12 Points 2024 programme announced!

12 bands, 12 countries, 12 fresh perspectives

"So this is Europe’s new jazz? This energising, sociable, genre-defying festival is all about confounding expectations." – The Irish Times

2024’s edition will take place in Tampere from September 25-28 at Finland’s leading space for creative music, the G Livelabs venue. Situated in a historical red brick building in the heart of the city, G Livelab Tampere opened its doors to the public in summer 2019, following the success of their original Helsinki venue, founded in 2016.

12 POINTS 2024 LINEUP

WED 25 SEP
Emmeluth’s Amoeba (Norway)
Inui (France)
Fixity (Ireland)

THU 26 SEP
Karmen Rõivassepp Quartet (Denmark)
Beyond (Lithuania)
Invisible Painters (Italy)
12 Points Late Night Jam

FRI 27 SEP
Ingibjörg Elsa Turchi (Iceland)
Pawky (Sweden)
Selma Savolainen Horror Vacui (Finland)
12 Points Late Night Jam

SAT 28 SEP
TamTam (Estonia)
/kry (Austria)
SC’ÖÖF (Switzerland)
12 Points Late Night Jam

Emmeluth’s Amoeba (Norway)

Emmeluth’s Amoeba works with creative music that moves through characters of free jazz to chamber music-like shapes. They play with a fierce energy, leaving no audience member untouched. The brainchild of saxophonist Signe Emmeluth, the music benefits from her wild but perfectly executed leaps of intuition, in far-flung melodies and styles that turn on a hair from playful to primal.

Inui (France)

French quartet Inui takes inspiration from the songs of Inuit peoples and African hunter-gatherer tribes, contemporary jazz, and electronic trance music. The two vocalists express the breadth of the natural world from gentle images of birds hidden in forests, to the harshness of sea-pounded rocks. Maya Cros on keyboards and Dimitri Kogane on drums drive things forward with psychedelic ostinatos and a rock-tinged rhythmic engine.

Fixity (Ireland)

From the southern coast of Ireland, drummer/composer Dan Walsh’s Fixity brings listeners on a rollercoaster of melodic and textural development. A 5-piece band bringing together improvisers from various fields of intrigue, Fixity explores the impossibility of repeated moments.

Karmen Rõivassepp Quartet (Denmark)

The Danish-based Karmen Rõivassepp Quartet lends a modern sophistication of harmony and melody to the classic roots of their story-telling songs, with a tight-laced interplay between the performers, and deft, inventive decoration in Rõivassepp’s vocals. With approaches ranging from through-composed to pure improvisation, the group draws the listener in to experience both pure joy and reflective melancholy in their music.

Beyond (Lithuania)

Lithuanian duo Beyond brings together pianist Dmitri Golovanov and saxophonist Jan Maksimowicz, mixing their instrumental skill with the extended sound palette of live sampling. From two musicians with strong academic backgrounds, their approach is at once thoughtful and shot through with a sincere Slavic soulfulness.

Invisible Painters (Italy)

A project of Italian bassist Ferdinando Romano’s, Invisible Painters is a distinctive experiment in jazz, electronics and melody, blending double bass, piano, drums and bass clarinet with synthesisers, samples and ambient recordings. Informed by the players’ light-hearted virtuosity and their love of blending digital sounds and analogue timbres, the group displays a depth of imagination which satisfies the heart as well as the ear.

Ingibjörg Elsa Turchi (Iceland)

From the northwestern edge of Europe, Iceland’s Ingibjörg Elsa Turchi’s outside-the-box style as a bassist and composer makes her one of the island’s favourites. Her music ranges from groove-laden classic jazz to more minimalist post-rock-inspired sounds. A conversational approach to writing gives space for her quartet to build on her basic structures, emerging in a back-and-forth style, threaded through with ear-catching motifs. Turchi’s second solo album Meliae received an award as the Album of the Year in the Jazz and Blues category at the Icelandic Music Awards of 2021.

Pawky (Sweden)

Hailing from Malmö, Pawky takes off in the tradition of instrumental acoustic jazz but reaches into darker and more abstract fringes. They mix through-composed passages with completely open, improvisatory space, contrasting more naive, innocent melodic material with harmonic depth, and find the shadows of their sound in their improvisations.

TamTam (Estonia)

Vocal and bass duo TamTam (with Anett Tamm and Karl Tammaru) from Estonia bring influences from art pop and electronica into a colourful musical palette, which fuses expressive vocals and euphonious bass grooves into dreamy nocturnes.

/kry (Austria)

In Austrian trio /kry, clarinetist Mona Ratbou Riahi and bassist Philipp Kienberger combine a willingness to stretch their instruments to the grungiest limits of their sounds with a playful approach to effects. Contemporary grooves by drummer Alexander Yannilos keep the group driving forward powerfully for music that is has both sit-up-and-pay-attention strikes and a lot of pure fun. In 2022 they were selected for NASOM, the New Austrian Sound of Music 2023/24 edition.

Sc'ööf (Switzerland)

With two horns, drums and guitar, Sc’ööf bring traditional jazz instruments into an avant-garde soundscape. Their music is fuelled both by their passion for odd grooves and a consciousness of social responsibility in their creative practice.

Selma Savolainen Horror Vacui (Finland)

Vocalist Selma Savolainen’s project Horror Vacui explores the fear of emptiness, renunciation and sudden discoveries. Combining a variety of influences, Savolainen can step effortlessly from old-fashioned jazz singer to grunge and further afield, pulling ghosts from a spare wasteland to create a powerful emotional punch.

25-28 September

G Livelabs, Tampere, Finland

Tickets & venue info:

glivelab.fi/tampere/12-points/

Tampere 12 Points is financially supported by the City of Tampere, Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the Wihuri Foundation.

Improvised Music Company is primarily supported by the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon with support for 12 Points from Culture Ireland.