Sweden’s Way Out West festival is giving new meaning to the phrase “start ‘em young.”
The three-day multi-genre festival, which returns to Gothenburg’s Slottsskogen Park from August 8-10, has announced a new IVF stage, where live recordings of festival headline performances will be played to “an audience of sperm and eggs.”
Dubbed the “Future Fan Stage,” the unusual music experiment will be housed off-site at Stockholm’s Eliva IVF clinic. According to Way Out West, the concept is based on recent studies that suggest music improves the fertilization rate during IVF, the medical procedure in which a female egg is fertilized by a male sperm in a laboratory.
“The infertility rates in the world are increasing,” Dr. Karin Ehn, a fertility specialist at the Eliva IVF clinic, said in a video announcement for the stage. “That’s why we always need to find the next technology to improve the success rates.”
The festival has teamed up with famed Swedish audiovisual artist Love Hultén, known for his works that bring together modular synthesizers, carpentry, and sculpture, to create “the world’s smallest, fully functional stage.” Way Out West says the “unique machine inspired by medical equipment” is an attempt to “create a new generation of fans, spawned by great music.”
“To stay relevant, new fans are crucial,” Way Out West wrote of the project on its website. “New generations of fans are vital for keeping both artists and music festivals alive and kicking. This year, we’ve added an additional stage to help create future fans of great music by ‘injecting’ live recordings by the headlining artists into their DNA at the earliest stage possible—before they even develop into fetuses.”
Among the headliners set to play Way Out West—and therefore indirectly serenade the next generation of music fans—are Fred again.., Peggy Gou, Air, Pulp, Queens of the Stone Age, André 3000, and more.
Learn more about the festival’s new Future Fan Stage in the video below and grab tickets to Way Out West 2024 here.
Featured image from Way Out West.
