Not exactly known to be ahead in the trends, Indianapolis is but only a blip on the electronic music radar. Bryan Luellen, Jack Shepler and Emily Pennington are trying to change that with their new promotions group, sideTrack. The group hosts PLUSH on Thursdays at Therapy nightclub, and will put on Foreplay, a pre-party for Indy Pride.
Here Luellen addresses a few of the essentials:
What is sideTrack?
sideTrack is the group that we're (using) to kind of diversify the electronic music scene a little bit. Trying to get people in the gay scene interested in live music and other people that are not really involved in the scene to reach out and get some new influences.
How healthy is the Indy scene?
There's an amazing amount of DJs, but the scene right now is really self-contained. There aren't people that are really interested in electronic music that don't DJ. Basically DJs are playing for each other, which is a really weird dynamic.
Has electronic music caught on in Indy like other places?
I think that bigger cities have more of an understanding that electronic music is actually a real music genre. I feel that the attitude in Indy is that it's all the same. It's just the one boring beat. In other cities like L.A. and New York and Chicago people go out to hear electronic music and dance.
How are you going to get people to your events?
MySpace is a great tool. And really we've just been hitting it pretty hard and going out several times a week and running into people and really trying to create a buzz.