offBeat

The Givers

The New Orleans Indie Rock Collective, more commonly known as the NOIR Collective, has been cultivating and supporting local indie rock for the past two years. They’ve created sampler CDs and organized mini-music fests, but most importantly, they’ve been knitting together the seemingly disparate indie scenes throughout the city—Tulane, Loyola, Marigny, Mid-City—and they’re about to unveil a beautiful patchwork of their efforts. It is Foburg, a 3-day indie music fest that will take place the weekend of March 12-14.

Mark Heck, co-founder of NOIR, says the idea to create Foburg came about organically. While they were putting together a smaller music fest in 2009 which only showcased local bands such as MyNameIsJohnMichael and Rotary Downs, NOIR started getting contacted by bands traveling to South by Southwest. “While we were in the midst of trying to plan out this little festival, we started getting emails like crazy from all these out-oftown bands saying hey, we’re coming to South By, can we get a show?” Heck says. “At that point we couldn’t help anybody. So that’s when the idea hit us—next year, let’s try to plan a bigger festival for the spring right around South By where we bring in these other bands, but also do a showcase of not just local bands, but as many as we can possibly fit.”

From there, the idea snowballed into a reality. “We put another sampler out in the fall, did another mini-fest, and then a couple months ago we started hitting this thing really hard,” Heck says. “We decided to do it on Frenchmen Street because Frenchmen is one of the music meccas of New Orleans.” The festival will be contained on the first two blocks of Frenchmen. The venues will be the Apple Barrel, Dragon’s Den, Checkpoint Charlie’s, Maison, Blue Nile, d.b.a., and R Bar. “Our center is going to be the d.b.a. side of the area, so we’re going to make this whole party stretch out across three or four blocks,” Heck says. “In the future, we want to get money together for a permit to block off the street, but for now everything is going to be contained in the venues. It’s going to have that traditional Frenchmen vibe, but with a lot of different music in its place.”

There are 100 bands in the lineup; three to five bands will be on each individual showcase with six to 10 showcases each night. “We’re hoping people come out and bounce around the streets. Go to a show, watch half a set, go across the street, see another band and watch half of their set,” Heck says. “The whole point of this is that we want people to see as much music as possible, not just that one band you’re familiar with.”

Rachel Puckett, co-founder of NOIR, says, “This is pretty much our way of doing SXSW as best we could. This has been a huge learning experience. There is just so much involved with putting on a big festival like this. It’s unbelievable.”

Both Puckett and Heck expressed sincere disappointment at the process of deciding who made the lineup and who didn’t. Puckett says, “It’s been awesome to discover all these bands and become friends with many of them, but it’s also bittersweet. It’s hard to tell people they made [it on] a sampler CD, but not the lineup.” Heck explained the selection process: “We pulled together over 150 submissions and let the programming partners pick the lineup.” Partners include Static TV, Humid Beings, WTUL and Antigravity among others. “We tried to stay as neutral as we could, so some of the bands that we felt really strongly about or had close connections to are just going to be people attending the festival, not playing. It’s been the hardest thing for me to swallow so far.”

Personal issues aside, the bands that were selected make for one stellar weekend of live music in the heart of NOLA. “I’m really proud of the lineups,” Puckett says. “That’s one thing about the festival that we did do right. Our programming partners chose very well. The quality of the music is impeccable.” There will be local favorites Silent Cinema, Giant Cloud, A Living Soundtrack, and Lafayette’s the Givers; in addition to this, touring national bands such as the Show is Rainbow, Hope for Agoldensummer, the Pharmacy, and the Bears of Blue River. The ratio of local to national bands will be 70-30, so the emphasis will be on showcasing the NOLA indie scene while incorporating a healthy serving of national sound.

For years, New Orleans has had a bad reputation as a rock ‘n’ roll city, and major indie touring bands stop in Baton Rouge instead of the Crescent City. With any luck, the NOIR Collective and the coalition building efforts of Foburg will help change that.