Though the largest clusters of national acts have come and gone, music festival season in downtown Phoenix is not ready to fade away.
The Trunk Space will be hosting its second annual Indie 500 beginning 6 p.m. on Friday, April 10, bringing around 80 musicians to the venue to perform 500 songs in a row as a celebration of the venue’s 11th anniversary. The event is expected to continue to early Sunday morning.
“Where else are you going to get to sit through 36 hours of music in a row?” asked Stephanie Carrico, co-owner of the Trunk Space.
The second annual Indie 500 builds off of the original 2014 event, which was titled after the Indianapolis 500 and resembled a marathon for musicians to challenge themselves to play 500 songs over the course of 10 days.
“I guess that didn’t seem ridiculous enough, so we decided to do 500 in a row,” Carrico said.
Though touring musicians, including Kimya Dawson and The Kris Special, will be performing a few extra songs, the music festival is distinct in providing an equal set of five songs for everyone, erasing potential competition for a headlining spot. Ideally for the organizers, no more than five minutes will separate each set.
“If you don’t sleep, you can see every band play every song, which is different than Coachella, South by Southwest, where you have to choose what band you see, which usually just means that people choose the popular bands,” said Mullarkey, the mononymously named frontman of Run-On Sunshine who helped organize the event. “This is making everyone equal, because it’s only one band at a time.”
To add to the hype that the uniquely ambitious music festival deserves, Josef Henry Rodriguez, a musician set to perform at Indie 500, will be filming a documentary at the fest.
“I think that this whole new thing where it’s straight through for two nights of music, it’s insane,” he said. “It’s something that I’ve never heard of anywhere, and it’s completely awesome. It think it has to be seen on film somewhere.”
Focusing on the festival and the Trunk Space, the documentary will mesh camera-quality videos with phone videos and interviews with musicians, ultimately capturing the unpredictable qualities of the venue from numerous perspectives.
“I always felt like the Trunk Space was a place where you went to kind of try stuff out and try new things and try new types of music,” Rodriguez said. “If it was cool, it was cool. If not, you tried it in a space that was very supportive and safe. I just want to convey that in the film as much as possible.”
The identity Rodriguez wishes to capture reflects the mission of Trunk Space, in providing a do-it-together space for people of all ages — the youngest performer at Indie 500 is 13 years old, and one of the eldest regulars at the venue is 79 — to find new platforms for creativity.
“I think that when people are creative, when they have that space to be creative, they’re healthier people,” Carrico said. “We just want to nurture that.”
Similarly, the Trunk Space consistently promotes a wide range of genres. At Indie 500, audience members can look forward to anything from pop-punk, to what Mullarkey could only describe as “noise.”
“At the Trunk Space, you don’t really have one genre,” Rodriguez said. “You just have music. You have what’s there and what’s playing, and that’s great.”
Including band members, at least 200 people are expected to shuffle through the venue, if not stay for the whole festival. To attract wider audiences, Indie 500 may be boosted to the level where Carrico said she hopes to see it in the next few years: a downtown music festival supporting original acts in multiple spaces.
“We would just like to continue to push Phoenix forward as a creative destination, a place where people go and know that people are interested in the music they’re playing, even if they’re not a gigantic band,” Carrico said. “We want to encourage people to continue to support them.”
In addition to an enormous amount of live music and new experiences, attendees will be offered breakfast for a donation, as well as air mattresses to rest on.
Single-entry tickets to Indie 500 will be available for $5. For those that do not wish to spend 36 hours inside the venue, $10 wristbands are available for re-entry. Updates on song count and artists playing will also be posted through the Trunk Space’s social media throughout the festival.
“It’ll be a great event,” Rodriguez said. “It is history in the making.”
Contact the columnist at Emily.Liu@asu.edu
