Farmer & The Owl co-owner Jeb Taylor visited New York to check out the New Colossus Festival and Conference in March. Here is what he had to say about the event.
The music industry conference/showcase has been an important step for emerging and ambitious artists to connect with and showcase to industry representatives, and there are many successful results from this over the years, more on that later. However it has increasingly become harder to get noticed at the larger events such as SXSW and The Great Escape, young artists are playing at the same time as twenty other similar stage artists and then The Strokes will decide to do a secret show to promote a new single to the gathered media and industry. Enter New Colossus Festival in New York.
I was a regular at SXSW(Austin) and The Great Escape(Brighton) through the 2010’s but I haven’t been back to either since the pandemic (I did get to SXSW in Sydney and have been to a few Bigsound’s since then). While they all have their purpose, they have become very daunting for emerging artists unless they are one of the most hyped artists on the program.
Last year I was looking ahead to 2026 wondering if I should attend any of these events, and as I wasn’t getting to excited about the main two. I was very keen to check out New Colossus, I’d nearly got there in 2020, but lock downs kicked in that week! Thankfully the Australian Independent Record Label Association (AIR) were providing grants for labels to attend conferences like this and they helped me get to New York.
Back in 2015, a crew of us from Wollongong went over with Hockey Dad for the CMJ music conference in New York. It would prove valuable experience for the young band at that time but also for a lot of us working with them early in their career. By this time CMJ was big and spread across Manhattan and Brooklyn. The heart of it though was in Manhattan’s lower east side, a lot of the venues I attended back then were used for New Colossus this year. That year at CMJ was the first time I met Lio from Kanine Records, he would go on to work with Hockey Dad in the USA for many years and is one of the founders of New Colossus Festival. He is a huge music fan, and I knew with him as one of main drivers of the event it would be well curated.
The curation and boutique size of New Colossus is where it differs from most other similar events. While the line up is diverse, guitar music is at its heart and the shoegaze, dream pop, post punk and like-minded sounds are prevalent. The fact there is only three or four bands on at the same time, means the bands play to decent crowds. I saw a lot of bands over three days so it’s hard to pick highlights but definitely keep a lookout for Makara from Thialand, Lucid Express from Hong Kong, UK bands Winter Garden and Magda, Hause Plants from Portugal, Sundayclub from Canada and a special shout out to Winter McQuinn who was representing Australia and is signed to fellow local label Third Eye Stimuli.
The panels/conference side of this happened during the first three days in daylight hours, all in the one location so there was no competing events. I managed to catch an interesting panel talk on the UK live music scene and then a great talk on indie labels and where things are at in the indie label world with representatives from Domino, Secretly Group, Kanine Records and more.
Overall this has been a great experience in the showcase/conference world and I’d recommend any bands ready to take that step to look at this event next year as a first option. I’ll try and get back next year for sure!
