Jack Ladder & The DreamlandersThirty-five-plus bands, three venues and the promise of experiencing "an immersive space design mapping out a journey which integrates artists of different genres into the one environment". That's what's on offer in the inaugural Volumes festival. The man behind it all is James Spink.
"A few things kind of led towards [Volumes]," Spink explains. "One of them was finding that kind of interesting collaboration between all the bands, how so many of the bands, or the people in the bands, in the local scene play in three or four different bands. Part of the original idea was formed out of the idea of a warehouse party, based around booking a headline act and then that headline act would have a bit of a curative kind of role to book either their mates or their favourite bands to play with or that they'd love to collaborate with. That would create that kind of special vibe where it's not just the punters that are having a good time but all the bands involved are really excited to play with these other bands and get the opportunity to do one-off collaborations and that kind of thing.
"Having a stage based around their bands and friends and that local scene, so it gives a little more of that community sense and a collaborative sense to it."
"Then the idea formed of getting labels involved with it as well. That happened pretty organically in that I was approaching certain labels booking this events and there were four or five different bands from their label that I wanted to book, so then I thought let's make it a little bit more of a collaboration and involve them as presenters and curators. So that's where bringing in Farmer & The Owl for instance and having a stage based around their bands and friends and that local scene, so it gives a little more of that community sense and a collaborative sense to it."
Alongside Wollongong's Farmer & The Owl, the Gold Coast's Strange Yonder and Sydney/Melbourne's I OH YOU labels came on board as co-presenter/curators. Then of course, there's this whole "immersive space design mapping" business.
"With that we're hoping to display a little bit of what an event can potentially be, alter the perceptions a little bit, change what people expect when they come to a live show, the fact that they can go to a music festival and it's not in a park, it's in three venues that they already know, and then adding those little elements of different visuals. That's something that I've found interesting at a show, where a visual artist is collaborating with a band to create something.
"We want to keep an element of surprise for people coming down but we're working with a couple of people who do various set designs and make props, and there'll be a couple of visual artists who will create some of the projection and video content. Visual artist DJ Ego is doing some stuff in the Cliff Dive and then a couple of the artists booked are audiovisual artists. Friendships, for instance, are a complete audiovisual duo, so one member is the audio component and the other the visual component, so their show consists completely around the live visuals created to match the music. Lower Spectrum is another one where the whole show revolves around that link between the music and the visuals."
