Irrelevant Music matters

Kyle Swick wants to expose you to the greatest local music you’ve never heard

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Photo credit: Chad Radford
TOTALLY RELEVANT: Kyle Swick is the mastermind behind Atlanta's Irrelevant Music Festival.

Kyle Swick spends just a few minutes mulling over the implications of what it means to call his booking and promotions company, and now two-years strong summer festival, Irrelevant Music. Clearly, there’s a sense of irony at work behind his branding concept. “It started when I was booking enough music around town that I needed to come up with a name, like Tight Bros. has their thing, and OK Productions has theirs,” Swick says. “I felt like, at the time, I was booking shows that the more popular crowd didn’t care about, but it was good music, so the name was super tongue-in-cheek. It was supposed to be funny.”

Swick had big ideas from the word go, though. After moving to town from Charleston, South Carolina, in 2010, he became entrenched in Atlanta’s underground music scene, booking punk, noise, indie rock and otherwise DIY bands to perform at WonderRoot before moving on to the Drunken Unicorn and then over to 529. And while he spent his days and nights working with local artists and laboring over pairing them with touring independent musicians, he found himself operating amid a cityscape that’s become ground zero for massive music festivals weekend-long productions operating on budgets large enough to fund a small country. As Shaky Knees, Music Midtown, Sweetwater 420 Fest and more have grown larger each year, the trouble Swick spotted is that local music was being increasingly cut out of the picture. “Some festivals have literally booked zero Atlanta bands, so I thought what if I try to cultivate an alternative a culture that exists as a counter to that way of thinking a festival that’s literally about what’s happening in the city, at the moment.”

The Irrelevant Music Festival was hatched in July 2016. As the second year approaches, both Swick’s concepts and the festival’s presence on the landscape are cemented into a singular niche for Atlanta. This year, a swather of music ranging from Material Girls’ explosive drag-punk performances to Jock Gang’s improv rock excursions set a framework for the music-outsider leanings. It’s not all local music, though. Northampton, Massachusetts-based industrial music duo Boy Harsher plays 529 on Fri., July 21. And North Philadelphia post-punk outfit Palm takes the stage at the Earl on Sat., July 22. But it’s all part of Swick’s design. “I wanted to pull in different audiences: Maybe someone from Kentucky is driving down to see Palm, or maybe someone from the suburbs is coming out because they’re into another band. I want to expose them to someone like Material Girls, or Mothers from Athens, or some other local bands that they don’t already know, and let it to grow naturally from there.”

Some festival highlights:

— Material Girls’ ‘MG VS IQ’ shines in a time of ruin: The drag-punk six-piece’s debut EP enchants with glam rock, jazz and cabaret theatrics

— Irrelevant Music Fest top 9: From Boy Harsher to Lois Righteous, CL Music scribes shout out their must-see picks

— Palm breaks all the rules: The north Philly four-piece strikes a balance between pleasing and disturbing with ‘Shadow Expert’

— Catching up with Sequoyah Murray: The singer and improv artist talks about his influences and learning to articulate his musical ideas