I'm a 28 year old guy coming from the French speaking part of Belgium, named Wallonia. I'm a researcher at the University during the day, and a concert / festival promoter during the night.

I'm one of the promoters of the Rhaaa Lovely Festival, and also a member of Matamore Recordings, a Belgian indie record label distributed in Japan by yourself. Thank you by the way.

I started the Rhaaa Lovely Festival in 2000 with a friend. The basic idea was to (at last!) propose a quality music event to the people of the small town where we grown up. At the beginning there was not really any "ethics" behind this. It came actually 2 or 3 years later, along with the premisces of our political / ideological awareness.

The Rhaaa Lovely Festival takes place each April near Namur, a town in rural Wallonia. It's thus kind of buccolic...

The festival happens in a local primary school, so the atmosphere is very welcoming. The capacity is of a little less than 1000 people. What's nice is that the people that attend the event are all very, very friendly.

The primary aim, beside gathering a quality lineup, is to offer cheap admission, so that the experience is as accessible as possible.

To achieve that... Well at first we are all volunteers, we're careful with any Euro we spend. We also don't offer luxurious hotel rooms or catering to the artist. What's nice as well is that seen the popularity of the festival here, we don't need to do a lot of promo, so the costs are very limited.

We are also helped by the public authorities, for an appreciable part of the budget (20% I would say).

A last important factor is that the bands usually understands the idea behind the festival, and appreciate our ethics, so usually they accept to play for lesser money than what they would usually ask for a similar event.

As for the sponsoring from private company, basically this is an ethic choice. As said on our website, the current trend for big festival organisers is to look at their happening more as a means to supply private companies with a big mass of public than as a way to please this public with what it is waiting for. This is a drift of neoliberalism that we obviously condemn, so we decided to do without sponsoring from private companies, even though we are aware that at our scale it's not really annoying for those companies... But at least we show the example.

Five people are involved. We discuss of the bands that could be interesting... We don't pay attention to which band is on tour, which one has just put out a record, ... So we kind of make our ideal lineup, and start to contact the bands. When they're on tour it's of course easier. But for some bands, when we have good contacts, we propose to fly them over to our little town... It happened for instance with Tarentel, Shipping News, Migala, The Durutti Column...

I must say that at the end the actual lineup is usually pretty close to what we wished!

About 800. On one side it's not much, but be aware that Belgium is a very small country and that the bands are not famous at all. So we are quite proud to be soldout each year! And actually we don't want to grow, so that's a good figure.

Beside the fact that the first edition was a financial fiasco, I cannot remember of any real serious problems... Maybe minor last minut things, but so far we always managed to solve them.

To my opinion it was the best edition! It was so crowded! And the bands were all good, and varied. The problem with the two last editions was that the lineup was too uniform. Seven hours of instrumental post-rock is a bit harrassing.

Well the date is already announced because it's always happening in the middle of our Easter vacations, so that's easy. But we haven't started to work on it yet. Will probably be for September. We have some ideas for the lineup, but no act is confirmed yet.

Hmm that's a subject I like to discuss! I'll give you a detailed list which will certainly give you the envy to join us for the next edition:

- Silly Pils: bottom fermentation beer, Pilsener style, pale malt, Saaz hop, blond crystalline colour.
- Troublette: artisanal Wallonian white ale, lightly spiced wheat beer of great complexity, starts off with aroma of mangoes, apples, citric fruit, wheat, yeast and finishes with slight sourness. This one is a total recommendation. You have to taste it!
- Maitrank: drink coming from the South of Belgium, mainly composed of white wine, orange and woodruff. We buy it from a guy who's making this drink to gather money for a school project he has in Brasil. It started 5 or 6 years ago and now it's a big success!
- Oxfam fruit juices coming from the fair trade market
- Bio syrups
And next year maybe we'll have a fairtrade cola.

As for the food, it varies... Last year we had couscous, and next year I think we'll prepare some "chili con carne" with our small hands. And also chili without "carne" cause we don't forget our vegetarian fellows.