A semi-regular look at music festival news, rumor, and gossip

CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival 2009: As college radio directors prepare to descend on New York City for their annual milking of the music industry-PR teat, we here at Festival Watch are left to wonder if we might have missed out on something by not signing up for airtime. We’re not talking about the opportunity to see more than 1,300 live bands (including   Broadcast, Pissed Jeans, and Rahzel). Nope: We’re bummed that we may have been denied, in the words of one former festival participant, a whole bunch of free NYC dinners. Sigh.

For those of you who can afford the $495 dollar ticket price (only $2.62 a band!), registration has been extended through 6 p.m. today. But we’re guessing that if you pay for the badge yourself, you don’t get the free dinners.

Unsound 2009: If you’re in the market for a festival experience that’ll probably cost you more than $500, we’d suggest you check out The Wire-sponsored Unsound festival. This, according to press materials, is a “[m]usic and art festival…with installations, panel discussions, workshops, film screenings and performances from Biosphere, Kode9 & Spaceape, Stars Of The Lid, Monolake, Omar-S, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Grouper, Ikonika, James Blackshaw, 2562, Untold, Deuce DJ Team (Marcel Dettmann & Shed) and more.” Honestly, it sounds pretty rad—and The Wire is an excellent go-to for culture you might have otherwise missed. Trouble is that Unsound takes place in Krakow. Poland. It’s a beautiful place, and we’d definitely suggest that you make the trip. But you’d need to get there by tonight. And, though the roughly 40 Euro admission price is totally doable, the plane fare it would take to get there will probably put this out of most of your respective price ranges.

Maybe we’ll see you there next year?

Blip Festival 2009: In December, New York will also play host to BlipFest, “[t]he world’s premier chip music event.” If that quote (pulled from the event’s Facebook page) isn’t enough to convince you to go get yourself a $40 3-Day Festival Pass—as, apparently, the thing’s organizers, who provided little else in the way of information, thought it would be—we’d direct you to the YouTube-ed trailer for a film called Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet. Think Nintendo.

Lollapalooza 2010: Message board speculators are all a-speculating about who might fill in the line-up cards for next year’s Lollapalooza (it’s not really all that relevant, but, back in high school, we used to call this ‘lots of poor losers’–feel free to dissect that), and, apparently that’s enough for some folks, cause early bird passes to the 2010 version of that festival have completely sold out. The Lolla people say that more tickets won’t be available until spring—with luck, by then interested parties won’t have to rely on guesswork to inform their purchasing decisions.