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ARC Festival | A Conversation With the Founders Ahead of The Inaugural Weekend
Copy of ARC2021\_PHASE2+-EVENT.jpg ![Copy of ARC2021_PHASE2+-EVENT.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56c346b607eaa09d9189a870/1630436730618-GYRZ4VT4IWHT6ZW1ZBU3/Copy+of+ARC2021_PHASE2%2B-EVENT.jpg) This weekend on September 4th and 5th at Union Park in Chicago, [ARC Music Festival](https://arcmusicfestival.com) hosts its inaugural weekend, welcoming house and techno DJs from the city and beyond. ARC brings house music home, hosting one of the first large-scale festivals for the genre in its birthplace. Featured on the lineup are Channel Tres, Detroit next-gen leader DJ Holographic, Lee Foss, Layton Giordani, Toni Varga, as well as heavy-hitters like Adam Beyer, Gene Farris, FISHER, ZHU, and more. In addition to the festivals two-day, four-stage experience (including a special production from Elrow, PSYCHROWDELIC TRIP, and the Arc Car Stage powered by The GoodBus), ARC will host intimate after parties around the city at venues RADIUS, PRYSM, Concord Music Hall, and more. _Flaunt_ caught up with ARC founders John Curley and Stuart Hackley ahead of this landmark weekend to talk about the importance of this festival in Chicago, stories of memorable sets, and what’s to come for this weekend and beyond. **Tell me a little bit about your history with house and techno. How did you first start getting into organizing events.**  **John:** I kind of cut my teeth in the club circuit starting in the early nineties. So, I've been at it for like 30 years and have started producing events in some of the legendary Chicago night clubs over the years. Eventually, I ended up creating a company called Paradigm Presents here in Chicago that focuses on house, techno, underground, and so on and so forth, which kind of brings us to the present.  **Stu**: Well, one thing that's really interesting, John, as well about your background. I think it's important to know the context of where and how. Like the scene really grew and evolved. I know that one thing that you had mentioned to me when we started working together, is the Chicago house scene was really the first time that people who are gay, straight, black, white, everything in between were enjoying a party in one place. Before, the house music scene in Chicago was all very segmented, and this style of music is really what brought people in Chicago together. It was inclusive. That's really what we're pushing for with the spirit of ARC, as well as, you know, obviously times have changed quite a bit, but making sure that we do have that representation under one roof. **John:** What's really changed is that the house techno scene has become a global phenomenon. So the mantra is to bring the global scene here to the birthplace of house music. So it's kind of like bringing it full circle.  **That kind of leads me to the importance of bringing a festival like this to Chicago, and kind of honoring its history in that way.** **John:**  Precisely. A lot of these guys that, you know, were crafting the sound over the years are all from here and they're really big overseas . And the sound certainly is. So I think it's really the right move to try and bring it all together in the city where it was born.  **Stu:** The vision of ARC was really born from seeing the void that Chicago had in a large-scale event, representing the important musical roots of house and all other underground sounds, you know, house, techno, whatever under the umbrella. That was missing, and it's an important part of Chicago's history. It's something that needed to be represented. And that's where ARC came from. It started with John last year around May, June, the summer of the pandemic, really looking at the marketplace and saying, this is missing and we need to put it here. not only from a standpoint of producing a great festival event, but also a cultural piece and an educational piece. These genres are in such an inflection point right now where they're really reaching a point of growth, especially in the USA, where new fans are coming in. New artists are being inspired by the sounds, and it's really coming full circle. It started in Chicago, gained popularity in the U.S., but it really grew much more strong overseas, and especially in Europe where you see these types of sounds dominating and being able to garner such a large amount of interest. And to be able to now see a point in the time of this American music evolution to where we can bring Arc here, attract a global audience, and begin to further kind of educate and drive this culture with the American audience is all part of the mission of ARC. And to then put these Chicago legends and performers—names and artists that this sound wouldn't be here nowadays, if it wasn't for them—to be able to put them back on this platform and really showcase them as a part of this international sound is another part of that ambition that we're looking to achieve. **You're hearing these sounds making their way into pop music—it's becoming totally ubiquitous. How does it feel inaugurating this festival after, as people say, ‘the dance floor has been dark’ for the past year and a half. It feels like you're  bringing the house and techno back into Chicago, but like doing it in an even bigger way than just opening the dance floors back up.** **Stu:** Well when we first started talking about ARC, it started at a smaller scale, not necessarily in the capacities we were targeting, but the lineup we had envisioned. It would have drawn a smaller type of audience. It was a little bit more niche. It was much more deep underground, you could call it. A festival of this size is not necessarily underground in terms of the environment. When we use that term, you think it's an underground warehouse or a tiny club, but when we speak about underground, it encompasses all that music that we're putting on this festival bill. And, when we first started planning, it was much more along those lines. And we kind of said, ‘OK, this is probably an event that maybe draws five to ten thousand people. They're really kind of hardcore fans of this nature. And as this sound kind of grew throughout the pandemic, which is a whole other conversation of how things really just evolved over the last year, we started to look at that and say, ‘OK, well, part of our mission is we really want to help develop and educate the American culture for this and the fans that are here and take current dance music fans that may not know certain artists or are just getting into the more popular American artists like FISHER and Chris Lake and the Diplo's of the world.’ ZHU’s is another good example where they may not necessarily come from a traditionally defined underground world, but they're making music in that lane, and FISHER, at least it's not an American artist themselves, they have a strong popularity with that American fan base. And you see an evolution of some dance music fans that may have come up on the more, you know, festival style scenes and are now maturing into these house and techno sounds. And when we looked at it, we said, ‘We want to be able to bring in all types of fans, whether you're an absolute techno warehouse fan that wouldn't go to anything else. Or if you're a college student that is a big fan of FISHER, but is interested in the more expanded genres of it.’ We want to be able to create new fans out of this and educate everyone on that. And so that's where we started to really look at the lineup and tweak it and say This is the type of festival we want to build. We want to bring good music. We want it to be music-focused where it's artists first and experience first and everything else comes second. That's what's really important for us. And we didn't even look at it from, okay, how can we get 20,000 people here for this festival. It was: who are the artists we think are important to support? How do we want to do this? And everything else followed. ![Copy of ARC_Schedule_Sat-SQ.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56c346b607eaa09d9189a870/1630436832879-KL16P0IBZ5E3YT7OVAA9/Copy+of+ARC_Schedule_Sat-SQ.jpg) ![Copy of ARC_Schedule_Sun-SQ.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56c346b607eaa09d9189a870/1630436835363-644SC6TCDXM4XZSLO2FG/Copy+of+ARC_Schedule_Sun-SQ.jpg) **You say that it's a completely different situation or conversation, but can you briefly touch on why you think it is that this music sort of blew up in the pandemic.**  **Stu:** I wish I had an exact answer. I think there's so many variables. Everything that's happened and is still happening throughout this weird COVID pandemic type situation. Pre-pandemic we were at a point of, I guess you could say, maximization or saturation of sounds that had been trending and popular for quite some time and reaching that peak of where the previous cycles of trends were kind of starting to push in different directions. You started to see some artists in the house and techno world, again like FISHER and some of these names, that were starting to break into this crossover territory. They were developing new fans, and especially in America. I think it was happening a little bit pre-pandemic. And then the biggest thing that I think helped throughout the pandemic is the amount of streams and new music that came out for whatever reason, at least from what we were seeing. Granted, we were really paying attention to these channels a lot more because we were building ARC at the time. The streams and the music that came out, and a lot of what was happening in that digital realm, really favored the house and techno artists. There were streams from bass and electro too. But for whatever reason, just really caught fire in this with the underground artists and managed to help take that up a notch to where once we came out of the pandemic, things really took off. And there were signs of that bubbling beforehand. You know, we work in a lot of markets throughout the U.S. just doing our club shows and other shows. And pre-pandemic we heard people talking about certain house names that really made us kind of step back and say like, oh, wow, like this is trending in these areas. There's something now happening on a national level with this sound. And it's funny, ‘cause we always joke that every year after Miami Music Week for the past 10 years it feels like we always leave saying, ‘This is the year that house and techno are finally going to go.’ There was such a big following for those sounds down there, and I kind of always felt like something was going to happen. But now, this year, it's kind of catching on across all the different demographics that it needs to gain that traction in the U.S. market. **John:** I'd like to add something I noticed really interesting during the pandemic. I can use one of the Chicago artists on our lineup, as an example, is Gene Farris and what the pandemic forced Gene Farris, and a lot of other people, to do is turn to streaming in order to continue to cultivate their audience. And he did it in such a way, I mean, he actually did a weekly stream under the moniker Ferris Wheel, which is his record label. And I think in doing so really broadened the scope of his audience, because it's a global audience. And I remember because we were hosting these streams, and I would monitor the people listening, and it was people from absolutely everywhere, all over the world. Which I think had an effect, sort of like globalizing the audience for some of these artists in particular. **There's such a broader reach of these things now. Even though we're doing live stuff now, I'm still seeing streams. There's this digital realm that has its hands everywhere.**  **I don't know how you feel about picking favorites, but I like to always ask people what one of the best sets they've ever seen is. Ruminate on that.**  **Stu**: I think about that question often. I always think if I were asked what one of my top standouts sets were, what would I say? It's always hard to find them, let me think for a second. **John**: It's totally subjective. It has so much to do with a certain point in time in your life when something really clicked. For me, it was listening to Danny Taneglia at what was then the Winter Music Conference. It wasn't even Ultra. This had to be like in the nineties at one point, playing at a club called Salvage, which is no longer there on South Beach, but it was the first time I ever heard an artist play like a super long set. I mean it had to be like 10 hours or something, and it just kind of really changed my perspective on what can be done, you know? And you've seen more of that now.  **Stu:** Yeah. I think one of mine that really stands out is a set from Green Velvet. I don't remember the year, but it was probably 2016, 2017. There was a hurricane that came through Texas, I think it was like up from Mexico. And this was when I was with a previous company, but there was a festival we had down there. It got canceled due to the hurricane, but it was canceled day-of. So all the artists were in town. We scrambled to put up a lot of after parties in venues that weren't even traditionally known for headliners, and Green Velvet ended up playing this spot. I think it was called Jet Lounge in Houston. Totally like last minute. It was a very cool venue, kind of raw, small, intimate, like 200 cap club vibes, not a lot of lights, but just banging sound, and it all sprung up last minute. Everyone was fried from the festival or from just setting up and taking down the festival, by the time we got to the club, it was midnight, 1:00 AM. All the staff jumped in to help run these shows. I actually took a nap on the opposite side of the DJ booth for about 30 minutes behind the wall of the sub woofer. Don't know how I actually slept, but I did. And this was before Green Velvet went on, and then I got up, crushed a Red Bull, and then jumped right into the show and it ended up going to like four or five AM or something, but it's just one of those moments where it was like, you know, the set was awesome. It was a totally unexpected thing, because the festival was canceled. A lot of artists said, “Screw it, let's go. Let's go play.” And everyone ended up having a good time. The music was great. So it's one of those moments you really remember—turning something out of nothing.  **And you are resurrected by the set after.**  **Stu:** I often tell this story because, first of all, I don’t know how I did it, and second of all it’s just this segment between the nights.  **What can we expect from this PSYCHROWDELIC TRIP production situation?** **Stu:** Yeah, if you haven’t been to an Elrow party, you should go. It’s the most fun party in the world, we say. Elrow is a great partner, we love working with them. They really put you in their own world while you are a part of their experiences. So the PSYCHROWDELIC TRIP, there’s been some teasers about it, it’s a theme that they’ve done before, and you can find some of these pictures and videos online. The name kind of explains it, you know, there’s a VW bus mock up in there, and peace symbols, and trippy visuals, of course a lot of proper lighting.  My words won’t do it justice. I could very easily say that Elrow parties before would be my top sets for the question you just asked. It feels like you are at a house party with thousands and thousands of people. They have performers, they have confetti, the action is nonstop, and it’s constant entertainment. It makes you want to dance, it makes you want to have fun with your friends, and it really takes you into a different experience. So we are happy to have it at the festival as part of that presentation, because we really want to give people multiple experiences and environments within our festival.  **John:** You know when I tried to describe Elrow to people who have never been, I just say it’s like Cirque du Soleil meets a giant rave.  **This being the inaugural ARC festival, what can we expect for the future? I imagine more festivals…** **Stu:** For ARC 2022, we are looking at going bigger, and we are still looking to provide that same mission and experience that we are bringing this year. Great music, really strong production and art experiences, and an immersive fashion door that is all brought together and it’s not just separate throughout the festival, and continuing to build and achieve our mission of educating and helping to build the culture for this music in the United States. Giving the Chicago artists and the other regional artists that were responsible for helping to build these genres the platform that they deserve, and continuing to book really amazing talent that we think is on the cutting edge of these genres and also longly established that are the leading legends. In addition to that, outside of ARC, we are looking to continue to achieve that mission in Chicago in general through our other shows that we operate throughout the market. We are constantly producing shows.They are not all under the ARC name necessarily, it’s from the same team, and ultimately working towards the same goal and mission of building this sound and giving people the opportunity to come see it.  **Any final words?** **John:** I would say, and this is what I say to people coming here, especially people coming in from out of town, is that while you are here, check out the city. It’s an amazing city. While you are at the festival, if you are not familiar with Chicago artists, take the time to check them out. Check out some music you haven’t heard before, and check out the scenery and the city.