4791

Pitchfork throwing a multi-day, multi-venue festival in NYC in February

Pitchfork Fest (more by Dominick Mastrangelo)
Pitchfork

The online music magazine that runs the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago — the influential outdoor showcase for indie bands — has plans to start a new festival in New York City next February, teaming up with the one of city’s largest music promoters, The Bowery Presents.

The new festival in New York will be called “Pitchfork Presents: Forms” and will include works by visual artists and game designers at galleries, museums and unconventional performance spaces around the city, along with four days of performances at clubs run by Bowery Presents, organizers said.

Christopher Kaskie, the president of Pitchfork, said his company had been seeking a way to do a festival in New York for several years, but did not think a large, outdoor event at a park, like the Chicago festival, would be successful in a city with such a crowded social calendar and so little public space.

“We never thought that kind of a model would really work that well in New York,” he said. “We’ve been strategizing for a number of years on how we could come up and do a festival that was impactful and unique.”

The decision was reached earlier this year to do most of the events inside at established clubs and to incorporate more visual artists and independent video-game designers into the mix, creating some multimedia events. “It’s going to be more of an urban festival,” he said.

John Moore, a partner in The Bowery Presents, said the lineup of bands for the concert had not been determined, but he expects to book between 50 and 75 acts, all in the indie vein. Passes to the entire festival will be available, but people may also buy a ticket to a single night of performances one of the promoter’s clubs – The Music Hall of Williamsburg, the Bowery Ballroom, the Mercury Lounge and Terminal 5. The prices for tickets have yet to be announced. Those tickets will be in the $15 to $30 range. Some of the multimedia events at galleries, museums and unconventional spaces during the day will be free, he said. [NY Times]