The park’s annual festival of emerging new artists returns.
Manhattan’s Bryant Park hosts its annual outdoor event series of free Picnic Performances this summer, from May 31 through September 13. They’ve just revealed the lineup for the Emerging Music Festival, happening June 28 & June 29, which happens to be curated by us fine folk here at AdHoc. :~)
All shows are free to the public and designed to be enjoyed casually – no tickets required – with more than 700 picnic blankets for audience members to borrow and ample chairs available.
Performing this year are Chanel Beads, Mei Semones, and Los Esplifs on Friday, 6/28 and Horsegirl, Hannah Jadagu, Greg Mendez, Bloomsday, and @ on Saturday, 6/29. Learn a little bit about each artist below and see you at the park in June.
Emerging Music Festival 2024
Curated by AdHoc
⭐️ Friday, June 28 at 7PM: Chanel Beads, Mei Semones, Los Esplifs
Chanel Beads — the project of New York-based musician Shane Lavers — recently released its debut album, Your Day Will Come, which marks Lavers’ arrival as a new force in experimental music. Throughout the album, Lavers captures the many contradictions of modern existence and the strange infiniteness of the digital world. Though he incorporates the scrappy sonics of post-punk, the gripping sentimentality of pop tunes, and the spectral artifice of electronic music, he blurs lines through unconventional song structures that build into transcendental climaxes. As he intentionally prints his songs down to embed fried artifacts and ghostly remains, the resulting songs have a time-collapsing quality, both transitory and timeless.
Mei Semones’ sweetly evocative blend of jazz, bossa nova and math-y indie rock is not only a way for her to find solace in her favorite genres, but is an intuitive means of catharsis. Semones chronicles infatuation, devotion, and vulnerability in her songs, complete with sweeping strings, virtuosic guitar-playing and heartfelt lyrics sung in both English and Japanese, that have all become part of her sonic trademark: ornately catchy, genre-fusing compositions serving as the backdrop to tender lyrics touching on the universalities of human emotion.
Influenced by Fania, fashion, and psychedelia, Los Esplifs blends nostalgic rhythms and sounds with progressive youth culture. Led by Bandleaders Saul Millan and Caleb Michel, this genre-bending, psychedelic “conjunto” is an instant explosive performance. With an EP and two full-length album releases in their arsenal, this six-piece Latin-Psych group is not slowing down.
⭐️ Saturday, June 29 at 5PM: Horsegirl, Hannah Jadagu, Bloomsday, Greg Mendez, @
Horsegirl is a noisy rock trio from Chicago composed of Penelope Lowenstein (she/her), Nora Cheng (she/her), and Gigi Reece (they/them). Horsegirl draws inspiration from shoegaze and post-punk, in the realm of ‘90’s American and UK indie underground.
Hannah Jadagu released her debut EP, What Is Going On?, a collection of intimate bedroom pop tracks recorded entirely on an iPhone 7, which was, at the time, Jadagu’s most accessible mode of production. An off-the-cuff approach to music making and instinctive ability to write unforgettable hooks belied the intensity of Jadagu’s subject matter. In 2023, Jadagu released her ambitious debut album, Aperture, which The New York Times applauded for “Jadagu’s easy aptitude with lilting melodies and her love of deliciously crunchy texture.”
Bloomsday is the tender, cerebral project of the New York-based Iris James Garrison. Their debut 2022 album Place to Land, was largely about transitioning and finding a home in their identity, body, and in other people. Since the project’s inception in 2019, Bloomsday has toured the US extensively, including supporting Becca Mancari and Joe Vann, sets at Hopscotch Music Festival and SXSW, and playing with Courtney Barnett and Bonny Doon. Their music has been featured on NPR New Music Friday, Nylon, and Paste, among other publications. Bloomsday’s new album, Heart of the Artichoke, is out this June via Bayonet Records.
On Greg Mendez‘s most recent release, Greg Mendez, the Philadelphia-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist investigates the shaky camera of memory, striving to carve out a collage that points to a truth. But there isn’t a regimented actuality here; instead, Mendez highlights the merit in many truths, and many lives, and how even the hardest truths can still contain some humor. While this is technically Mendez’s third full-length album, his back catalog boasts an extensive range of EPs and live recordings. He’s a prolific and thoughtful songwriter, understanding the joy in impulse, and shying away from the clinical sheen of overproduction. 2017’s ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and 2020’s Cherry Hell garnered acclaim for their quiet, lo-fi urgency, exploring themes of addiction and heartbreak with an intentional, authentic haze, and it’s this approach that has solidified Mendez as a staple in the DIY community for years.
@ (pronounced “At”) is the folk-pop project of vocalist/guitarist Victoria Rose and multi-instrumentalist Stone Filipczak. Their debut 2021 album Mind Palace Music was released to rave reviews; Pitchfork said, “Mind Palace Music is an example of what happens when you take a poignant songwriter who’s careful about her chord progressions and introduce a fellow songwriter who knows the magic of no-frills arrangements.” In 2024, @ released their new EP “Are You There God? It’s Me, @.” Diverting from their usual acoustic instrumentation, @ go soul-searching on a sonic side quest into more electronic music.
