Sweden's Way Out West festival is taking a unique approach to ensuring the future viability of the fest by crafting a stage specifically for sperm and eggs bound for in vitro fertilization.
Festival and designer Love Hultén announced the Future Fan Stage project Wednesday, revealing they will play live recordings from this year's Way Out West to the babies-in-waiting at Stockholm's Eliva IFV clinic.
As Way Out West noted in their accompanying video about the Future Fan Stage, “recent studies show that music improves the fertilization rate during an IVF process.” With that in mind, what better music to soundtrack the process than a festival lineup that includes Fred Again…, Andre 3000, Jessie Ware, the National, the Smile, Pulp, PJ Harvey, and many more.
“To stay relevant, new fans are crucial,” Way Out West said of the effort. “New generations of fans are vital to 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 from the headlining artists into their DNA at the earliest stage possible—before they even develop into fetuses.”
Hultén added in a statement, “When they first approached me with the IVF stage project I knew I was all in. The Future Fan Stage was already an amazing concept in theory and had a lot of interesting design aspects. Combining elements from the lab world with musical stage visuals was challenging and fun. For future fans of Way Out West!”
Fully-formed humans can experience the festival for themselves on August 8-10 in Sweden. Other artists on the lineup include Sampha, Arooj Aftab, Big Thief, Blondshell, Amaarae, Slowdive, the Kills, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Tems, Serpentwithfeet, Wednesday, Fever Ray, and more.