Recording - August 2017 - 10

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The Northside Festival Returns
REPORT BY MARC URSELLI
to Brooklyn
The yearly appointment with the Brooklyn-centered and
Brooklyn-centric version of Austin's SXSW, Northside, took
place the second week of June this year and offered a lineup
of over 300 millennial-approved artists scattered across 35
venues, plus innovation panels, art initiatives, extemporaneous
exhibits, and a block party along Bedford Avenue,
Williamsburg's main drag.
The music programming started in the afternoon and was the
main attraction of the festival, but during the weekdays leading
up to the jam-packed weekend, the festival also offered three
days of panels surrounding the topics of Innovation and Art
(and, although not advertised, also Politics, with a variety of
panels and guests including New York mayor Bill De Blasio).
Unfortunately, Northside still has no daytime music panels.
To me that's a huge missed opportunity to add content and
usefulness to the festival for all the music lovers out there that
attend, and I frankly don't understand why they don't see this.
The majority of the crowd in attendance is there for the music
anyway, so why not give them more of what they're there
for? It almost seems like they are trying to keep the daytime
programming very techy to attract the Silicon Valley-wannabe
crowd, and then just give them musical entertainment at night.
I can only hope that they will add something for us music lovers to do during the day in future years.
It would be hard to beat last year's headliner: the great
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys doing Pet Sounds. This year,
much younger and less influential bands headlined the festival for the most part. The Dirty Projectors headlined Thursday night at a packed McCarren Park with their lead singer's
quirky vocalizations, ambitious arrangements, and out-of-tune
guitarisms, supported by a great band featuring the talented
musical director Olga Bell on keys, Mauro Refosco of Forro
in the Dark on percussion, his long-time bass/Moog player,
a horn section, and Anthony Braxton's son Tyondai on electronics. On the other hand, Friday and Saturday featured acts
that ran counter of the indie-rock leanings of Northside. Friday
featured DJ Kool Herc, a.k.a. "The Father of Hip Hop" (who's
credited with inventing hip hop breaks) spinning on the main
stage to a nearly empty park, and Saturday was an equally
uncharacteristic evening featuring a not so exciting neo-soul/
R&B line-up headlined by Miguel.
Nevertheless I got to see some great bands, most notably:
world-jazz sax player Kamasi Washington (who commandeered
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RECORDING August 2017

the stage with two drummers), Sarah Lipstate's Noveller at
Rough Trade (structured solo looping-guitar songs), Elysia
Crampton at Good Room (whose attitude, words, and wisdom I
like more than her reinvented old-school electro/industrial samples, even though she breathes new life in the genre with the
Latin source samples that she overlays), Giuda at Brooklyn Bazaar (very good and energetic stomp-and-clap pre-punk/rock
quintet from Rome, Italy), Big Thief at Rough Trade (inteospective shoegazing-folky-indie-rock), Pharmakon at Brooklyn Bazaar (industrial/noise/screaming solo female-fronted Sacred
Bones recording artist), and Destruction Unit (punk-HC-noisers
also on the great label Sacred Bones) just to mention a few. The
block party day stage had some cool bands, most notably a
surprise performance by the hip hop duo Mobb Deep and the
amazing and entertaining New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian
funk brass band Cha Wha, fronted by Native American Indian
singer Spy Boy J'Wan Boudreaux (grandson of Big Chief Monk
Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles).
I am a tad reluctant to say that it's worth traveling to Brooklyn specifically for Northside if you don't live nearby. Other than the opportunity to make friends and see music and
obviously make new contacts, there isn't the huge learning/
educational angle/advantage that much bigger and more established festivals like SXSW offer to musicians looking to
network, learn, improve and excel in their craft. That said, if
you live, love, and breathe music like I do, then it's a great
week to be here. I live in NYC, so I'm used to having access
to 100+ concerts every night. If you want the same, then by
all means come visit during Northside and get your fix... and
then some!
Marc Urselli (urselli@recordingmag.com) is a multiple Grammy®-
winning engineer and producer living and working in New York
City. Learn more at marcurselli.com.
http://www.marcurselli.com
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