Astral Witch
Moon Over Salem 2024
Astral Bitch casts a spell on Cinema Salem at Moon Over Salem.
The Rupert Selection, oldsoul, Winkler, Permanent Blue, Good June, and Shiver. join in the septuple feature. Popcorn available.
Goodbye Hope Fest, hello Moon Over Salem.
Moon Over Salem is a partial benefit for two artist scholarships. So says MOON:
“We aim to support the community by raising funds for local scholarship programs.
“A portion from the proceeds from our annual festival will go towards awarding two scholarships to students pursuing music or the arts in college.
“Each school year, the scholarships will be awarded to one NAGLY youth, and a Student from the Greater Salem area, helping to nurture the next generation of artists and musicians.”
The one-day music festival Moon Over Salem, FKA Hope Fest, shined on a hustling & bustling Saturday in Salem.
Were we still in September? You don’t even want to know what kinds of crowds come out of the tourist woodwork closer to Halloween. As it was, a beautiful day and night of music, tightrope-walking the line between summer and fall, with more than thirty bands performing at seven stages.
And if you had one of those little green cloth wristbands (don’t overtighten them!), you had a front row seat for the entire moveable feast.
Are music concerts at movie theatres a new trend? Happens all the time at the Capitol Theatre for the 4th Wall show series. And there’s a Spider Water record release on 10/12 at the Regent Theatre.
Cinema Salem
One advantage of music shows in movie theatres is that you’ve got a lot of the stuff you need in place: sound, lighting, staff, and even concessions. One drawback, though, is that the crowd will find it difficult to stand, move around, during a show in a room full of seat rows, designed with seated guests in mind. If the crowd wanted to sit anyway, no big deal. But sometimes you want to move around, you know?
Cinema Salem abuts the Witch City Mall, which, full of hustling and bustling capitalism, is not as spooky as it might sound. If you want a spooky mall, check out those abandoned ghost malls in zones of economic collapse. Rat Kings abound!
Shiver.
Shiver. was scheduled as the first band to take the stage at Cinema Salem, and the second band to play overall, about 30 minutes after music started on the other side of town at Ames Hall. But tech delays at Ames Hall might have unexpectedly anointed Shiver. as the unplanned inaugural performance at Moon Over Salem, not counting any earlier DJ set at Old Town Hall. Ah, the speculative honor bestowed on the melodic alt rockers, who settled into their set nicely, drenched in the multi-colored projections manufactured by Digital Awareness.
The bill at Cinema Salem ran nearly as long as the one at Ames Hall, making them two venues that you could reliably show up to hear music from the start to (near) finish of the fest.
One word about the timing of the acts, though, which were staggered, with as much as forty minutes between acts. Plenty of time to soundcheck, absorb unforeseen delays, etc. Too much time, maybe. But the idea was probably to entice folks to bounce between venues, which is a not-so-secret pleasure associated with this kind of decentralized festival – get out, explore, go catch 15 minutes of a new act here, another 30 minutes of an old favorite there, so on and so forth.
Were the venues close enough together to accommodate that sort of walkabout? Sort of!
Permanent Blue
The five-piece vocal-forward Permanent Blue took the stage after Good June. A pair of vocalists kept the sounds in the pop rock sphere, except for occasional detours into doom grunt domains.
Contrast to Astral Bitch, whose throwback hard rock makes grunts – or at least yelps, whoops, and yips – the main course on their new track “Haunting You,” which they performed live at the cinema.
Astral Bitch
The night closed out with Winkler, oldsoul, and The Rupert Selection. The posted schedule left you a little bit of time to scramble over to Ames Hall to catch Prince Daddy & the Hyena. But you’d have to have really hit the hotfoot. You’d have to be a fast motherfucker. Otherwise the evening bills were starting up, or already underway, at Chagall PAC, Gulu-Gulu Cafe and Koto.
What’s next for Moon Over Salem? You’ve got to ask the organizers, MOON. Seems like they’ve created a kind of template for a locally-supported fest. The inaugural edition of Moon Over Salem was a success, and if the local support is there, it’s a success that could be repeated for years.
But you don’t want to just repeat an event, however successful. You want to grow it, develop it, refine it, nurture it, cultivate it, tend to it lovingly like a prized Tamagotchi Pet. What are some areas in which Moon Over Salem could grow?
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