Music Festival, Done Correctly [Anonymoused]

This past weekend, for the third year in a row, the owners of the upstate Basilica Hudson performance venue collaborated with the curators Brian Deran and Brandon Stosuy to mount Basilica SoundScape, a model of the modest, focussed music festival. It’s an enjoyable, not overwhelming experience; many cities in what some call, unfortunately, secondary markets could take a cue from Basilica and duplicate the magic. Do you live in an attractive, semi-rural town? Is there a big abandoned building nearby? Is your town along a major touring axis for live bands? Then you could pull off your own kind of SoundScape. Music festivals don’t have to involve thousands upon thousands of fans covered in mud and jacked up on whatever they could sneak onto the grounds. (There is a place for that kind of bacchanal, and we’d miss Glastonbury and Coachella if they weren’t there to provide the literal big-tent moments that help to capture the year’s dominant moods and offer youngsters a taste of communal mayhem.)

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