eh? We try, though, being thoroughly educated and all… We even know words like “thoroughly”. Note: if you do come across the odd mistake, that’s probably because we’ve thrown it in on purpose – for fun or to keep you alert.

Invited by RadioWroclove, Kutiman will visit Poland. He will come especially for us to Wroclaw from Tel Aviv. Meet Kutiman in EpiCentre, June 19 at 9pm.

Ophir Kutiel was born (1982) in Jerusalem and grew up in Zichron Yaacov. He studied piano since the age of six, and then drums and guitar at age 14. When Kutiel was 18, he moved to Tel Aviv to study Jazz at Rimon Music College.

While working at a local convenience store in Tel Aviv, Kutiel tuned into a college radio station that was playing music that was much different than the classical jazz he had been used to playing. Soon after, Sabbo, another Israeli artist and current music partner, introduced him to afrobeat and funk, including the sounds of James Brown and Fela Kuti. His obsession with Fela Kuti and the fact that his last name was similar led him to create the stage-name of Kutiman. He traveled to Jamaica to research reggae and afrobeat and work with Stephen and Damien Marley.

In 2009 Kutiman released ThruYOU, an online music video project mixed from samples of YouTube videos. After disclosing his work to just twenty friends, Kutiman’s project spread virally across the web, racking up more than one million views in less than a week. [9] After viewing ThruYOU, open source advocate Lawrence Lessig praised the project as a pioneer of a new, less regulated form of media, saying “If you come to the Net armed with the idea that the old system of copyright is going to work just fine here, this more than anything is going to get you to recognize: you need some new ideas.”

The differences between Wrocław and Tel Aviv. By Kutiman

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Kutiman in Epicentre. June 19. Part 1

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Kutiman in Epicentre. June 19. Part 2

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Bio from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiman

Photo credit to http://www.myspace.com/kutiman

More infos:
http://www.przekroj.pl/ludzie_sylwetki_artykul,4575.html
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1886626,00.html
http://www.nowamuzyka.pl/news.php/6130/Kutiman-rzadzi-na-YouTube

Brave Festival, organized since 2005 by The Song of the Goat Theatre in Wrocław, Poland, is a festival of brave people, people who speak about where they come from, what their values are and what their tradition and spirituality is. It is a festival not about works of art, but about art through which it is possible to save and protect thousands of abandoned and forlorn cultures and people. That is why we called it “Brave Festival – Against Cultural Exile”.

Each edition of Brave Festival focuses on a different aspect of either humanity, art or region of the world. That is why our previous editions were so far called: “Magic Voices”, “Asian Voices”, “Drowned Songs”, “Rituals: Out of Africa” “Prayers of the World”. This year we would like to draw our audience’s attention to the incredible richness of various forms related to the art of praying, worshipping and meditation, and we therefore want to present a number of authentic and little known rituals, ceremonies, sacred songs and rites from Asia, Africa and Europe. This is the reason why we have titled the fifth edition of the festival “Prayers of the World”.

Brave Festival 2009 is held in Wrocław, Poland between July 3rd and 11th 2009. The program consists of performances, concerts, workshops, exhibitions and film screenings, as well as artists’ meetings with the audience, will allow our viewers to approach and get deeper understanding of various forms of expressing one’s spirituality coming from all over the world. We will thus have a chance to see, among others, a Zikr ritual performed by an all-women’s group from Georgia, libations to the milungu spirit done by the Gogo tribe members from Tanzania, Korean shamans and their mudang rituals, Corsican polyphonies based on Requiem, as well as the Vimbuza healing dance from Malawi, Ahellil chants of the Berbers of Algeria, and the Azer songs of Mugham (the latter three representing art from the UNESCO Intangible Cultural  Heritage List).

Our aim is to prevent expelling people from their own cultures and sensitivity. Brave Festival is a festival of people who do not accept the models promoted by mass culture, people searching for the deepest possible sources of inspiration – the inner one. In relations with such people and traditions we want to promote diversity, multiculturalism and peace.

We believe that intercourse and an attempt to understand distant traditions is only one of the manners to preserve cultures. The other is charity, which means that all our revenues from ticket sales support the activities of Rokpa International, an organization running educational and cultural projects in various parts of the world. The aim of Rokpa is to raise children, who are aware of their identity, from their early years till adulthood. This is how we want to save cultures, traditions and languages in a very practical and palpable way.

Listen to Brave’s sample music

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More infos at www.bravefestival.pl