Since 2013, New York-based Building Beats has been cultivating the next generation of passionate leaders though digital music production. Founded by DJ and music enthusiast Phi Pham, the nonprofit introduces low-income students in grades 3 and up to digital music production using free cloud-based software.
The goal of Building Beats is two-fold. On one hand, it aims to fill the music education gap that affects many New York City schools. At the same time, the class doesn’t just teach young people hip-hop in a vacuum; Pham sees these workshops as an opportunity to inspire in students universal skills like problem-solving and collaboration.
“We want to empower young people with the technology they have available around them,” Pham says. “The 21st century is all about remixing different tools, different products together, and we think music is a good starting point to teach students those fundamentals.”
In the five years since it began, Building Beats has partnered with over 50 schools in the New York area to serve upward of 3,000 students. Watch the video above to see some of Building Beats’ young producers at work.
Tag: music
What I Know About Being in a Band
This post is paid for by AARP.
Neo-Nazi Music Is on the Rise. These Companies and People Are Taking It On
Updated: Aug. 19, 10:12 a.m.
When white supremacists and neo-Nazis recently marched in Charlottesville, Va., they chanted old, racially-driven mottos like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
The tenor of the protest’s cheers were horrific to many Americans glued to their televisions or mobile phones, but the slogans are nothing new for white supremacists who have been listening to them for decades with the help of hate music, or “hatecore,” a genre of white supremacy and fascist music.
Heavy rock songs like “White Victory” by the band Blue Eyed Devils is a favorite on white pride forums, and one of the individuals involved in the events in Charlottesville, Ryan Roy, was a member of a white power heavy metal band called Hate Speech.
But there’s another favorite among white supremacists that differs from the typical anger-filled lyrics of traditional fascism music: fashwave.
The music, based on the hipster genre “vaporwave,” is a mix of cybernetic swells matched with video game 8-bit sounds and is a throwback to music of the 1980s, when Halloween-esque theme songs collided with pop culture bass to create a genre fully centered on beats and synthesizers.
“Fashwave is almost like this transient music that puts you away. It’s definitely a different kind of beast,” says a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League familiar with hate music and fashwave. “But we can’t view it as just a flash-in-a-pan trend, because we’ve seen that this kind of music doesn’t just go away.”
Fashwave’s influence is no different than the American neo-Nazi punk rock and industrial music that rose out of the mid-80s and became popular among white supremacists in the 90s. With more of the youth population interested in indie-pop electronic and the EDM scene, it was only a matter of time before white supremacists would evolve their tastes for music, as well. But there is a push by activists and organizations to stop the spread of fashwave and other hate music while also using music and other art forms to teach impressionable youth to appreciate diversity.
A HIDDEN MESSAGE OF HATE
Music has always been instrumental in getting citizens to rally around political and cultural movements. The hundreds of thousands of people gathered in upstate New York at Woodstock in 1969 to listen to music were also protesting the Vietnam War and celebrating free love. Today’s white supremacy groups use it as a recruiting tool.
“Music is incredibly effective in bringing together communities, and the alt-right recognize that and are using it to generate excitement about their cause,” says Scott Crow, an author on subcultures and music, referring to white supremacists who bill themselves as “alt-right.”
Arno Michaelis, a self-proclaimed former skinhead and former lead singer of the band Centurion, a white power band, echoes this sentiment. “It’s not a new thing. Through the skinhead and punk-music surge of the late 80s, it likely revealed the power that music had to move people,” he says. “Going forward, the movement won’t ever miss a beat as far as using music to spread their message.”
Michaelis, who left the band — and the white power movement — close to a decade ago, says that the music coming from neo-Nazis resonated with him as a teenager.
“It was like crack. It conveyed the message in a really catchy habitual way,” Michaelis tells NationSwell. “And if it has that kind of effect on you while conveying a message of blood and soil, it really indoctrinates you into that ideology like nothing else can.”
Today’s fashwave music has the same mission, but goes about it differently. For one, the music is mostly lyric-free and is a hodgepodge of electronic and video game sounds, and trance-like beats. And with the exception of a few song titles, such as Xurious’s “Team White,” or tunes that have sampled vocal tracks (like C Y B E R N ∆ Z I’s “Angry Goy,” which is paired with portions of speeches made by Adolf Hitler) it’s entirely possible that listeners have no clue what they’re actually hearing.
“It’s always better to reach people that don’t think like you and convince them to think that the international Jew is the ultimate enemy of the human kind,” C Y B E R N ∆ Z I tells NationSwell in an email. “It makes no sense to compose music only for people that think like you when you want a peaceful change of regime.”
NationSwell reached out to Xurious via social media, but did not receive a response by time of publication.
In a 2016 post entitled “The Official Soundtrack of the Alt-Right,” Andrew Anglin, founder of the white supremacist news website The Daily Stormer and an organizer of the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, said “The forms of music associated with previous White Nationalist movements, various forms of rock music, are pretty dated… the solution to this problem had been staring me in the face all along. The Whitest music ever: Synthwave.” He continued, “Synthwave represents the truest sound of the Alt-Right, … Within this genre is the sound of reading the Daily Stormer…the sound of an old guy punching a Black Lives protester in the face at a Trump rally.”
On the song “Hail Victory” by Xurious, the voice of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump is heard saying, “We will have so much winning if I get elected, that you might get bored with winning.”
The song is not a parody or a mockery of President Trump, but instead a galvanizing piece used at white supremacist rallies — such as the one in Charlottesville — and championed within the circle as a rally call.
President Trump hasn’t defended the use of his name by white supremacists, but did say during a contentious press conference that there was blame “on both sides” in regards to the Unite the Right rally, which left one person dead.
MUSIC CAN DIVIDE, BUT ALSO EDUCATE
In 2004, Panzerfaust Records (a white power record label that was named for a German weapon from World War II) released 100,000 sampler CDs to middle and high schoolers as part of its “Project Schoolyard” mission. The company failed, though, when parents, schools and the Anti-Defamation League caught wind.
To mitigate the spread of hate music, organizations such as the ADL have called on leading tech companies to take a proactive approach to uncovering the content and having it removed or flagged. The group hasn’t been able to track how effective its efforts have been, but various businesses have started cracking down on hate speech in the wake of Charlottesville.
In the matter of just a few days, The Daily Stormer (which had a dedicated “Fashwave Friday” blog) was taken offline by its host, GoDaddy. When the publication tried to transfer its domain registration over to Google, the tech giant canceled its account. BuzzFeed News reported that Apple disabled Apple Pay on white supremacist websites and Squarespace will no longer serve white nationalist businesses or individuals, including Richard Spencer — the self-proclaimed leader of the “alt-right.”
Spotify, the music streaming provider, removed dozens of artists from their platform after the Southern Poverty Law Center released names of current bands. Neo-fascist and fashwave playlists created by users, however, were still available to be streamed.
When NationSwell contacted Spotify and asked for an explanation of its policy on allowing fashwave playlists and users, the company seemed unaware that the genre was even on their platform. A spokesman for the tech company immediately responded, saying the company was “glad to have been alerted to this content — and have [sic] already removed many of the bands identified today, whilst urgently reviewing the remainder.”
At the local level, former white supremacist Michaelis now works as a leader of the organization Serve 2 Unite, which introduces students to arts and different cultures to combat hate and radicalism. It was organized almost immediately after the 2012 mass shooting of six Sikh members in Milwaukee, where Michaelis lives. The shooter in the attack, Michael Page, was part of the supremacist band End Apathy.
Michaelis says that even though music can divide and radicalize, it can also bring education and hope to those who have been taken in by far-right ideologies.
He says, anecdotally, that at the hundreds of speeches he’s given on converting from radical white supremacist to open-hearted peace advocate, he’s been approached by young white men who have gone down the path of racist thoughts and have “changed their way of thinking,” he says.
And according to research conducted by Reinder’s Research and posted on Serve 2 Unite’s website, the nonprofit’s work increases students’ personal, behavioral and social growth, on average, 52 percent.
“If you get that angry young white kid, and involve them in an art project, like music, that shows positivity, they are empowered because they see a problem in society that they can solve and be a part of something,” he says. “That process is the biggest blow you can give to hate groups.”
Additional reporting by Sean Ryon
MORE: Can You Really Improve Race Relations in a Country Divided?
The Most Meaningful Literature, Entertainment and Art of 2016
In a late-night victory speech, President-elect Donald Trump called his base “the forgotten men and women of our country,” and he promised they “will be forgotten no longer.” His line embodied the spirit of 2016: This was the year that nationwide events put a spotlight on plights that can no longer be overlooked. Beyond Trump’s core base of white working-class voters, there was an assortment of marginalized communities making headlines, from the gay Latinos targeted at an Orlando nightclub to the black men confronted by police in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul; from indigenous peoples protesting a pipeline in the Dakotas to those fleeing climate change in Alaska and Louisiana; and from hijab-wearing victims of hate crimes to unemployed veterans.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, because where there is strife there is also powerful art to make sense of it. And 2016’s collection of books, movies, TV, plays, music and other works was no different, helping us see these groups, to understand their grievances and develop a response. After polling our staff, here is the art that most moved us at NationSwell in 2016.
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On Blending Art and Activism
Every day until November 8, bands are releasing songs about what’s at stake in this election. As part of an effort called “30 Days, 30 Songs: Musicians for a Trump-Free America,” new original music, live recordings and remixes are dropping daily. (A sampling of the work released so far includes the songs “Million Dollar Loan” by Death Cab for Cutie; “Demagogue” by Franz Ferdinand; and “Same Old Lie” by Jim James of My Morning Jacket.) Jordan Kurland, owner of the San Francisco–based Zeitgeist Artist Management, says he organized the project along with author Dave Eggers “to save our country.” Kurland spoke with NationSwell about his latest politically-driven project.
When did you first get interested in music?
I was an obsessed music fan from a very young age. At 6, I had every KISS record, and it just went on from there. It became a driving force in my life through high school and into college. At Pitzer College, outside of Los Angeles, I started reviewing records and interviewing bands for the school magazine and freelancing for some local publications. Through that experience, I started to meet people in the industry. That’s when I stuck around L.A. for internship opportunities at record labels and management companies.
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What effect are you hoping to see from the “30 Days, 30 Songs” project?
Music has always been an important part of politics and protest. In 2012, there was a surprising amount of apathy around Barack Obama’s second term: People felt like they all had bought into this idea of change and hope, but that he hadn’t come through on a lot of promises. When we launched “90 Days, 90 Reasons” [daily pro-Obama writings from cultural heavyweights] to motivate voters to re-elect him, we felt like it was an easy way to get people to pay attention to what’s at stake. It’s very much the same this year. We’re getting artists to come out and say, ‘You know what, there’s a lot at stake here.’ Donald Trump is a huge threat to our democracy and our belief system. And we need to point out his hypocrisy and the danger he poses, or play up what’s great about this country and what we want to preserve.
How do you fold public service, whether it’s raising money or awareness, into the music business?
That’s always been part of my DNA, and I’m grateful I have clients who also are interested in that, whether it’s donating money from tours and merch sales or getting involved in political issues. Artists have a way bigger soapbox to stand on than I ever will. I’m fortunate that I can help them come up with a plan and execute it. Maybe it’s sometimes to the detriment of my management company, because maybe I’d be cultivating a new artist instead. But it keeps me passionate about what I’m doing. There are periods of time where you’re doing the same thing for 20 years, so to get involved in things that keep it fresh is important.
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What albums have you listened to most in your life?
The Who’s “Quadrophenia” and “Who’s Next”; John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”; Bill Evans’s “Sunday at the Village Vanguard”; and “The Bends” by Radiohead. Those are my mainstays, the handful of records that mean a ton to me. I’ve certainly worn out my copies of them.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I’m proud that I’ve been able to do this as long as I have. When I was young, I struggled for almost 10 years. There was a long stretch where I wasn’t anywhere near the level of success I wanted to be at. During that period, I always felt that if I had a gold record to my name, I’d have a level of success that’s really meaningful to me and I could decide whether or not I wanted to continue in this career. I’m proud I accomplished that and then some. I’m proud that I stuck with it and was able to take a path that not as many people travel.
Through the Power of Music, These Homeless Mothers Create a Lasting Bond With Their Children
Earlier this winter at Siena House, a homeless shelter for young mothers in the South Bronx, Crystal spoke softly to her five kids. “This song is for you,” she said, and began crooning a lullaby she wrote (along with the musician Daniel Levy), titled “You’re the Reason Why.”
Accompanied by a guitar and violin, she sang, “You’re the reason why I smile. You’re the reason why I sing. You’re the reason I’m alive. You’re my all, my everything.” In delicate couplets, Crystal expressed a mother’s love for her children — sentiments we often associate with a woman leaning over a crib in a baby’s bedroom, not new moms passing through homeless shelters, jails, housing projects and adult education programs who are barely able to hold their families together.
Since 2011, the Lullaby Project, a Carnegie Hall program (part of its larger Musical Connections initiative) that takes music’s transformative power outside gilded concert halls and into neglected communities throughout New York City and across the nation, has paired more than 300 homeless or incarcerated mothers with professional musicians to create a musical experience for their child. Over three sessions, new and expectant moms write, compose and record a short lullaby for their newborns. For young women who may have experienced their own difficult childhood, the project is a chance to give a name to all the raw emotions that come with motherhood: the regrets from their own lives, the bright wishes for their children and, most importantly, the bottomless affection welling up in these new mothers’ hearts.
The Lullaby Project is not simply a chance for a mom to pen something lasting and meaningful; the song also creates a vital bond that’s key for the child’s development, says Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, a researcher evaluating the project. Singing a lullaby helps to create a secure attachment between mother and child, which studies have shown often leads to exploration, better social relations and emotional well-being in later life, Wolf says. Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project is one of the few programs that encourages that broader neonatal development, rather than society’s limited emphasis on preventing infant mortality or disease.
“When we fund maternal and infant healthcare, it’s chiefly in a disease framework: ‘How do you keep mothers from smoking, drinking, or having soda? How do you ensure that kids, postnatally, get vaccinations?’ Those are epidemiological issues. What we don’t pay any attention to, yet is no less critical, is the other side of prenatal and postnatal care: ‘How do we say to young mothers who are maybe on their own, maybe pregnant in neighborhoods that are not particularly safe or in the shelter system, that you are about to be a mother? How do we tell them you are an agent in charge of your own and this baby’s growth and development?’” Wolf asks. This initiative, she adds, is “building young people to do the job they are about to engage in.”
For a generation of children, despite all the turbulence of growing up in poverty, falling asleep in mom’s arms suddenly sounds much sweeter.
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How A Venezuelan Program Inspired Massachusetts to Save the Music
Across the country school budget cuts have led to diminishing music programs, but Massachusetts is borrowing an idea from Venezuela to carry on the tune.
The Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) announced plans this week to set aside funding for a program inspired by El Sistema, a free, music-education program founded in Venezuela, making it the first state to do so in the United States. The new program, SerHacer, translates to “to be is to make.”
El Sistema, which focuses on “intensive ensemble participation” from as early as pre-school, was founded in 1975 by Dr. Jose Antonio Abreu to help poor Venezuelan children learn to play music, according to its website. More than three decades later, the program has transformed into a philosophy that’s gaining international traction. In 2009, Dr. Abreu was awarded the TED Prize for his mission to expand the program. Venezuela’s El Sistema reaches more than 500,000 students with plans to increase that number to 1,000,000 annually.
MCC Executive Director Anita Walker began supporting the idea after a visit to Venezuela with the New England Conservatory and Longy School of Music, two higher-education programs that practice the philosophy. The Council plans to award $55,000 toward the initiative, according to Erik Holmgren, who is leading up SerHacer.
The first batch of recipients in Massachusetts include programs such as Sistema Somerville, the Cape Conservatory in Hyannis and the social service Kids 4 Harmony, according to WBUR. The state plans to open free instrument lending libraries to students while also conducting studies on the benefits of music education.
For schools like Springfield High School of Science and Technology, the benefits are obvious. Music director Gary Bernice tells WBUR 99 percent of his 500 students, most of which hail from low-income neighborhoods, had no experience with instruments before joining band.
“It’s no secret that our dropout rate and graduation rate in urban centers is not great. But for students who are in our band…for more than one year, they are almost twice as likely to graduate high school than their peers,” he says.
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For Struggling Veterans, Strumming Guitars Can Help with the Healing Process
In Texas, a group of veterans at the San Antonio Military Medical Center is making beautiful music, thanks to volunteers with the Warrior Cry Music Project.
The nonprofit gives instruments — guitars, drums, trumpets and more — to injured service members, then provides them with music lessons.
Robert Henne started the organization five years ago because he believes playing instruments helped him recover from injuries he sustained in a car accident. At the time, his wife was working as an Air Force doctor at the Walter Reed Medical Center, and he wondered if the same process could help wounded veterans recover.
As the veterans work through the inevitable squawks and stumbles that come along with playing an instrument, they also learn to overcome other challenges. “It’s not just learning to play music,” Henne tells the San Antonio News-Express. “It helps reprogram what’s going on in the head.”
The former soldiers agree. Army veteran Ricardo Cesar suffers nerve damage in his fingers, but plucking the guitar is helping with his recovery. “Just parking here and knowing I’m coming in here lowers my blood pressure,” Cesar says. “This is my time. This is my therapy. Now when I’m starting to transition (to civilian life), at home, I can shut the world out and start playing my guitar, rather than, you know, drinking or doing all types of other nonsense that I don’t need to be doing.”
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The One-Of-A-Kind Oregon Festival That Is Friendly to the Environment and Music Lovers Alike
You can’t buy a water bottle at the annual Pickathon Music Festival, held on a private 80-acre farm on the outskirts of Portland, Ore. Rather, you can buy a water bottle — but only of the stainless steel, reusable variety.
You can’t buy food served on paper plates, either. You have to ask for a napkin if you want one. And the vendors don’t sell bottles of Coke or cans of Sprite. Everything you eat at Pickathon — unless it’s brought in from your own campsite — is served on a blue bamboo plate, its circular edges rounded into a shallow bowl shape. And the utensils used to serve the legendary Pine State Biscuits or scrumptious Bollywood Theater cucumber beet salad into festivalgoers’ salivating mouths? They’re also made of bamboo, with a spoon at one end and a fork at the other. The craft beers from local breweries and the Riesling from local wineries are served in stainless steel cups designed by Klean Kanteen to minimize foam and insulated to stay cool. Alongside every trash and recycling container is a five-gallon compost bucket, lined with a compostable bag and emptied throughout each of the festival’s three days by a legion of 53 volunteers.
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A permanent solar array mounted atop the Galaxy Barn (one of Pickathon’s seven venues) supplies not only the stage inside but also all the food and craft vendors on the farm with electricity, and three solar generators power the lights and giant lanterns dotting the trails between the camping areas. One of the stages is constructed almost entirely of recycled wooden pallets. Another, appropriately named the Woods stage, is tucked deep into the trees and features a dome above the performers built from curling tree branches. Its audience sits atop burlap sacks draped over hay bales.
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Pickathon is unique among the world’s music festivals for a dozen reasons: its 3,500 attendees are so amicable and well behaved that organizers aren’t forced to play the heavy at stage area checkpoints. Lines are often blissfully short, and musical acts are carefully curated not for their Grammy potential but their raw talent. Pickathon’s band lineup is about the next big thing — not the flavor of the week — and it makes for a real sense of discovery for music fans.
But what truly sets Pickathon apart from other music festivals is how environmentally sustainable it is. And while it may be hard to imagine scaling the aforementioned green innovations to a festival the size of Coachella or Bonnaroo, where hundreds of thousands flock to see the hottest bands on the planet play a live set, it shouldn’t be, insists co-founder Zale Schoenborn: “You just have to set it up to succeed.”
Pickathon began in 1998 at a small venue called Horning’s Hideout, with less than 100 people. The idea was never to make it big, but to make it better than some of the niche-oriented, profit-focused festivals in other parts of the country.
“We just wanted the art of the better party,” said Schoenborn, who created the festival with a few friends. The idea was to put together an event for local and up-and-coming bands that spanned musical genres. “People come to Pickathon knowing we curate the best of the music worlds we try to go after.”
The organizers were all green-minded, but in the early days, they had a venue with existing infrastructure, so there wasn’t much room to innovate.
After seven years, land use issues forced Pickathon to move to a site in nearby Woodburn, to a place called Pudding River, where a “ginormous field with nothing on it” lay, Schoenborn says. The blank slate “made us really create a whole different thing.”
Stages were built from scratch, and Pickathon’s founders began to ponder what this new autonomy might allow them to accomplish. But after just a year at Pudding River, more land use problems required the festival to search for its third home, eventually settling at an 80-acre farm in Happy Valley that is owned by Sherry and Scott Pendarvis. “Bohemian, wonderful people,” as Schoenborn describes them.
Like the previous site, the farm wasn’t set up to host a music festival, so it was up to Schoenborn and his crew to build it. They erected custom-designed stages and a shade structure made entirely of tensioned fabric to keep music fans cool at the ninth annual event, which was held in 2006.
As Oregonians, holding an event that was light on the land was an important part of Pickathon’s ethic, so it has always had a heavy emphasis on recycling. But even serving beer in recyclable plastic cups resulted in the distribution of tens of thousands of cups and bottles in a single weekend. There had to be a better way, Schoenborn figured.
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The following year, that number dropped to zero.
Via Pickathon’s blog, Schoenborn asked festivalgoers if they would be willing to consider some kind of single-use container, something they’d buy once at the outset and then carry with them from stage to stage. Overwhelmingly, respondents said yes.
So Schoenborn and Pickathon’s other organizations reached out to Klean Kanteen, makers of a line of reusable food-grade stainless steel products, who in turn, designed a steel pint cup, which sells at the festival for $6. Organizers set up a dozen or more filtered water refill stations strategically placed throughout the farm, so that people wouldn’t have to wait in long lines to fill their cups (or their own water bottles.) Even that first year, Schoenborn says, the idea went off without a hitch, and Pickathon became the first music festival in the world to implement such a system. “It was flawless,” he says.
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The next innovation was those bamboo plates, a far trickier challenge than the cups. While the cups are fairly easy to tote around the venue — Klean Kanteen also sells a silicon accessory that loops around the rim of the container and can attach to a belt buckle via carabiner to aid in the process — imagine having to lug around a whole plate and a bamboo spork for an entire weekend.
Enter the token system. Before purchasing any food at Pickathon, you must first visit a station that distributes a wooden coin about the size of a quarter, for $10. Then, you take that token to a food booth, hand it over (along with additional cash for your food), and receive a meal served on a bamboo plate. Once you’ve eaten, you can either wash the plate yourself at a nearby dishwashing station and keep it, or head back to the token station, where you return the plate (someone else will wash it) and receive your wooden coin back.
If that sounds complicated, it really isn’t. First-time festival-goers do require some explanation and vendors had some difficulty understanding that they couldn’t choose what dishware to serve their food on, everyone picked up the concept quickly, Schoenborn says.
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Those two steps alone — replacing all the single-use dishware and plastic cups with reusable materials — have helped reduce Pickathon’s landfill impact by about a dumpster load, Hofeld told NationSwell.
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“My job keeps getting easier,” he says.
But he and the festival’s organizers remain on the hunt for new ways to reduce the event’s environmental footprint.
Pickathon itself creates very little landfill waste, but the festival goers still bring in loads of their own stuff for their campsites: individually-wrapped snacks, cans and bottles, anything you might tote along to a camping trip. Plus, people leave things behind, such as tents that break during the weekend, chairs and tennis shoes. Once, an abandoned sewing machine remained.
“The majority of the trash is coming from the campers, not from the event,” Hofeld said. “Camping is messy business. That’s why we can’t be a zero-waste event.”
Organizers could ask people to “pack it out” (the way you would on a backpacking trip), that only reduces the amount of trash Pickathon hauls away, not the amount of trash generated. Plus, part of the festival’s charm is that it’s not a place where someone is always telling you what to do: “We don’t want to get too preachy,” Hofeld says.
The event partners with Clackamas County and the local trash hauling company Hood View Disposal, which provides the waste collection equipment gratis, but if it’s not recyclable as a curbside pickup back in Portland, it has to go in the landfill. And because it’s so labor-intensive to sort out the less obvious recyclable material — the plastic packing of a dozen apples from Trader Joe’s, for example — there’s actually less product that can be easily tossed in a recycling bin today than there was a few years ago, Hofeld says, so it’s mostly bottles and cans that go in those containers.
Composting is a different story, though. Four years ago, the festival convinced the local trash company to drop a compost bin at the festival. Recycling crewmembers fan out throughout the festival grounds, informing people what can and can’t be composted. Food is an obvious choice; paper, though compostable, stays out, because the hauler can’t collect it. Compostable items from the campsites (which are scattered throughout the woods) aren’t gathered because it’s not worth the effort.
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Pickathon’s sustainability works well in part because it takes place in part of the country whose population is already well attuned to the ethic of recycling, Hofeld says. Much of what makes the system work here, then, is that there’s a well-oiled infrastructure already in place to receive all those recyclables.
As awareness about climate change increases, though, there is growing interest in sustainability across America, and part of that movement includes making music festivals easier on the environment. Both Schoenborn and Hofeld regularly field calls from their counterparts at events across the country, and they tend to give the same advice to everyone: Whatever you do, go all in. If you design an optional system — selling stainless cups but also plastic water bottles, for example — it won’t work.
For music lovers, the options are a little more complex. Convincing your favorite festival to go greener may be more about convincing the county that hosts it to provide more recycling options. After all, festivals can’t recycle what their trash collector doesn’t haul. But a good first step, suggests Hofeld, is to contact your state representative to lobby for better recycling options in your home state.
Or, journey to Oregon, for next year’s Pickathon.
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This Record Label is Rocking Indianapolis
When thinking of musical hotspots, Indianapolis is certainly not the first city that comes to mind — especially when it comes to indie music. But one little record label is kickstarting the arts scene in the Crossroads of America — and providing a boost to the economy, too.
Asthmatic Kitty Records got its start in 1999 when it launched the music of the experimental small scene happening in Holland, Michigan. At the time, the primary artist was co-owner and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens.
At the time, Asthmatic Kitty Records was headquartered in Lander, Wyoming. But as the label grew, it needed a manager, so San Diego resident and graduate Michael Kauffman came on board in 2001. In 2005, he moved the label to Indianapolis where it continued to grow and expand. Soon, Asthmatic Kitty Records was a global organization with employees in not just the U.S., but England, too.
With so many music hubs in the country, why Indianapolis? First of all, the low cost of living made it easier for the label to function — something which might not have happened in New York. Second, according to Kauffman, “there seemed to be a real exciting, embracing community in Indianapolis and an influx of cultural things within the city.”
That open community is precisely what made Kauffman see the move as an opportunity to “make a cultural impact on [Indianapolis].” From there, it just became a matter of engaging it.
The label began signing local Indianapolis acts, offering advice to others in the music scene and organizing local musical evenings. It began an informal partnership with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and helped create an “Unusual Animals” pop-up art gallery.
Asthmatic Kitty continued to work with the community, when, in 2011, it helped host a screening event of Gary Hustwit’s film Urbanized. Hustwit attended, and the day expanded to include various speakers discussing Indianapolis and urbanization. The end result: the start of We Are City – a virtual think-tank run by Asthmatic Kitty employee John Beeler who twice a week sends out an email to 1,200 Indianapolis residents discussing urban action.
The label’s influence continued to expand when Indianapolis hosted the Super Bowl in 2012. Kauffman worked to create a showcase of local bands for the festivities, while Beeler established The Music Council, which aims to influence city policies to help expand the music scene and is composed of members of music blogs, indie labels, the chamber of commerce, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and various education groups.
All of this work has not gone unnoticed by citizens and the local government. City officials are increasingly looking to this former little label for help in bringing in young professionals to expand the urban scene.
Clearly, this “little label that could” is not just a force to be reckoned with in the music industry, but it’s a great unifying force for the city of Indianapolis itself.
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