The North Carolina Festival of Psychedelia | Friday, Aug. 27, 8 p.m., $7 | Local 506, Chapel Hill 

Hippies, free spirits, and trippers, rejoice: The North Carolina Festival of Psychedelia returns this week for one more round of mind-expanding local music before it morphs into n o i r b i z z a r e, a pan-bohemian, all-inclusive, Black-centered multimedia affair from the paisley-spotted mind of Daniel Chavis.

With his twin brother, Danny, Chavis plays in The Veldt, the inimitable shoegaze-soul band that broke out of the Triangle indie scene to make a major-label record in the alt-rock nineties and eventually returned for a second act in Raleigh, where they grew up.

“When I went to Crabtree Valley looking for NME or Melody Maker, reading about The Pixies or Cocteau Twins or The Jesus and Mary Chain, I didn’t know that five years later I’d be performing with them,” says Chavis, who leapt onto a Trailways bus after high school to follow the eighties psych-rock revival known as the “Paisley Underground.”

The idea for the NCFP was planted when the neo-psych band The Brian Jonestown Massacre took The Veldt on some European tour dates, including a festival in Portugal.

“We were never able to get into any kind of festivals for most of our career—we didn’t fit in, being Afropunk and anything else,” Chavis says. “I thought, why do we have to go out of the United States to get on a festival?”

Chavis staged the first NCFP, which featured bands like Stray Owls and Night Battles, at Kings, The Pour House, and Wicked Witch in 2016. He had booked the second on the roof of a Holiday Inn, transforming it into “The Holiday Love Inn.”

Then COVID came. Instead, he did a small version at Local 506 in May, working with Wendy Mann, an owner of both the Midway block and the music venue, and Luva Zacharyj, another Local 506 co-owner.

“There were some amazing kids there who were really looking for this kind of music,” Chavis says. “Music that’s not Americana, which I do like, but there’s no avenue for it here. I’m really grateful that Wendy’s been getting the Midway area up and jumping.”

Featuring The Veldt, Candy Coffins, Pretty Odd, The Mystery Plan, and TRIPLE X SNAXXX, the NCFP returns to the 506 on Friday, August 27, the night after it opens at Charlotte’s Visulite Theatre and before it closes at Winston-Salem’s Monstercade. There, the name will be retired as Chavis shifts toward an exciting venture called n o i r b i z z a r e.

“Not being included as a kid, you grow up with a sense of not belonging. I know what that’s like, because I was the guy in the middle of the lunchroom with my guitar, not on the white or the Black side,” Chavis says. “There was never really any place for my brother and I when we first started playing music, because we were Black and never fit into the hardcore scene. So I thought, what if we had kind of a Black hippie fest between Hopscotch and IBMA?”

If COVID allows—“We stand on the side of science,” Chavis says—n o i r b i z z a r e will piggyback on Hopscotch and debut September 11 in the former Taz’s grocery space at the bottom of the SkyHouse apartment building in Raleigh.

For the first n o i r b i z z a r e, The Veldt is teaming with Burnt Sugar, an Afrofuturist jazz-punk ensemble featuring Greg Tate, the famed Village Voice writer who was also a narrator in the documentary Summer of Soul, which Chavis says captures the vibe he’s going for. The bands will blend into The Imploding Black Inevitable to rewire Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Black culture.

It’s one example of how Chavis’s music-industry friendships will fuel n o i r b i z z a r e events, where eventually we might see iconic acts like Fishbone and Living Colour sharing stages with young local bands of all races and genders for whom the Summer of Love never ended, all not fitting in together.

Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.

Comment on this story at music@indyweek.com.