All photos by excellent person Nick Cusworth.
Imagine, if you will, the following situation: it is hot outside, let’s make it 85f (that’s around 30c, I’m sorry non-US comrades, I have been converted) but, under the sun, it feels much hotter. You’re also standing on asphalt so that doesn’t help, plus there’s a bunch of people around you. Let’s imagine too that you have been standing all day and, how shall we put it, you’re no longer the youngest of the sparrows in the nest. You’re also not home and to be honest, you think you might be coming down with something. And yet, all of these things considered, you have a huge, stupid grind on your face.
You are flooded with endless joy because you are not only watching one of your all time favorite bands playing live, you are also doing it alongside two of your best friends. And on top of that, you are doing it in Indianapolis, a city you didn’t know much about until you visited (except that Kurt Vonnegut lived there, which is a ringing endorsement as far as you’re concerned) and you’ve since fell in love with. In short, you are having a grand old time and it appears as if nothing can touch you or spoil your mood. What’s more, you can already feel this bright, resonant energy radiating out towards the future, turning into a deep sediment of joy and contentment which you will be able to draw on to comfort you. Imagine all of that for me, if you will, as it encapsulates everything I experienced at this year’s Post. Festival.
That’s right, we have dropped the obvious pretense: I wasn’t talking about you at all, I was talking about me! This year, I finally got the chance to attend Post. Festival, on July 25th to the 27th. I say finally because I was supposed to attend it all the way back in 2018 but couldn’t make it due to general fatigue and anxiety. This year, everything conspired to help me get there: first, I live in the US now, so traveling to Indy involved two and a half hours of flight over the eastern seaboard of the US instead of eleven over the Atlantic ocean. Secondly, my good friends Nick and Jon from the blog were also going to attend, making the prospect that much sweeter. And lastly, the setlist was absolutely insane. No, more insane than that. MORE INSANE! It had not one but two bucket list bands for me, sleepmakeswaves and And So I Watch You From Afar, alongside friends who were playing in Outrun the Sunlight, Man Mountain and Wess Meets West. Oh, and also REZN and The Ocean and Caspian and Maserati and a lot of other bands I didn’t know. I told you it was insane.
However, even with that prodigal list in mind, my expectations were far exceeded. That’s a bit of an understatement – I was truly blown away. At the core of this amazement, and at the core of the experience itself, was of course the music. Not only was the sound at the venue (the incredibly fun and well thought out Hi-Fi Indy) excellent but every single band brought their A-game to the fest. It was probably helped and motivated by the fact that they all genuinely seemed excited to be there – any festival dedicated to post-rock and metal is a bit of a rarity today, let alone a festival as big and well attended as this one. Which was the second thing I was amazed by: the level of organization and execution on the side of the Post. Festival crew was astounding. Not only did shows start and end on time, in the vast majority of sets, everything else went off without a hitch: lines weren’t too long, the facilities were all well stocked and maintained, and in general everything just felt effortless. I’m sure it wasn’t – running something like this is a nightmare, the knowledge of which makes the whole thing that much more impressive.
Like the last time I attended a festival set in the city, the city itself ended up being one of my favorite things, rounding off this list. Indianapolis is a fascinating place, filled with layers and layers of its past. You can see the recent, and massively accelerated by COVID, gentrification, new (and almost invariably ugly) houses overlaid over the more traditional (and more modest) construction in the city. But you can also glimpse its fierce pride in its art scene (and especially its musical scene) and the eras of its earlier prosperity, especially around the Gilded Age and the boom of the 1920’s. In fact, much of the architecture and design style that are still on display in the city, especially at its center, is from that period – bright red fonts, striped signs filled with lights, and, everywhere, the sensibilities of cars, racing, and sports. Combine that with the city’s aforementioned pride in itself, in standing out and in individual expression, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for unique locations everywhere, from book shops, through stores, and all the way to restaurants.
Speaking of which, the food was simply incredible. Everywhere I ate I found a kitchen influenced by a multitude of kitchens, from Dutch pancakes to one of the best wraps I ever ate (shout-out to Love Handle, I miss you already), garnished with peaches who left me wanting to recite poetry in their name. The festival also did amazing work partnering with the local businesses around it, making us feel welcome everywhere we went. Especially Turchetti’s Delicatessen & Meat Market, a wonderful little spot just outside the venue which hosted the pre-festival mixer and which became a sort of field HQ for us, a welcome place for a break and something cold to drink when the heat got to be too much for us.
OK, you didn’t come here for food recommendations (though seriously, check out Love Handle if you’re in town) – you came here for music! Luckily, I got the chance to see some great shows during the festival but I also got the chance to interview the musicians I was most excited to meet and ask them about this weird and wonderful thing we were attending/witnessing. First up was Rory Friers, from And So I Watch You From Afar. Grateful to be seating on a comfortable couch with the AC blaring in the green room of the Hi-Fi, I skipped the boring questions as I usually do (no one really needs to know how the band met, mate) and clove to the core of it – what keeps post-rock going? What is at the core of this uplifting, jubilant, and energetic gathering of people that we were a part of and, more importantly, how do you stay optimistic in the face of, you know, the world as it is?
Eden: I have this thread I’ve been chasing: sleepmakeswaves talked about it yesterday when they played Love of Cartography, which is their most jubilant album. That got me thinking about 65 Days of Static. How they quit, basically. And when they quit, they said they’re too depressed to make happy post-rock and math-rock. And then you have All Hail Bright Futures. It’s kind of the jubilant pillar in your career. What’s the emotional makeup that you put into your music today? What do you think about when you look back at that happy palette of All Hail Bright Futures? Is that gone or is it somewhere else out here?
Rory: That’s interesting. I mean, I feel when we were making All Hail, it felt like it was like a symptom of an optimism with us. We weren’t necessarily in a, like, super, super happy place.
But we were striving to, like, you know…the future. And so we decided with that record, we wanted to do something completely different. It felt easy to just churn out another Gangs. In some respects, that’s what I always want my favorite band to do, I just want them to stay the same as my favorite band. But then being in a band, that’s not how it feels.
And so with our record, yeah, we just were like, this is the idea. This is what we want to do. This is the atmosphere and the environment that we want to create. This is what it’s going to look like and sound like.
And we just went ballistic. I think it probably shocked a few people whenever they first heard it. But that’s kind of what we wanted to do. And we try and do that with each record, stick to the thing we want to create and do.
That idea, of an optimism for the future rather than some sort of deluded current happiness, struck a deep chord with me. It was interesting, since I had chatted with Rory on the first day, it sort of transformed my perspective of the next two days to come. It seems to me that, fittingly, All Hail Bright Futures captured a lot of the same energy that was driving the festival as well, a sort of power in holding on to the things you want to do and how you’d like the future to be and pushing that into your art. But All Hail Bright Futures was released years ago now and ASIWYFA have a new album out. How does Megafauna fit into all of this? I wanted to know if there was something to be gleaned from the newer record about the flood of emotions I was experiencing.
Eden: So when you were building up to Megafauna, the PR text mentioned lockdowns and COVID and so on. Do you think about it as a “plague album”?
Rory: In some respects. You know, the environment that we wrote in was very isolated. It was the four of us in an old linen mill in Belfast where our rehearsal space was. We were sort of the only people we were getting to hang out with. And so, it’s weird to say, but it was, as much as that was a hard time, it was quite enjoyable. It was like the four of us, yeah, hidden in this room, hanging out, being friends.
Eden: And no one could interfere even if they wanted to.
Rory: Yes, exactly. And so we wrote this record. But the thing we were thinking of the entire time was all these people who we missed, we weren’t getting to see our friends, our families. We weren’t getting to be in our hometown. We live in Belfast, but where our home is, it’s on the North Coast. We weren’t able to go up there. And so the conversations in the rehearsal room were alway ”oh, you know, whenever we get to see these people, oh, do you remember that story of, you know, so -and -so, oh, these times”.
Eden: Which is also the future, right?
Rory: Yeah. So future and past, you know, thinking about all these relationships. And so Megafauna; that was our descriptor for all these great people in our lives. They were our one big organism.
Needless to say, I emerged transformed from that conversation, with my chest and head feeling even bigger than before, an enlargement of emotion that made me feel like the entire festival was my community. And it was; even if I had never posted anything in the Facebook group (which I have), knew none of these people by name (which I do, some of them), we were still all part of this great community, united in our love of this genre(s) of music. And the festival, both the bands and the organizers, constantly made it their job to remind us of that. I have never heard musicians, organizers, people selling merch, just everyone, always repeating that we’re all in this together, that we should take care of each other, that they were so grateful we were there. I’ve never seen so many people hug organizers of thi, like they did the organizers of this one. It felt like they knew everyone and, in a sense, they did. And so did I and was known in turn; it was truly a coming together of a community.
The next person I got to talk to was my good friend Austin Peters from Outrun the Sunlight. I’ll post the full interview on our Patreon (by the way, reminder that that’s a thing) because it was a fascinating and often funny conversation, but there was one part of it that really stands out to me when I listen back to it. After a brief aside on meditation, which is a big part of Peters’ body of work, and its relationship with music, we alighted on this idea of being lost in the moment while playing or listening to post-rock. A lot of the ideas of losing oneself in the moment but being completely present at the same time, not an out-of-body experience but rather a deep enmeshment, really captures how I felt during those three days.
Eden: I just wrote this essay about how being in a crowd is an experience of being alone and together at the same time and that’s something like being on stage as well. Would you agree with that?
Austin: Yeah it’s similar to being alone, being alone together, which I think is a beautiful thing. It’s like full sanity in a way, that’s how I think children move in the world. Oftentimes I think children are the most sane beings on the face of the earth, so it’s like that, this childlike energy . It’s being alone together. By the way, I’ll say I kind of disagree with describing it as an out-of-body experience. That’s something I actually experience when I’m in my head.
If I’m in my body, I’m meditating. I’m in the moment, I’m fully in it, and that’s how I felt on stage today. Actually, that’s not true, there was a moment today where I was having an issue with my board where all my tones, all my clean channels were coming out distorted, and that threw me for a second, and I don’t know if the audience could feel it, but I could feel myself come out of the performance to be thinking, “how do I fix this?”
Luckily, the answer came really quickly, and then I immediately was like “okay, in the next break, I’m just gonna reset the device” and then that ended up fixing it, and it was a really simple solution. But it was one of those things where I could literally feel myself come out of the experience of being on stage and into my head in real time.
As far as the interviews went, the best was yet to come for me. I have said several times on the blog that I consider sleepmakeswaves’s Love of Cartography to be the greatest post-rock album of all time, and I stand behind that. The rest of their discography is no joke and all of that comes together to make them one of my favorite bands around. I was giddy then to get to talk with Otto (guitars) and Alex (bass/keyboards). It was especially fitting that the interview happened later in the festival, as it allowed me time to reflect on my talks with Rory and Austin, and think how I’d want to revisit the same questions. The first main one was a direct continuation, as I asked the guys where they landed on the question of optimism, vibrancy, and jubilation in post-rock:
Eden: I wanted to touch on something you said on-stage Alex, the optimism of Love of Cartography. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m actually going to write an essay about it.
Recently, 65daysofstatic quit and one of the reasons they gave when they did is that they’re depressed; the world is a mess and the future is uncertain and they can’t find that energy anymore, to make explosive, boisterous albums. I was talking to Rory from And So I Watch You From Afar, they also have that kind of album, also from 2014 by the way, All Hail Bright Futures, that’s optimistic and vibrant and so on. And you guys are still around. How do you feel with those energies? Are you still struggling to find that optimism? Or is it coming back now? Where does all that find you?
Alex: We probably sit in the middle. I think that we don’t like the world a great deal to be honest. We probably have a foot in the 65daysofstatic camp, where things are kind of depressing and we do kind of live in a boring dystopia. But I think, for some reason, we don’t want to make that the core of our musical output and funnily enough, I think looking back on Made of Breath Only has made me realize that lot of the sadness of that record was more just personal things that we’re all going through at the time.
For me personally at least, the pandemic in Australia changed how I related to being in the band a lot because it changed the rhythm of life. We couldn’t play to the same extent, we couldn’t go on tour and I went and did other things with my life and came back to playing shows afterwards with a very different energy. Even if our outlook on the world isn’t necessarily that everything’s great, maybe for me my relationship to the band is a positive one. I feel really happy that we still get to do this. We’re coming up on like close to 20 years of being a band and there’s still life in the old girl, that’s a reason for me to smile.
Otto: I think the world is a scary place and getting scarier and there’s a lot of reason to fall into cynicism and despair. But I found my relationship with music to be one of immense healing and restoration and of beauty. I think finding love and beauty in the darkness is the task for all of us. And if that takes the form of this ridiculous post rock band and traveling around and getting into trouble with these guys, then I didn’t really choose that but it shows me it still has power.
One direction I didn’t expect this conversation to go towards was me finally getting a good answer for what makes Australian post-rock the way it is. I’ve been pondering that over the years of covering their scene, whether it be the off-kilter, intense musicality of SEIMS, the sweeping grandeur of We Lost the Ocean, or, indeed, the power and bounce of sleepmakeswaves. Interestingly, Alex volunteered an explanation right from this point in the conversation:
I think post-rock is very self -serious music and I’m not denying that we do that as well but we’re Australian and we come from a culture where like you don’t really want to be too serious. We really connected with the approach of And So I Watch You From Afar when we saw them for the first time, we found that really inspiring and I think we wanted to take the way that they brought, a sort of different irreverence. It was really fun to find a space where stuff that was very stern and serious could coexist with stuff that was, you know, big dumb riffs and just happy loud noise for the sake of happy loud noise and I think making that stuff coherent, making those different aspects of our personality musically into something that works is a really cool and interesting challenge.
Otto: One of the advantages of being in the situation we are, which is that this is essentially a wonderful, glorified hobby for us, is that we don’t feel the pressure to abide by the kind of restrictions that a band in a different position would be. We are at the liberty of being able to unleash ourselves and do weird shit/ Sometimes it goes really well, sometimes it doesn’t, but at the end of the day we’ve still got a back catalog. That we come back to and play for people. Playing live is still a big core of the band. It’s still important for us to deliver the show and I think it’s great to be in this situation.
Jim Ward (At the Drive-in, Sparta) last night said something really beautiful which was that he tried at some stages in his career to feel like he was in this real peak. Everyone was talking about the band and it was really big. But then he found out he’s really happy down here with us, playing the music, in this spot where you can play rooms like we do and really enjoy it and feel connected to the core of what we’re doing. That’s just trying to create art.
By the end of my interview with sleepmakeswaves, I was on cloud nine. The festival had been everything I had wanted and more. I could keep going on and on about what made it wonderful (like the people who walked up to me to tell me how much they like Heavy Blog or the wonderful merch I got to buy) but I would really like to make sure above resonates as the main point of this essay. Post Fest. is all about that beautiful feeling of making art and sharing it with others; in fact, I have never been to a festival that was more about that, and I’ve been to multiple ones across the globe at this point. Everything except what made it all worth it, namely the music and getting the time to spend it with people who love it just as much as you do, was stripped away, the gimmicks, cash-grabs, lines, and frustrations all pushed to the side by the organizers to make room for what matters most – the music.
Aha! And that of course is my segue to the actual last part of this essay – the rapid fire round! It would take me tens of thousands of words to give every show I saw during the festival its own review and I don’t want to do that. But, on the other hand, there were so many great acts playing that I feel like I would be remiss if I only left some of them as mentions above or omitted them entirely. So, therefore, it is time to do a rapid fire round! Below, I’m going to mention all those I would like to mention (that is, not an exhaustive list of every band) and give them a few sentences or maybe even less reviewing their show. Let’s go!
Girih – we’ve covered these guys multiple times on the blog before so I was excited to see what they had for us. This was probably my favorite “noisey” set – absolutely cavernous and present post-metal done exceptionally well.
sleepmakeswaves (set #1 – Love of Cartography in full) – no words. If you’re in Australia, go see this show. It was absolutely delightful to get to sing along to these tracks out loud. Shout to Otto who could see from the stage that I knew every single drum fill. A highlight of my life.
The Ocean – it’s The Ocean. If you haven’t seen The Ocean live, you are messing up. I am not the biggest fan of their latest albums but they made them feel electric and absolutely necessary. One of the best live bands in post and metal spaces right now.
The Color of Cyan – extremely promising stuff from these guys, who I didn’t know at all before this. Great structure, good groove, and great usage of the violin. Excited to dig deeper into their work!
Chew – the first act in the festival that made me go “what the fuck”. A duo making absolute mincemeat of keyboards, guitars, and drums. Holy fuck those drums! Probably one of the best “forceful” drum solos I’ve ever heard. If you like kicking, biting psychedelic stuff, this is for you. Exceptional.
Outrun the Sunlight – the boys! Can’t wait to head out to Chicago and catch them headlining. Very impressive that their complex post-rock and metal translate so well to the stage; phenomenal stage energy and vibes.
And So I Watch You From Afar – second time catching these guys at a festival, I have to see a full show at some point. I can’t explain to you how it feels for me to hear these songs live; like an explosion of light in my legs. I danced so hard. It was so good.
REZN – maybe the best young American doom band in operation to do? Certainly the best live show. Holy smokes these guys rule, second time I’ve seen them and I want to see them at least twenty more. Putting them on the smaller, darker, in door stage was absolutely the move. The energies were impeccable.
Caspian – it’s Caspian. Go see Caspian live. Right now. Bring tissues.
Hiroe – I couldn’t attend this one but Nick and Jon told me it was great and they’d be mad if I didn’t include a shout out. I’ve listened to their music since then and it’s just as good as the show sounded!
The Supervoid Choral Ensemble – second act that made me go “what the fuck” and it was also a duo. Doom but it’s also math rock? And metal? It’s super hectic, I can tell you that. And fucking amazing.
Man Mountain – another show where the indoor stage absolutely played in the bands favor. I think these guys are crazy underrated (as you can tell by the amount of times I’ve covered them on the blog) and hearing their chunky bass live was a true joy. American post-rock as it should be made and performed live.
Wess Meets West – I wasn’t entirely sure how the more dreamy post-rock of these guys would translate to the stage but they absolutely killed it. Getting to meet them and Man Mountain at the merch table was also lovely. Brilliant people making brilliant music.
Maserati – a lot of fun! Something in the repetitiveness of the music worked super well live, creating atmosphere and groove that was really hard to resist.
sleepmakeswaves (set #2) – wordless crying and gesturing
Now we are done! Please be good to each other. Please continue celebrating this miracle called music. Please don’t listen when people say that post-rock is dead. Please come to Post Fest. next year. I will be there for sure.
