Slingshot | Friday, Oct. 1 & Saturday, Oct. 2, 7 p.m., $25 | The Fruit, Durham 

“So it’s basically a mini-Moogfest?” each and every one of us wondered, not unfairly, when we heard about Slingshot, which makes its local debut at The Fruit on the first weekend of October.

Both festivals focus on electronic music, art, and technology. Both moved to Durham from other Southeastern cities. Both feature Kai Riedl in a leading role.

The likeness is undeniable, but the shared history is more layered than it might seem. For one thing, Slingshot predates Riedl’s time at Moogfest. In fact, it got him hired there, and you might just as well say that Moogfest was a maxi-Slingshot for much of its time in Durham.

In the late nineties and early aughts, Riedl played in Macha, a band from Athens, Georgia that featured future Deerhunter guitarist Josh McKay. They made waves on college radio by infusing American post-rock with Indonesian folk music, though I’ll always remember them most for their Postal Service-y cover of Cher’s “Believe” with the band Bedhead in 2000. Even with the melody typed on a touchtone phone, it was a bellwether of the Auto-Tuned poptimist era of indie music to come—and of Riedl’s far-spanning curatorial ambit.

Slingshot started small in 2013, with a Kickstarter, Macha, and a few other bands.

“There’s a strong DIY culture in Athens, and everybody was going to Austin to play South by Southwest and bemoaning it as it got too large,” Riedl says. “I looked around and thought, we can do everything we need right here.”

Riedl says that he was aware of Moogfest, which had been happening in Asheville, 150 miles away, for several years, but he had never gone.

At the time, he was pursuing a PhD involving music and tech at the University of Georgia, a worldview that also informed Slingshot. He did take notice in 2014, though, when Moogfest was importing expensive European icons like Kraftwerk to the North Carolina mountains.

“Oh my god, we could never compete with that,” Riedl remembers thinking.

Nevertheless, from 2013 to 2016, Slingshot grew from a one-day concert to a multi-day, multi-venue festival with city support. It drew in big names like James Murphy and Jamie xx alongside tastemakers’ favorites like Holly Herndon. In 2015, before Moogfest started its four-year run in Durham, its only presence was a presentation at Slingshot in Athens.

When the festival offered Riedl a job as executive director in 2017, there was an undeniable logic to freeing himself from the fundraising cycle, which he did for three years, until Moogfest imploded into its current lawsuit-choked limbo.

After Moogfest, Riedl rolled up his sleeves again with a new creative and business partner, Vivek Boray. They started envisioning how to relaunch Slingshot in Durham, a city much like Athens, both in its rich DIY principles and embryonic electronic-music culture.

They first bonded near the end of the Athens days, when Boray was curating South Asian experimental music at SXSW; he currently hosts a show on the Indian indie station Boxout.fm and works with the Mumbai hip-hop label Azadi Records.

The three headliners that Riedl and Boray have assembled for Slingshot’s Durham debut, a streamlined weekender to warm up for a full outing in 2022, neatly summarize the festival’s musical purview.

Juan Atkins, the living legend who literally invented techno, represents a firm foundation in the history of electronic music. Ela Minus, the Brooklyn-based Colombian composer of experimental club jams, represents a blurry perimeter where electronic classicism mingles with countless global tributaries. And chillwave avatar Washed Out is a name-recognition olive branch to the indie fans who compose much of this area’s festival audience, and who should take note that Ela Minus and Washed Out are both playing DJ sets. There will also be a free public discussion with Atkins about his career at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday.

Filling out the lineup are nearly three dozen other artists, mostly from North Carolina, who represent the Triangle’s most active electronic strains, such as the modular synthesis of Moroderik Musik, the house and UK garage of Maison Fauna, and the hip-hop-adjacent beat music of Raund Haus. The latter two collectives were enlisted as local curators.

“We want to bring people from around the world and connect the dots that way, but also provide a platform for local people so everyone feels ownership,” Boray says. “It’s not just big money pushing something off on people; we want everyone to get involved.”

Indeed, if there is one clear difference between Moogfest and Slingshot, it’s that the latter is still a decidedly homegrown affair, though Riedl and Boray have already secured grant funding from the City of Durham, which they call a great partner.

Though this COVID-era debut is heavily audio-focused, except for Boray’s audiovisual project ThisOnly and the usual A/V shenanigans of locals like thefacesblur, the full festival to come promises to build on the art and tech components that manifested in copious side programming at Moogfest—though it’s hard to say just what that will look like yet.

“The word ‘festival’ is a little tired even in itself,” Riedl says. “Honestly, what we’re doing next week is a small thing in the scope of what’s possible. But we’re here for the first time, bringing the founder of techno and curating the local scene in a way that’s really interesting. It’s humbling that people want to be involved in what we’re doing. You want to grow the creative culture and the economy, but you want to do it in a curated way that the town is proud of.”

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