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New urban explorations

Nuits Sonores has never stopped surveying its territory, helping festival-goers (re)discover the city and its most unique sites, and transforming wasteland into spaces conducive to meeting, dancing and debating. The 21st edition of the festival will stay loyal to this tradition by inaugurating a new main site for its daytime events: Les Grandes Locos. The Confluence neighbourhood, with its former wholesalers’ market and disused Fagor factories, will make way for the district of La Mulatière and its rail hub, a site of vertiginous halls and mechanic relics, steeped in industrial history, which will be transformed into an ephemeral world for the duration of the festival.

For two editions now, the focus of the festival has been shifting from the night to the day, a profound evolution defined by the reappropriation of daytime spaces, by the collective euphoria that comes with dancing in sunlight until the fall of night. The unveiling of the festival in its new surroundings, a fertile ground of imagination and possibility, will be the culmination of this process: Les Grandes Locos will become the symbolic site of daytime gatherings, festivities and celebrations. And because dancing remains a resolutely political act, the venue will also host the Nuits Sonores Lab programme of conferences and debates, thereby serving as a new and stimulating space for idea exchanges and meetings.

From an artistic perspective, our Days will continue to look to the future and the forthcoming decade, with four stages offering very different experiences: a signature soundsystem, immersive audiovisual spectacles, live performances and a vast urban dancefloor. Four stages showcasing the diversity of international and local artistic communities, drawing attention to scenes that are under-represented at other European festivals, and presenting yet more electronic music stories from around the world.

The Nuits, designed as an à la carte offering of music experiences throughout the city, gives each individual the power to make his or her own way through the urban space. These nocturnal meanderings are centred around four club-culture venues, with one stage each, providing contrasting experiences. In the Confluence district, the main hall of H7 will host A night with…, our iconic curator-led programme that will be entrusted for the first time to four up-and-coming figures from the local scene. Le Sucre continues to reinvent the dancefloor with a new club format based around live performance and stage art, while its neighbour, La Sucrière, another symbolic venue in the festival's history, will bring to life some (very) special projects tailored to its unique main stage. Last but not least, Le Transbordeur, an old friend and long-standing partner of the festival, presents a series of alternative line-ups reflecting the aesthetic identity that it cultivates all year round.

Last but not least, Nuits Sonores would not be the festival it is without its events in public spaces and around the city. The 2024 edition will include a wide range of free events open to all, ephemeral projects organised in collaboration with local actors, creating friendly, festive bubbles at the heart of the urban space. These are programmes that place emphasis on togetherness, on providing moments of intergenerational sharing and celebrations of diversity.

Come together, and resist

The year 2023 marked the festival's 20th birthday, a euphoric celebration of two dynamic decades characterised by moments of joy but no shortage of crises. As we enter this new era, we wish to be guided by the conviction that partying is still possible, despite the disorder around us. Conscious, respectful partying that resists polarisation of all kinds, that celebrates the common, that reveres the universal. Against an increasingly fractured backdrop of social division, the challenge before us is huge. We wish to believe in our shared ability to resist and unite, to safeguard this rare and precious platform for togetherness, so that Nuits Sonores may continue to showcase and defend spaces for expression, experimentation and freedom.

The Arty Farty team