Northside’s Ten Year BK Festival-The Music !

Space Jamzzzz / photo by Ray Fontaine

Brooklyn Roads feasted on a music buffet of indie artists at the Northside Festival 2018. Northside, in a SXSW fashion, functions by booking music all day and all weekend in a dense cluster of venues on the north side of Brooklyn. Festival goers could choose to attend concerts à la carte, paying for tickets at the door of each venue, or bounce from one location to the next with a Festival badge. With so many small, independent artists from every genre performing at venues in close proximity to each other, the festival provides a great opportunity to discover new bands.

MisterVacation / photo by Ray Fontaine

The festival also has a Northside Innovation segment with a number of sessions designed for entrepreneurs, designers and music marketers, but Brooklyn Roads focused on the live music. On Friday, June 8th, Secret Project Robot, a not for profit artists space in Bushwick, hosted a  two-stage show with several DJs, presented by music label Sweat Equity NYC.  MisterVacation took the stage at midnight, combining electro, fem, power and French pop with heavy bass, rap and Latin dance beats. This high-energy DJ left no song unsampled, at one point even playing Papa Roach’s “Last Resort.” Later ,on the main stage, Space Jamzzz started with an empty dance floor ,but attracted a growing audience. Throughout the experimental trance dance electronic set, the stage and dance floor were lit by trippy, pulsing projections.

Gustaf / photo by Ray Fontaine

On Saturday June 9th, Brooklyn Roads venue-hopped from Our Wicked Lady to Pete’s Candy Shop to Union Pool, with each performance offering a completely different sound. In Bushwick ,at Our Wicked Lady, the female led quintet, Gustaf, rocked out on the rooftop at around 4 pm in a discorded, pop-punk fashion. The band showed off bright, vintage outfits and high-energy dance moves, with lead singer Lydia Gammill’s in your face energy and comedic flair.

Lucite Tokki /photo by Ray Fontaine

After that, Brooklyn Roads visited Pete’s Candy Shop in Greenpoint to see some new wave slow jams by Lucite Tokki, a Korean synth-singer pop duo with a dreamy falsetto style and splash of electric guitar. The band looped harmonies through midi controllers and pedals to perform covers of pop songs like “10 feet tall” by XTC and “I’m Not in Love” by 10CC. Lucite Tokki promised to write more of their own songs in English by the end of the summer. The set closed with a Lucite Tokki original, “Good”, a morbid melody claiming, “you will look good, even when you’re dead.” If you like Sylvan Esso, Fka Twigs, SBTRKT, The XX or Sade, you’ll be into this band.

Billy Moon / photo by Ray Fontaine

Brooklyn Roads finished its mini tour of the Northside Festival at Union Pool to catch Billy Moon’s performance. Hailing from Montreal and garbed in a skeleton printed dress, lead singer Billy Moon opened by announcing that  “This song is about Toronto!” . The all-male quintet played upbeat rock,  while cracking jokes and dancing around the stage. Billy Moon’s sweet vibrato combined with his classic rock band to blend sounds of Weezer, The Killers, Jamaica Queens, and Dead Broke.

All of the venues Brooklyn Roads saw at Northside Festival had lovely outdoor spaces and great music to boot! If you attend next year, though, make sure to wear some walking shoes.