As part of this partnership, hub producer Matthew Linley will be working alongside members of the Arts Team on all aspects of the arts programme, including the forthcoming GeoQuest project and June’s Home festival, which showcases acoustic music from around the world as part of a programme that explores themes of diversity and sustainability. Other members of the hub team, including hub Director Julia Payne, will be involved too, working with Dartington to develop its programme ideas and supporting the development of new partnerships.

You can keep up with Dartington programme by following Dartington on twitter (#DartingtonHall), and by following Matthew (#matthewlinley).

Taking place at London’s City Hall on 10 June, the programme will include discussion panels, breakout sessions and presentations about New Music Plus… Panellists will include Stuart Brown (BFI Southbank), Laura Ducceschi (De La Warr Pavilion), Jude Kelly (South Bank Centre), John Kieffer (Sound and Music), Penny King (Arts Council England) and David Metcalfe (Forma). Watch this space for full programme details, or email us to make sure of your place at the event.

The event will draw from our learning from the pilot New Music Plus… producer development programme which ran in London during 2009. Click here to find out more about New Music Plus…

EFDSS aims to “nourish artistic innovation and excellence and develop the reach of English folk and new acoustic music in the UK and its profile internationally”, and we’ll be looking in particular at how it can support artists to build and connect with new live audiences. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more, or tell us what you think.

In the meantime, check out Folk Rising, a three-part concert series sampling the freshest, undiscovered and at times radical UK folk music, produced by EFDSS and the most excellent The Magpie’s Nest. The future sound of folk…today.

A big thank you to all of you who came to see us on tour or in London – you made our artists very happy. A massive thanks to all the artists too, it was great to have you at Fertilizer! And thanks too to our funders: Arts Council England, Sound and Music, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM), not just for their money but for their all-round support in helping us deliver the festival.

As far as the future is concerned, we’re already plotting and planning in true Fertilizer style, keeping our ears to the ground for the latest underground sounds. We’ll keep you updated with our plans, but in the meantime if you have any suggestions for future Fertilizer outings, please do get in touch. Let us know if there’s good s**t anywhere in particular you’d like us to check out and bring back to UK. This is not a competition; there are no prizes to be won – but you might end up seeing your dream festival come to life and how cool would that be?!

The mash up of sounds and influences has to be seen (and heard) to be believed this year as we bring you everything from the finest Polish hip hop, to electronica, post rock psychedelia and even an orchestra of tiny instruments. To find out more about the acts showcased this year check out their biogs on our website. And for the first time we’ll also be spreading good s**t across the UK as the Fertilizer tour bus heads for Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Liverpool and Gateshead for a series of very special shows featuring Sing Sing Penelope, Jacaszek and Contemporary Noise Sextet.

Plus thanks to Sound and Music this year Fertilizer has been able to commission a unique British Polish Jazz collaboration between Pete Wareham of Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear fame and Poland’s prog-jazzers Pink Freud. Pete is at the heart of the new breed of improvisers who effortlessly blends rock, electronica and beats with Jazz which makes him the perfect partner for Pink Freud who epitomise Gdansk’s tradition of improvisatory drawing on a truly eclectic range of influences, including jazz, rock, folk, jungle and drum’n’bass, making them one of the most interesting and spontaneous jazz groups we’ve come across in recent years.

Pete has been out in Poland to practise and perform with Pink Freud and you can follow his time over there through his regular updates on Twitter. The guys will be playing 2 exclusive gigs during the festival the first at London’s Cargo on Wednesday the 13th of May and then at Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds the next night, Thursday the 14th.

And this year it’s easier than ever to keep up with everything Fertilizer. Why not become our friend and receive exclusive updates on the festival, read interviews with the acts and be in with a chance to win some goodies? You can also join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

I’ll leave you with our first in our new series of the Fertilizer Phrasebook, which aims to equip you with all the phrases you’ll need to have a good time at this year’s Festival:

No. 1 - Zatańczymy? – which means ‘Shall we dance?’

Phrased and Confused heads off on tour this May, taking an irresistible mix of song-writing genius and spoken word to venues in Bracknell, London, Norwich, Derby, Stockton and Exeter.

We’ve invited some of our favourite songwriters and poets to climb aboard the tour bus, get lyrical and explore the spaces between poetry and music. Expect a night of blissed-out pop, dark satire, exuberant wordplay and new collaborations from four very different artists working together for the first time.

Championed by Steve Lamacq, and described by the Guardian as ‘Canada’s best kept secret…the most unjustly overlooked band in Canada’, music collective Woodpigeon are rapidly gaining a cult following for their laid back and lush folk pop.Next up, the brilliant, darkly funny satirist, Murray Lachlan Young who is a regular at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, penned the cult hit ‘simply everyone is taking cocaine’, supported the Pet Shop Boys and is a resident rhymer with the BBC’s Saturday Live.

With nods to Patti Smith, John Cooper Clarke and Tom Waits poet Aofie Mannix and accordianist Janie Armour mix live and recorded sounds to create beautifully haunting soundscapes. We first worked with Aoife and Janie when they wrote new work for our Phrased and Confused stage at Summer Sundae festival last August.
We’re also pleased to be unleashing on a national audience for the first time Dead Poets, a cheeky fast-paced and laugh-out-loud mash up of ‘proper’ poetry and sharp-eyed MCing, courtesy of Mr Mark Grist and MC Mixy.

For more information and the full tour dates visit www.phrasedandconfused.co.uk and join our Facebook group.

I’m really enjoying working on the Fertilizer Festival, it’s a brilliant project and is allowing me to combine all my interests; promotion, live music, marketing and online and digital promotional techniques. I’m really looking forward to the Festival landing in May, and experiencing some underground and slightly left field music from Poland!

I’ll leave you with a few of my favourite links from my first few weeks at the hub…

• Firstly my favourite band at the moment Strawhouses who I’m sure I am now beginning to annoy my fellow hubites with by talking about them so much.

• The Fertilizer Festival on Twitter… please follow us!

• hub operations manager Andi’s RT @Shunt project which I very much enjoyed at The Shunt Lounge.

Tom Johnson, hub Fertilizer Intern 2009.