Brickside Music Festival
Saturday, Apr. 11
Duke Coffeehouse, Durham
Other than a good day of music at Duke Coffeehouse, you never know exactly what to expect from the Brickside Music Festival. Remember the year they booked Grandmaster Flash?
As a coproduction of a student-run campus venue and a student-run radio station, WXDU Durham, the festival is kept fresh by steady taste turnover, though it naturally tilts toward the music-nerdiest multi-hyphen genres. As music nerds ourselves, we’re so here for it.
This morning, the festival announced the lineup for 2020, which takes place at Duke Coffeehouse on Saturday, April 11.
The music begins at 3:00 p.m. with Loamlands, the simmering folk-rock project of Pinhook owner Kym Register. Next is Saariselka, the collaboration of N.C. expat and ambient pedal-steel maestro Chuck Johnson and singer/multi-instrumentalist Marielle V Jakobsons, who have a record, The Ground Our Sky, coming out on Temporary Residence. The operatic folk of Colorado’s Josephine Foster closes the afternoon block.
The evening session begins at 8:00 p.m. with Durham’s own riotous QPOC punk band The Muslims, followed by the unforgettable experimental hip-hop of Moor Mother, whom you might have seen at Moogfest in 2017.
The festival’s most unexpected booking is Hailu Mergia, a former Ethiopian jazz star turned Washington, D.C. cab driver who is now enjoying a second music career with a new album, Lala Belu.
Helado Negro—who, last time we saw him at Duke Coffeehouse, enlisted locals to dance in glowing costumes as he performed his sleepy, entrancing electro-pop—closes the concert at 11:00 p.m. before the DJs take over at midnight.
Advance tickets should be on sale within a week at the Duke University Box Office at tickets.duke.edu. Tickets are $20 general admission and $10 for non-Duke students; Duke undergrads and graduate students get in free.
Contact arts and culture editor Brian Howe at bhowe@indyweek.com.
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