The inaugural Sound Tracks Festival will bring music on the move to the core of the East London Line and a handful of select venues en route. That includes live acoustic music on the trains themselves!
The co-organisers, designer Amanda Lwin and music producer Carolina Garcia Huerta, were inspired by the site-specific gigs of Black Cab Sessions and La Blogotheque.
With a single wristband (and an Oyster card), commuting gig-goers will be able to hop from one music stop to the next, with live performances in transit to fill the gaps in between. Sound Tracks promises that the main ‘stages’ – Dalston’s Café Oto, Concrete in Shoreditch and the Amersham Arms of New Cross – are all under 3 minutes walk from their respective stations, ‘making it speedier to travel from one stage to another than at Glastonbury!’ A sort of Playbus for music lovers then, albeit via rail track.
Herself a Dalston resident, Lwin found the cultural cachet of the new Overground line irresistible: ‘If the head of TFL were a hipster, this is the line he would build.’ Yet even with this gift of infrastructure, it’s easy to get parochial: ‘It’s 22 minutes from Dalston to New Cross and people think it’s a world away.’ The organisers are determined to challenge the infamous north/south divide, performing some ‘hipster outreach’ whilst celebrating the unique character of each locale – so you’ll find jazz and soul in E8, dubstep and electro in E1 (including a DJ set from Mercury Prize nominee Ghostpoet) and SE14 will stay true to its punk and indie roots.
On the train tracks, expect a more mixed up line up, ‘from the Ukulele Club to a harpist, a few singer songwriters, soul vocalists…’ All acts are acoustic to minimise disruption to passengers not out to party-on on the platform.‘Ambient sounds like announcements and the noise of the tracks are all be part of the live experience,’ Lwin insists. ‘Leave your ipods at home!’
By Kirsty McQuire
Soundtracks is tomorrow, Saturday 17th September 2011 from 7-11pm. Multi-venue wristbands are £12.50 in advance and can be collected at participating venues from 6pm. Single venue tickets are also available on the door.
