Sal's Site

This article was originally published in The Hub during the week of September 14-20 in 2006.

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Fans of some of the best indie rock and roll music in the country will be in heaven soon, when the second annual PYGMALION takes place in Champaign-Urbana on September 20-23.

Created on a whim by Seth Fein, owner and booking agent for The Nicodemos Agency and part-time employee for Jay Goldberg Events and Entertainment, PGYMALION will feature 54 bands at seven different venues ranging from intimate to more spacious.

Venues will include Cowboy Monkey, the Highdive, the Iron Post, Canopy Club, Mike ‘n’ Molly’s, and the Courtyard Cafe at the Illini Union. Playing in these venues will be some of the most exciting national indie acts writing, recording, and touring today. Said acts will include Of Montreal, Salaryman, the Headlights, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, and many more.

Fein came up with the idea of an indie music festival in C-U after a spur-of-the-moment visit with his girlfriend down to Athens, Georgia, where his sister, Erin, was celebrating her birthday and playing a gig with her band, the Headlights, at Athfest, a huge music and arts festival that features more than 100 bands every year.

“I was down there,” Fein said, “and I was like, ‘Champaign-Urbana has just as good of venues, and certainly is even more centrally located than Athens.’”

Fein was already working closely with local C-U venues at the time, so he decided to give PYGMALION a shot. His close relations with indie music contacts nationwide, made possible by his full- and part-time jobs, have no doubt helped his booking clout.

The debut PYGMALION in 2005 was put together in a mere three months, whereas Fein had eight months to plan for the shows this year. Seth Hubbard of Polyvinyl in Champaign, as well as Mike Ingram, were instrumental in promoting the festival nationally, recruiting several artists from Polyvinyl, securing the band lineups, and assisting with the overall production.

Sponsors for this year’s PYGMALION will be Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jack Daniel’s, Caffe Paradiso, Furniture Lounge, Radio Maria, Homeworks, and Pogo Studio.

Fein said he makes it a priority to book top local bands at PYGMALION as well and struggles with which ones to include and pass over.

“My biggest problem is that I’m not able to invite all the bands that I want to invite because there’s only a finite number of slots,” he said.

At the same time, he said PGYMALION is far from a locally focused festival.

“This is a festival where fans from out of town come to Champaign, and we show them a good time,” Fein said.

Fein, who books PYGMALION artists several months in advance of the event, said the local music scene in Champaign-Urbana is as good as anywhere in the country.

“For a town our size, the amount of bands committed to bringing their sound outside of the local realm is pretty astounding,” he said.

Many local bands will take the stage at PYGMALION this year including Triple Whip, The Living Blue, Lorenzo Goetz, Shipwreck, and the Tractor Kings.

A pre-party festival show will take place starting at 8 p.m. on September 19 at the Cowboy Monkey, where Erase Errata will play. An 8 p.m. post-party festival gig will take place at the Iron Post on September 24 with the sounds of Casey Dienel to wrap things up.

Fein said a few surprise acoustic performances will take place at Caffe Paradiso by “very well-known artists,” but he would not reveal the dates and times.

One big local act to catch – perhaps the most anticipated local band playing at PYGMALION this year – will be the rare appearance of Salaryman at the Highdive. The band is made up of Poster Children members Rose Marshack and Rick Valentin who recently released Electric Forest, an electronically oriented album that has been praised as an ambient treasure.

“Rose and Rick are really an inspiration to me and really kind of heroes to me in a lot of ways, so it’s really an honor that they decided to play,” Fein said.

Last year’s PYGMALION drew around 2,200 people who took in 52 indie bands at various venues. As of early September this year, Fein said more than 50 festival passes have been sold, a number that has surpassed last year’s total. Bigger crowds will likely infiltrate PYGMALION 2.0, Fein said, with more people coming to C-U from out of town. Fein said festival passes have been purchased from as far away as Arkansas and Minnesota.

Fein believes the integrating of local acts with national ones at PYGMALION can only be a good things, something that could raise the profile of music in Champaign-Urbana.

Fein, who writes a column for Buzz, a weekly newspaper run by students at the University of Illinois, has immense respect for committed local bands such as The Living Blue, Lorenzo Goetz, the Headlights, and Beauty Shop.

“Bands who have put their lives on hold to be musicians, I love that,” Fein said. “The more of those that we have, the healthier the music scene is going to be.”

“Bands who have put their lives on hold to be musicians, I love that. The more of those that we have, the healthier the music scene is going to be.”

-Seth Fein

Fein himself played drums and toured in the renowned Absinthe Blind, a lush-sounding C-U band that lasted from 1996 to 2003. When fully dedicating himself to that project grew tiresome and he no longer wanted to be away from his girlfriend for long stretches on tour, Fein decided to take up the organizational component of the music business, a place in which he felt he could help many up-and-coming bands succeed.

Indie rock festivals in the mold of PYGMALION are generally put on in cities much larger than Champaign-Urbana, Fein noted. The musical breadth of PYGMALION is much smaller than South by Southwest in Austin and the CMJ Music Festival in New York City, for example.

But at the dawn of just its second year, PYGMALION has already established itself as a force that has come to fruition and is making itself known to indie music fans nationwide.

The Future of PYGMALION

The 26-year-old Fein is adamant that he will not cater to older crowds by booking non-indie acts at PYGMALION, at least not in the near future. Indie rock bands are his focus, especially as the event continues to establish itself as a budding haven for independently minded rock bands that want to travel to C-U and play gigs every fall.

Booking hip hop acts, however, has captured Fein’s interest and will likely be a reality at future PYGMALION events.

“Hip hop is the most important kind of music that we have in America without question,” Fein said. “It’s the most popular genre, and some of the most innovative and creative stuff is happening in hip hop, more so than rock.”

Though much more legwork would be required, Fein has also toyed with the idea of expanding PYGMALION festivities to include film showings at the Virginia Theatre, a venue he loves.

Inviting indie rock bands that have the potential to draw well at Virginia Theatre is also an attractive option to Fein as he considers future PYGMALION festivities.