IN CONCERT
Rifflandia festival featuring the Flaming Lips, Mother Mother, Everlast, Dan Mangan, Sloan, DJ Shadow, Saul Williams, Austra, F--ked Up, and more
When: Thursday through Sunday
Where: Royal Athletic Park, Alix Goolden Performance Hall, Club 9ONE9 and more
Tickets: $60-$295 at rifflandia.com, Lyle's Place, and Ditch Records
And so it begins.
The fifth annual Rifflandia festival gets underway at 8: 30 tonight, the kickoff to four days of programming with rock, rap and electronic music all under one conceptual umbrella.
Rifflandia will dominate Victoria's downtown core over the weekend, with Royal Athletic Park sets by the Flaming Lips, Sloan, Cake, Mother Mother and Everlast balancing out dozens of sets over three nights at Market Square, Lucky Bar, Club 9ONE9 and more.
Nine venues are in play, with seven in action simultaneously at any given point during the night. That pace means a lot of advance planning for festival director Nick Blasko, who said his team went back to the drawing board heading into this weekend.
"We realized last year we needed to expand a lot of our departments and organizational structure. I've learned how to delegate properly and give certain departments ownership over certain things. In all of the areas, we've had to learn how to handle things and get better at it."
With help from a crew of 450 volunteers, nearly 50 per cent more than last year, Blasko hopes things will run smoothly. However, some situations are beyond his control. The L.A. duo Best Coast has cancelled its appearance, for reasons that remain unclear to Blasko.
He also had to readjust his schedule to account for the loss of Sugar nightclub, advertised as the site of Friday night's showcase headline by Polaris Music Prize winners F--ked Up. The Yates Street club is currently under renovation and will not re-open in time for the festival.
F--ked Up, along with four other acts, will now perform at Soprano's on Caledonia Avenue.
Venues have been added and subtracted from the concert calendar this year, too. The lot at Phillips Brewery is not being used, and for the first time since the 2010 festival, Market Square is on deck as the festival's secondary outdoor venue.
These are minor ripples, according to Blasko. When a potential crowd of 7,000 gathers Friday night at Royal Athletic Park for the Grammy-winning Flaming Lips, the group's madcap performance will wash away all concerns.
"This is unprecedented in Victoria," he said of the appearance by Flaming Lips, singer Wayne Coyne's notoriously theatrical artrock group from Oklahoma. "The amount of lights, video screens, dancers and confetti - this will be the spectacle of the year. Everything that they have become famous for, they are doing it all in Victoria."
Rifflandia runs Thursday through Sunday at various venues. Tickets and information are available at rifflandia.com.
Follow sa国际传媒 reporters Amy Smart and Mike Devlin on Twitter for live coverage of Rifflandia: @tc_vicarts
