Festival producer talks turning Adult Swim’s prolific relationships with musicians right into a must-see occasion.
Cartoon Network’s late-night programming, Adult Swim, isn’t any stranger to music collaborations and plans to carry these bountiful relationships to Los Angeles for the first-ever Adult Swim Festival. From Oct. 5-7, Adult Swim will take over Row in Downtown Los Angeles for 3 days of comedy, music and immersive activations for lovers of hit exhibits like Rick and Morty, Aqua Teen Hunger Force and extra.
“This is our first time doing a competition and we actually needed it to signify how Adult Swim feels on the air. The truth is, music and comedy are each the issues that folks establish with Adult Swim,” svp/inventive director for Adult Swim On-Air, Jason DeMarco, tells Billboard.
The Adult Swim Festival lineup weaves collectively comedy and musical headliners with high spots going to Broad City’s Hannibal Buress, hip-hop group Run The Jewels, standup comic Jena Friedman, and rapper T-Pain.
Other headliners embrace Neko Case, Mastodon, Zola Jesus, Thundercat, Big Freedia and Code Orange. Comedians Jo Firestone, Joe Para, Ahmed Bharoocha and Nick Rutherford are additionally set to carry out.
“Numerous the bands that we work with are big comedy followers and they’re already form of working collectively, whether or not it’s by way of us or on their very own. For us, it felt like we may do it in a extra natural means than it has ever been achieved,” DeMarco provides.
Neko Case has labored with Adult Swim since 2010 when she voiced the titular character of animated sequence Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fantabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge.
Back in 2010, co-creator of Adult Swim “Dave Willis got in touch with me to see if I would do the voice for Cheyenne. I screamed ‘yes!’ I went to Williams St. in Atlanta and had the best time despite the fact that I had just broken my ankle and had to leave a tour,” Case tells Billboard. “We are all music and TV nerds, so we keep in touch.”
Case went on to create the theme music for Adult Swim sequence Squidbillies and tells Billboard it was no-brainer signing as much as be a part of the Adult Swim Festival.
“Who doesn’t love to see the artists they love from different mediums and genres cross over?! And right in front of you at a special, local event!?” Case tells Billboard. “It’s the best of everything and I’m so thrilled Adult Swim are doing it. I hope other people get inspired by this because if I trust anyone to make it fun and joyous, it’s them.”
“We really wanted our first year to be a family affair,” DeMarco says. “We reached out to artists that we had a very comfortable, long-term working relationship with. Virtually everyone on the bill, whether it is a comedian or a band or musician, are people that we’ve worked with extensively or have some sort of simpatico with already.”
T-Pain produced a musical particular for Adult Swim referred to as Freaknick: The Musical. Flying Lotus has produced a lot of the bumper music, or music clips used between programming, for Adult Swim.
DeMarco launched Jaime “El-P” Meline and Michael “Killer Mike” Render, who make up rap duo Run The Jewels in 2011 and the pair have contributed a number of singles to Adult Swim Singles Program, which releases curated free music yearly. The Adult Swim Singles Program has additionally premiered music from Mastodon.
“For the first couple of months of the Adult Swim singles this year (it runs for 52 weeks), the artists are all artists that are part of the festival,” says DeMarco. “We’re really tying the two together just because over the last eight years the Adult Swim singles have gotten 20 million SoundCloud streams. The average song gets streamed about 2 ½ million times a week. It has been good for everybody on board.”
In addition to the 2 levels vacillating between comedy and music, the competition will function curated experiences for Adult Swim followers. The Rick and Morty Musical Ricksperience, that includes a stay 37-piece orchestra the place, Ryan Elder, the composer behind Rick and Morty’s music will crew up with a sequence of particular friends to current fan-favorite tracks from the present performed stay in sync with an episode.
The Meatwad Dome might be in roughly 10-minute experience the place the Aqua Teen Hunger Force character takes followers by way of a sweet world. Festivalgoers can step away from the levels to experience an enormous hotdog like a mechanical bull or take part within the Dream Corp VR expertise, which is a VR game based mostly on present, Dream Corp, LLC.
“We want it to feel like a big fun carnival as opposed to just another giant music festival where you’re either eating or looking at music and that’s it,” DeMarco says. “The lines are going to be blurrier than you would normally see at another festival which I think is perfectly on brand for Adult Swim.”
For extra info on the Adult Swim Festival, head here. Check out the Adult Swim Festival playlist here.
