The Electronic Music Festival as Urban Infrastructure: GLOWBALL x Nuits sonores

In mid-May this year, the GLOWBALL crew took part in Nuits sonores, the electronic music festival that Lyon-based Arty Farty has run for over twenty years. Led by Sonia Calico, the Taiwanese lineup also featured Scattered Purgatory, B E N N, and Sandy’s Trace. Now in its 23rd edition, the festival drew 100,000 attendees. At the end of June, Nuits sonores’ artistic director Pierre Zeimet came to Taiwan together with French musician KUKII, completing a link-up that spanned the Eurasian continent. We seized the chance to sit down with the two of them for a talk.

▲GLOWBALL 2026 @ SUB. (Photo Source: GLOWBALL)

When people hear “electronic music festival,” most instinctively think, “Isn’t it just a bunch of people partying?” That’s not wrong, but the revelry is only the outermost layer of a festival. What most people don’t see is everything underneath: curatorial strategy, the reactivation of disused venues, international artists’ travel logistics, partnerships with cities abroad, the value generated for cultural tourism, and even the possibility of electronic music festivals functioning as part of a city’s infrastructure.

This article draws on a conversation between Pierre Zeimet and Sonia Calico. Pierre Zeimet is the artistic director of Arty Farty, an independent non-profit cultural organization founded in 1999; together with executive director Frédérique Joly, he runs its festival, Nuits sonores. Sonia Calico, besides being a highly experienced electronic music producer and DJ on the independent scene, is also the founder of GLOWBALL, the Taipei music festival that emerged in 2024. One festival has been running for twenty-three years and has an established market; the other is only in its third edition and is still growing.

Through this conversation, we explore how Nuits sonores and the wider European market develop and sustain electronic music as a major part of a city’s cultural life. It now draws 150,000 attendances a year, and the economic impact it generates is considerable.

How the Taiwan–France Collaboration Began

The bond between Pierre and Sonia goes back to a documentary. About three years ago, ARTE, the Franco-German public broadcasting group, teamed up with TaiwanPlus to make a documentary about the electronic scenes in Taipei and Beijing. At the time, Arty Farty was already running La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, a theater it had converted into a digital arts center. The team originally planned to hold a single screening, but Pierre felt that would be a missed opportunity. Since the artists were already flying in from China and Taiwan, he proposed adding live performances at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and Le Sucre in Lyon.

In fact, Pierre had heard Sonia Calico’s music long before the documentary premiered, and the well-known French electronic producer Brodinski had strongly recommended her, so he took the opportunity to bill the two of them together. But Sonia recalls that they didn’t really talk much that time. The real turning point came a year later: when Sonia wrote to Pierre about a winter tour in Europe, she casually mentioned GLOWBALL and asked whether he’d be interested in collaborating. Pierre said yes on the spot.

Arty Farty, a Non-Profit Cultural Organization

Headquartered in Lyon, France, Arty Farty is an independent non-profit association rooted in independent culture, youth scenes, nightlife, and subculture. Festivals are one of the organization’s main areas of activity, but Arty Farty has also developed most of the capabilities it needs in-house, including venue operations, talent development, media, and work across the creative industries. Its ecosystem also includes European Lab, a forum dedicated to public debate.

The festivals within this ecosystem include Nuits sonores, Intérieur Queer, and S Festival. On the venue side, there’s Le Sucre, converted from an old sugar warehouse; HEAT, located in a former metalworking shop south of Confluence in Lyon, HEAT is a semi-open space combining food and lifestyle programming. Hôtel71, converted from an old private mansion; and La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris.
Pierre laid out this year’s Nuits sonores revenue mix directly: roughly twenty percent comes from public subsidies, including money from the city and the EU; the remaining eighty percent relies on drinks, ticketing, and corporate sponsorship. When Arty Farty held the first Nuits sonores in 2003, it already realized that pinning all its revenue risk on a single three-day festival meant that the weather or an election could swing sales dramatically.

So they spread the risk: running a club, a food-and-drink space, media, and a talent-incubation center, with grants from the European Commission and support from the Lyon city government for their events. This year, for example, they placed DJs in five record shops; Sonia played a set at the bar inside one of them. Free, open events like these are exactly what the city cares about most.

The Continental Curation Networks: TIMES and Reset!

This kind of curation network for independent electronic festivals doesn’t exist in Taiwan, and hasn’t been built anywhere in Asia yet. Nuits sonores has deep ties with both TIMES and Reset!.

TIMES is a curatorial alliance responsible for artists and programming. It binds together ten European festivals, including internationally renowned electronic/art music festivals such as Atonal, Sónar, Unsound, and Le Guess Who?. Its members jointly select artists and fund original performances. Artists in residence rotate among festivals in different countries, while emerging talents share the stage with established names, allowing the work to circulate among some of Europe’s most influential stages.

Programming is, by nature, something a small team of just a few people has to shoulder on its own, so the pressure is intense. After joining TIMES, you can exchange intelligence and industry trends with peers in other EU countries, or collaborate on specific needs. Pierre admits frankly that many festivals flying the “independent” banner are in fact partly owned by multinational touring giants like Live Nation; the people genuinely running “independent music,” whatever the style, need to be more united.

L’appel des indépendants (the Call of the Independents) was a cultural self-rescue movement launched in March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, by independent cultural organizations in Lyon, including Arty Farty and Mediatone. Independent cultural organizations and independent media, belonging neither to the public sector nor to large corporations, found their survival threatened by the pandemic, so they joined forces to put policy proposals to the government and the public.

Reset!, which grew out of Arty Farty, was formally established in 2022. It does not curate; instead it focuses on the sustainability of independent scenes, and today connects more than a hundred members across thirty countries. Membership is not limited to festivals: venues, community radio stations, cinemas, bookshops and agencies can all join. Its main function is documentation. It carries out field research and produces reports for its members, which give independent scenes solid evidence to bring into negotiations with governments, foundations and the EU, and which help knit the network together.

As for how Taiwan might take part in the EU subsidy structure, Sonia asked Pierre that on the spot.

“You can, but Taiwan can’t participate as an institution — only individuals can take part, in an associate capacity. EU funding won’t be wired directly to your account; that route is closed. But you personally can be inside a project. So how does collaboration happen? I can take our own budget and send European artists to Taiwan, or the other way around — work with you to invite Taiwanese artists over. And it doesn’t have to be festival-to-festival, either: TM Lab, for example, connects a festival in Turin with two radio stations, one in Brussels and the other in Athens.”

Reactivating Idle Spaces: A New Engine for the Cultural Economy

This edition of Nuits sonores turned the Lyon’s Saône riverfront into its venue, you can move across the whole industrial district to another stage. That’s not common in Europe: usually the continent’s large festivals or concerts choose fields or forests on the outskirts. Pierre says their core idea is the city-based festival. Every site, including factory buildings and their rooftops, has to be approved by local authorities, with permission negotiated each year anew. But precisely because of this close cooperation, a stable, reciprocal relationship has formed between the city and the festival.

This year several Nuits sonores stages were at Les Grandes Locos, a vast former train factory. They’ve now held the event at this site for three editions in a row. Before applying to use it, they first tracked down the old workers who had once worked in the factory to understand the structure and possibilities of each space; they also opened it up to nearby residents first, because the place had been derelict for years and even local Lyon residents were unfamiliar with it.

Nuits sonores cares about sustainability, and for them a venue must never be used only once. Pierre gives an example: Arty Farty’s current office was itself a performance venue in a past edition; so was Le Sucre, the venue for the welcome dinner, which was once a huge sugar warehouse — after the sugar industry declined, its structure was preserved and turned into a late-night dance floor. For them, a festival is a project spanning several years. As Pierre puts it bluntly, this is how they get to know the city.

 

 

 

 

 

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Are Taiwanese and French Curatorial Approaches Really So Different?

When asked how the two festivals differ from commercial EDM festivals, Pierre offered a clever culinary metaphor.

“I get asked this a lot, and I always use food as an analogy. A big EDM festival is like a fast-food chain: you walk in, order, eat, feel ‘mmm, not bad’ for about five minutes, and then forget it. What we want to make is more like the fine-dining experience of a one-MICHELIN-star restaurant: small in scale, but extremely meticulous and expensive to run. The ingredients are shipped in from all over, and the guests may be relatively few, but it will absolutely give you an unforgettable experience. Both are food, but they’re completely different.”

On festival curation, the two sides’ approaches are very similar; neither believes curation is something one person can decide. Nuits sonores’ programming is driven by a core curatorial group of four, but in meetings even the interns get to speak up, and they regularly bring in people from outside teams, such as local artists in residence, international collectives, sometimes other festivals or radio stations, with this year’s GLOWBALL crew being one example. Sonia’s team is much smaller, but GLOWBALL’s relationship with artists isn’t the rigid “I book you, you perform” kind: every year GLOWBALL features several cross-disciplinary collaborations, all of which she personally develops through conversations and brainstorming with the artists before making them happen.

Both value their relationships with artists more than any single show. In her curatorial choices, Sonia is more focused on who she wants to bring in. The voices she thinks about most are those least often given the spotlight. When collaborating with Indigenous artists, for instance, she won’t just send out a booking notice and be done with it; she sits down and talks with them for a long time first, discussing the possibilities of working together. Gender is also something she keeps in mind constantly: what she cares about is whether everyone on the ground can feel free to be themselves, treating this as an inherent part of what a festival should be, not an optional bonus.

▲Taiwanese artist Sandy’s Trace performing on the HEAT stage at Nuits sonores.  (Photo Source: GLOWBALL)

The KPIs Governments Care About: Where the Two Sides Differ

In Taiwan, subsidy applications require organizers to set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which are later used to evaluate the project upon completion. At the proposal stage, for example, you might promise an audience of five thousand, plus at least ten pieces of media coverage. But for a relatively niche event, proving through numbers that you’re doing serious work is comparatively difficult — or comes across as unconvincing.

The Lyon city government, of course, also uses quantitative targets when evaluating completed projects. The difference is that what the city asks for are free, open events: the open stage, the Sunday family sessions, the European Lab lectures and professional exchanges. This year they even placed DJs in five record shops, one of which posted its best sales of the entire year during the festival month. As for attendance, there’s no rule like “you must draw a hundred thousand people.” Pierre says that when the city government recently approached him, what they asked about was more whether the programming was diverse, whether it was equitable, whether there were local artists, and whether there were free sessions.

Pierre himself admits he’s been lucky: the Lyon city government has long been aware that Arty Farty is a non-profit organization and that it organizes free events and lectures, so he doesn’t have to keep explaining this. When a government already understands an event, communication becomes much simpler, and you don’t need hard statistics to prove yourself.

Infrastructure for the Future

First, can Taiwan gradually build its own lasting network, as Europe has done over the past twenty years? Could an organization like TIMES or Reset! emerge in Taiwan? The democracy, freedom and cultural inclusiveness, plus the geopolitical situation of Taiwan have made it a promising fertile land. Right now, how can the festival ecosystem get public and private bodies to collaborate on building an Asian cultural supply chain?

Second, is the structure of subsidies. For events, do they support the less visible infrastructure underpinning a festival, such as networks, personnel training, venues, or does each edition keep being funded as a one-off event? For artists, can the subsidy arrive in time to make it easier for Taiwanese artists to tour abroad? More crucially, can the current subsidy logic allow for something that takes ten years to bear fruit, rather than demanding that it deliver numbers within the same budget year?

Finally, the possibility of the festival as urban infrastructure. Taipei, as well as Taiwan more broadly, has many emerging scenes, such as Temple Rave and other events that have caught the attention of Western music media. How can these scenes be allowed to thrive without interfering with the principle of their independence, serving as soft-power infrastructure, nurturing more creators, generating cultural value, and even contributing to tourism?

It’s worth adding that while these questions remain unresolved, concrete collaboration is already moving forward. According to the organizers, Taiwanese artist FTK will perform at Lyon’s S Festival this December, taking part in a relay-style live event that spans ten venues across the Confluence district. Perhaps greater exchange between artists can help lay the groundwork for a future network.

Author: Liyang / YSOLIFE