The Walkmen, Black Flag and Merchandise will be among about 350 bands that will play at this summer’s Northside Festival in Brooklyn, as organizers have added two free outdoor concerts and an expo for entrepreneurs to the weeklong schedule.
Now in its fifth year, Northside has become Brooklyn’s answer to the better-known South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex., a three-pronged event featuring an indie film festival, a music festival and a conference devoted to innovative businesses. The Northside Festival runs from from June 13 to 20 and is expected to attract more than 80,000 people to Greenpoint and Williamsburg. “South by Southwest should be shaking in its boots, because the Northside Festival is the new sheriff in town,†the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, said.
The organizers, Daniel and Scott Stedman, founders of the Northside Media Group, said they would produce two free public concerts on June 15 and 16 in McCarren Park as part of this year’s event. The Walkmen will anchor the first show; a headliner for the second has yet to be announced.
Earlier that the week the festival will erect a tent over the park and invite dozens of businesses to showcase their products for the Northside Entrepreneurship and Technology Festival, or NExT. That expo is also free.
“We are now at a scale where we can make it a massive event and have a lot of the programming be free to the public,†Scott Stedman said.
But most of the concerts, panel discussions and films will be for people who buy badges to the festival or who buy tickets to individual events. The music lineup â€" concerts will be held in two dozens bars and clubs from June 13 to 16 â€" features a few older punk bands, like Subhumans and the current lineup of Black Flag, led by the songwriter Greg Ginn.
But the list is also heavy with young rock bands that generated buzz at the CMJ Music Marathon last fall and at South by Southwest in March, among them Merchandise, Milk Music and Mac DeMarco. Others scheduled to perform include Swans, Lambchop, Torche, the Men, White Fence and Iceage.
The film festival, which runs June 17 to 20, will feature several New York premieres, including “All the Light in the Sky,†a 2012 film about about an aging actress directed by Joe Swanberg, and “A Teacher,†about a teacher who has an affair with a student, directed by Hannah Fidell.
