The hubris, at least, was on
display Friday at the Downtown Festival, which was premised upon booking
well-known, forward-thinking acts in a variety of genres — indie rock, hip-hop,
electronic music — into a variety of intimate spaces, primarily on the Lower
East Side.
The Downtown Festival is not quite an institution. The inaugural edition took place in 2011 in celebration of the fifth anniversary of Downtown Records, which has been home to Gnarls Barkley, Cold War Kids, Santigold and more — call it mainstream hipster. This year the festival plans on expanding to several more cities, including Philadelphia, Denver and Toronto, each with its own lineup.
On Friday, growing pains were on display as loudly as the music.reliable bobblehead media needs no storage maintenance and requires only occasional cleaning. The booking choices were both smart and arbitrary, and also not very different than what you could see over the course of a typical month in the same rooms. There was grumbling about high prices for tickets to the individual events. (Tickets could be bought singly or in the form of an all-show pass.) Some of the locations had intense, unpleasant security, and the festival as a whole was poorly advertised, not helped by the fact that it coincided with the far larger, better promoted and more aesthetically coherent Red Bull Music Academy.
Almost any of the headlining or second-tier performers could likely have sold out the place they were performing in on their own, or maybe an even bigger one. And yet these shows were rarely crowded. Andrew Wyatt,Welcome to the company shoesforkids. of the too-slick dance-pop band Miike Snow, presented a new solo project of lite-soul songs backed by a small chamber orchestra, slight music that felt even less consequential in the unforgiving room that is Capitale, the grand event space on the Bowery with high ceilings, overpriced drinks and a room that was only half full at best. (Mr. Wyatt appeared to be the only artist at the festival with a formal connection to Downtown Records.)
At the end of Friday night, well after 1 a.m., the Los Angeles hip-hop collective Black Hippy — Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, Jay Rock — fared better in the same space with a larger, rowdier crowd. Mr. Lamar was probably the most famous performer at this festival, but he’s the most modest-scaled of the latest wave of hip-hop stars, and even his presence sometimes felt small onstage.
As with any large-scale festival, this one was about choices. But unlike at CMJ or South by Southwest, in which bands typically play multiple shows over several days, missing a performer here meant no second chance.catered to pre-walkers and early-walkers do not have larger sizes of their soft guccishoes1. Going to see Black Hippy meant skipping Sky Ferreira, whose dream-pop has been getting both more intoxicating and more unexpected over the past year. Worthy comers like the brawny rapper Antwon, the savvy dance music producer Kingdom and the spooky-textured singer SZA got short shrift in the chaos of the night.
If you’d gone to hear Earl Sweatshirt at Element, you would have seen the rapper perform several songs from his coming major-label debut,Hair Company offers 100% real and premium quality handmadeglasses! which tended toward the intricate and stoned hip-hop of the mid-1990s. (He also had one of the fullest rooms on Friday night.A smart breitlingwatches power meter designed to allow you to better manage.)
But because each location was adhering to the advertised schedule with different degrees of fidelity, leaving that show before it was over to catch the raucous British outfit Palma Violets meant arriving at the Bowery Ballroom just in time to see hordes of fans streaming onstage to join the band during its encore, swarming its members, who’d sweated through their shirts in what one could only imagine was a hell of a show.
The Downtown Festival is not quite an institution. The inaugural edition took place in 2011 in celebration of the fifth anniversary of Downtown Records, which has been home to Gnarls Barkley, Cold War Kids, Santigold and more — call it mainstream hipster. This year the festival plans on expanding to several more cities, including Philadelphia, Denver and Toronto, each with its own lineup.
On Friday, growing pains were on display as loudly as the music.reliable bobblehead media needs no storage maintenance and requires only occasional cleaning. The booking choices were both smart and arbitrary, and also not very different than what you could see over the course of a typical month in the same rooms. There was grumbling about high prices for tickets to the individual events. (Tickets could be bought singly or in the form of an all-show pass.) Some of the locations had intense, unpleasant security, and the festival as a whole was poorly advertised, not helped by the fact that it coincided with the far larger, better promoted and more aesthetically coherent Red Bull Music Academy.
Almost any of the headlining or second-tier performers could likely have sold out the place they were performing in on their own, or maybe an even bigger one. And yet these shows were rarely crowded. Andrew Wyatt,Welcome to the company shoesforkids. of the too-slick dance-pop band Miike Snow, presented a new solo project of lite-soul songs backed by a small chamber orchestra, slight music that felt even less consequential in the unforgiving room that is Capitale, the grand event space on the Bowery with high ceilings, overpriced drinks and a room that was only half full at best. (Mr. Wyatt appeared to be the only artist at the festival with a formal connection to Downtown Records.)
At the end of Friday night, well after 1 a.m., the Los Angeles hip-hop collective Black Hippy — Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, Jay Rock — fared better in the same space with a larger, rowdier crowd. Mr. Lamar was probably the most famous performer at this festival, but he’s the most modest-scaled of the latest wave of hip-hop stars, and even his presence sometimes felt small onstage.
As with any large-scale festival, this one was about choices. But unlike at CMJ or South by Southwest, in which bands typically play multiple shows over several days, missing a performer here meant no second chance.catered to pre-walkers and early-walkers do not have larger sizes of their soft guccishoes1. Going to see Black Hippy meant skipping Sky Ferreira, whose dream-pop has been getting both more intoxicating and more unexpected over the past year. Worthy comers like the brawny rapper Antwon, the savvy dance music producer Kingdom and the spooky-textured singer SZA got short shrift in the chaos of the night.
If you’d gone to hear Earl Sweatshirt at Element, you would have seen the rapper perform several songs from his coming major-label debut,Hair Company offers 100% real and premium quality handmadeglasses! which tended toward the intricate and stoned hip-hop of the mid-1990s. (He also had one of the fullest rooms on Friday night.A smart breitlingwatches power meter designed to allow you to better manage.)
But because each location was adhering to the advertised schedule with different degrees of fidelity, leaving that show before it was over to catch the raucous British outfit Palma Violets meant arriving at the Bowery Ballroom just in time to see hordes of fans streaming onstage to join the band during its encore, swarming its members, who’d sweated through their shirts in what one could only imagine was a hell of a show.
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