Indie music big-names from across the country shared stages at 12 downtown venues with dozens of Triangle-based bands and unsigned artists at Raleigh’s fifth-annual Hopscotch Music Festival this weekend.
Featuring acts of mixed genres and experimental styles, this year’s Hopscotch brought indie royalty such as Spoon, St. Vincent, De La Soul and Mastodon to the main stage at City Plaza as well as about 150 other bands to 12 venues all within a few blocks of each other.
Yvonne Chazal, a junior in mathematics and the 88.1 WKNC promotions manager, said Hopscotch is one of Raleigh’s best musical showcases due to the how the artists are chosen and scheduled to perform.
“A lot of other music festivals are geared toward getting the biggest names possible, but that’s really not the goal of Hopscotch,” Chazal said. “Hopscotch is definitely more geared toward the smaller acts that have something more interesting to show.”
One element that sets Hopscotch apart from other music festivals is the order in which its acts played throughout the night: Headlining bands performed earlier in the evenings, and lesser-known artists played late at night.
“By doing it that way, you get really pumped up for these smaller bands, which is not typical,” Chazal said. “Typically headlining bands perform later than smaller names. It’s a very different feel than the big festivals like Bonnaroo or Coachella.”
The festival began Thursday evening and continued until late Saturday night. The original line-up included 160 bands before a couple of cancellations and last-minute additions. Stockholm-based singer Mapei and Brownsville, New York, rapper Ka cancelled in the weeks prior to the festival, and North Carolina rapper Big Pooh was added to the bill.
Callie Hagemeister, a junior in social work and Hopscotch attendee, said planning for Hopscotch is important for vistors because of the sheer number of musical acts happening over a short period of time.
“I wish I would have planned my visit a little better,” Hagemeister said. “There were so many cool bands I heard about after the shows. If I could do it again I would have researched the bands more beforehand.”
Jim Eno, the drummer of Friday night’s headlining band, Spoon, graduated from NC State in 1989 with a degree in electrical engineering. Spoon is based out of Austin, Texas, formed in 1993 and signed with indie rock label Merge Records in 2000. Eno has been a full time musician since 2006.
Along with having the typical indie rock kind of musicians that frequent most music festivals, the Hopscotch lineup featured a wide range of electronica, experimental, rap and hip-hop performers, offering a different vibe from most music festivals, Chazal said.
“There were a lot of times when I would just walk into a venue not really knowing what I was headed into and I ended up really, really enjoying myself,” Chazal said.
Chazal said the most notable of those experiences occurred during a performance at Fletcher Opera Theater. The band IIII (read “four”), a project conceptualized by five drummers, played a collaborative show with 10 drummers from the Triangle for a one-time experience unique to the 2014 Hopscotch.
“All of the drummers had their own drum set, and they all drummed together,” Chazal said. “It was an incredibly powerful experience just to have that much sound coming at you at once, and just seeing all of them moving together at once, I know I am never going to experience anything like that again.”
NC State’s radio station, 88.1 WKNC, was among Hopscotch’s sponsors, which mainly included promoting and covering the event.
“One of the big things we did was we live broadcasted from Hopscotch’s Wristband City, which is where all of the people who went to Hopscotch went to pick up their passes to get into all of the shows,” Chazal said. “The DJ’s all did their shows from there and did interviews with lots of Hopscotch artists.”
“It was definitely different than I expected,” Hagemeister said. “There usually isn’t anything going on in Raleigh, but I went to Hopscotch for two days and downtown was packed this weekend.”
