Here's What It Takes to Create Your Own Festival

Article by: Cameron Crumpler

Thu October 08, 2015 | 00:00 AM


Music festivals have grown immensely over the past few years. They showcase the cutting edge of a number of different artistic mediums, which come together through the energy, collective passion, and life work of today’s most creative minds. 

While the musical talent, dancers, performers, and envelope-pushing artists are at the forefront of these festivals, the behind-the-scenes work done by festival organizers is less obvious. Their countless hours of work are a conduit for all of these different expressions of creativity to coalesce in one space. 

We wanted to get inside the minds of the people who put on some of our favorite and most progressive festivals, to give readers some insight into what it takes to curate your own DIY music festival, maintain an inimitable vibe, and create an incredible, devoted community. We got in touch with the founders of Desert Hearts in California, Sonic Bloom in Colorado, Trillectro in Washington D.C., and Wonderfruit in Pattaya, Thailand. These accomplished individuals shared their experience and insight into what inspired them to bring these festival dreams to reality.

Desert Hearts: Grow Organically

Desert Hearts 2015 Jamie Rosenberg   15

Photo by: Jamie Rosenberg

Desert Hearts is an exploding house and techno community that has carved out a place for itself in American dance music culture over the past three years. The crew's empire consists of not only a biannual music festival and club events held nationwide throughout the year, but also a booming (free) record label for house and techno.

Desert Hearts co-founder, Mikey Lion, explains that spreading a positive vibration through gatherings is what has fueled them from a 200-person gathering in the desert, to get to what they have today. “Find a niche that you're truly passionate about and come from the heart. If it’s pure, it will resonate with others and grow organically. Don’t do it for money, do it because it’s for the greater good of mankind.”

Trillectro: Book From The Top Down

Trillectroviaillvibesdotcom

Photo by: Trillectro

A strikingly similar backstory exists between Desert Hearts and the East Coast festival Trillectro, which just had its fourth incarnation this past August in Columbia, Maryland. The idea for the festival was born after they and a group of their friends attended Coachella in 2012, and left the festival so inspired by how the music had such a capacity to bring people together that they felt pushed to do them same back on the East Coast. 

This past year, according to co-founder Modi, was their biggest and most well-executed event yet. Much like Desert Hearts, the Trillectro founding team’s vision began with a genuine desire to bring people together through music. Modi stressed that the most important thing when beginning an undertaking with so many different moving parts and variables is being methodical in every step. Don’t start booking any sort of talent until you have a venue cleared, and the permitting and legal groundwork needed to ensure a good festival. He says that the way that you go about booking is probably the most important step in the process. 

You have to book from the top down. You have to do the headliners first, because that’s where you get the draw. After that you get the sponsors, vendors and things like that and everything falls into place.” Making sure that you will be able to produce enough revenue is incredibly important, and in booking the headliners first, you are locking down a large portion of your cash flow early on in the process. 

Another similarity with Desert Hearts that Modi mentioned is the incredible feeling of watching the event they created transform in a relatively short time (three to four years) into something they wouldn’t have even been able to imagine in the beginning: “We started as a fusion of hip hop and electronic music, but I think in the last couple of years, we’ve moved beyond that. We've had a really good response the past few years and we're very thankful.” 

The success of both Desert Hearts and Trillectro holds the common thread of being genuinely passionate. These festivals weren't trying to be the next huge, moneymaking festivals – their founders just started out as inspired, authentic, hard-working people, and from there, things unfolded organically.

Sonic Bloom: Look Beyond the Music and Mind Your Budget

Sonic Bloom 2015 Eric Allen   24

One festival that's synonymous with community and top-notch art is Colorado's Sonic Bloom. Sonic Bloom founder Jamie Janover talked to us about his festival's modest beginnings, and what directions he sees his creation taking in the future. Just having completed its 10th year, Sonic Bloom began as what was, at the time, a one-off party featuring the supergroupZilla(which Jamie plays the hammer dulcimer in) and a conglomeration of their close friends. 

At the time, Jamie was inspired by early renditions of Burning Man and Symbiosis , and he felt inspired to bring in fire dancers, painters, and progressive art installations, just as those festivals do. He wanted the other performers to be “an extension of our artistic ideas,” so that the event was carried out with a sense of cohesion, where performers and crowd alike could feed off of the high energy that builds in a space of shared artistic chemistry. The party was so successful they decided to do it again the next year, and bring in notable artists like Bassnectar, STS9 and Pretty Lights, while still focusing on the holistic aspect of the event, featuring keynote speakers, yoga, live painting, and art installations. 

Sonic Bloom became a living, breathing entity that Jamie likens to his other work in the Unified Field theory in physics. This theory, in a nutshell, states that all things are connected and everything affects everything else. He stresses that “all of [a festival's] content is important, not just the music,” and that being mindful of all of the complementary elements within these types of gatherings is essential. 

Lastly, Jamie stressed the importance of being mindful of the budget: “You want it to be awesome, but awesome can be expensive.” Like everything else, this more business-centric side of the process has to be brought into balance with the more artistic side in order for things to be successful.

Wonderfruit: Create a Social Movement

Wonderfruit Festival Thailand 2014

Our last festival, which also happens to be the most exotic, is Wonderfruit in Pattaya, Thailand. It's Asia’s first transformational festival and is now in its second year. The festival received a lot of positive feedback in its first year, and there is a lot of hype currently surrounding it’s second incarnation this December. We spoke with Pete Phornprapha from the Wonderfruit team, who said: “We are looking to create a social movement so we really don’t think of ourselves as purely a production team, more of a social enterprise that has access to lots of interesting content. We want to continue to develop that content in terms of sustainability, both social and environmental and also in terms of impact. We aim to produce positively transformative experiences.” 

Pete is a passionate guy and has a refreshing outlook on the business side of things. The original intention of creating Wonderfruit was less on music and more on creating positive social change, while bringing awareness to social issues via the arts. "Everyone can relate to arts, music and having fun. And if we can tie a sense of social consciousness to it, then it will be worth doing, and in a way that is positively disruptive," he says.

Wonderfruit has a number of different social initiatives. One of these, Reverse Graffiti, is making waves in the surrounding Thai communities, replacing graffiti in urban areas with positive messages to Thai people without producing additional waste. “We aim to inspire attendees to live in ways that improve their environments, bodies, and spirits," says Phornprapha. "Through our Reverse Graffiti campaign we spread positive messages by power cleaning them into previously dirty or vandalized spaces. Our hope is that, as we spread the word about Wonderfruit, we might challenge Thai residents to consider their own environmental impact at the same time.” 

The similarities between those who put on some our favorite festivals are clear: They trust their instincts, follow their passions, and are aware and comprehensive in terms of what they focus on as their visions unfold. Curating a festival is no easy task, and like everything else that’s incredibly awesome, it takes an a lot of work to pull off with elegance. In reality though, their advice extends way beyond just festival curation – it seems many of the tips they offered also work as advice for succeeding in life. These festival organizers know what they want, they've gotten it, and they don't stop working to make it better. In the process, they've shared something truly beautiful with the rest of us that will, in turn, inspire others to do the same.