About Tangle Festival
“Tangle Festival” is a music, arts, and culture festival for (and by) the multi-ethnic Russian Speaking community living in the United States. Our festival is a place to showcase our local and overseas talent in music, visual and performing arts. It is also a place that brings together an entire community of people who share an interest in tasteful and meaningful music, poetry, visual arts, performing arts, and choice of entertainment.
It is never easy to find people with similar interests, and it is even harder to do so when the point of interest is something so fragile as good artistic taste and meaningful entertainment. We have been working on building such a community for over 12 years now (see a brief account of our history below), and we think we have had much success.
We don’t like to brag about it and we don’t like to advertise, because good things shouldn’t require any marketing and because the people who we want to attend don’t need marketing to know that this is a great fit for them. We prefer word-of-mouth, personal accounts and experiences, and your personal judgment. So, if you have friends or family who also enjoy tasteful music, the arts, cultural enrichment, and spending time with others like them, show them what they have been missing and take them with you to one of our “Tangle” (ПЕРЕПЛЁТ) Festivals.
In addition to organizing some concerts locally in New York City, we host two “Tangle” festivals a year, which are roughly 2 hours away from the city. Festival participants usually drive up from various east coast cities (most come from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington DC), and there are always guests from other parts of the country too. One of the events is in the winter, near skiing slopes, and inside a hotel, and the other one is in the summer (weekend after Labor Day), outdoors at a campground.
Children at Tangle Fest
It is very important for us to involve young people in our events to ensure that our culture and values are shared by generations to come. This is why we try to keep tickets to our festivals as cheap as possible for young adults and completely free for children. We work very hard to make sure that children have an entire set of activities, workshops, and developmental programs at our festivals. Even though our festivals are usually loud and restless around the clock, you can always find space that is comfortable for families to join. You will also notice that we devote a portion of the festival program to showcasing young and upcoming talent, side-by-side with professionals and masters of the music, arts, and entertainment world.
A brief history of our club (the KZM Legacy)
We started out as a Russian folk and bard music club, and we were called “Клуб Заезжего Музыканта” (“The traveling musician club”), “KZM” in short. We delivered great music at festivals far away from home, and in local city venues for over a decade, until it became clear that we have become more than just a Russian folk/bard music club. We developed into a community of people who care about form and content, and who are diverse in their musical and not just musical interests. After 11 years of KZM we decided to take the natural next step and entangle music, the arts, and our beautiful growing community into a new project called “Tangle” or ”ПЕРЕПЛЁТ” in Russian.
During the final KZM music festival in the winter of 2013, it was clear that nobody wants KZM to just disappear and everybody is very concerned about what will happen next. One year later, in the winter of 2014, we introduced the Winter Tangle Festival, and managed to convince even the biggest skeptics that the KZM legacy lives on, and what happens next is not only in the best traditions and high spirits of KZM, but also the next evolutionary step in Festival/Slyot culture for all of us.