Minecraft Music Festival Quarantine Extravaganza | EXTREMELY ONLINE

[Applause] I’m sam sutherland and this is extremely online a show about the internet now being made over the internet because we pitched it and sold it in the before times we think it’s very important to live up to our commitments right now the only music festival that you can attend

Is a url one instead of an irl one Open pit started out as a bunch of pals from hamilton ontario and now they’re they’re essentially the biggest name in the whole url music festival scene and the week that we insisted that they talk to us they were busy planning the biggest event of their lives a fundraiser for feeding america

Curated by 2019’s buzziest band 100 gigs well the whole thing is themed around their new album and they’re curating artists like charlie xcx a.g kirk like really exciting established artists all happening in a magic tree next to a giant rat with a huge ass in minecraft You’re listening to square garden my name is max trump i’m an architecture student from hamilton ontario you’re about a week out from what is maybe going to be one of the biggest events you’ve ever thrown it’s already gonna be like four times bigger than the last one

Right what is the most stressful part definitely most stressed about server issues because that has been a staple of our events the server’s not working at the beginning and 100 x explicitly mentioned we we hope this work open pit was preparing to do what fortnite was just pretending to do

Host thousands of people inside of a video game for a live musical experience that is absolutely the closest thing any of us are going to get to anything like that for a little while it’s show day how’s everybody feeling as soon as you reminded me it was show day

It’s like my heart rate went up do you want to talk about something else you want to talk about like There’s nothing else to talk about it’s quarantined it’s true there’s nothing else happening what’s the thing you’re the most excited about listening to the sets yeah i was gonna say the same thing even though we obviously get them in advance i always like intentionally don’t listen

To them until the show so i can experience it like with everybody else especially this lineup is all artists that i specifically love perry grip especially just amazes me because that’s like i listen to his songs as a kid the first like itunes purchases i made were perry grips really

If you’re not familiar with 100 gex it’s confusing to say like this is a big deal it’s not like james taylor is playing a minecraft festival james taylor for some reason is like the most popular non-internet artist i could think of but you know charlie xcx is like a very

Popular normal artist and even 100 gecks you know over the last year become like normal mainstream popular do you like maury i’ve definitely seen headlines like you know check out this like minecraft music festival with 100 x at charlie xcx like because of the size of the artist is

There any more pressure with this event there isn’t pressure from that but there’s a lot of like pressure internally to make sure that this event goes flawlessly on the open pit side and as well on the hundred gigs side i mean there’s not much we can do now we just have to see

What happens but we didn’t start there we started much closer to here That’s superstar producer and musician ryan hemsworth who’s worked with artists like tinashe and mitsuki djing via tinychat a very early and highly unstable live streaming platform from about 10 000 internet years ago via his bathtub this is all part of spf 420 the og url music festival tony hawk pro dj

Tony hawk pro dj tony hawk pro dj i’m ryan hemsworth i’m living in hamilton i’m a musician producer um yeah that’s kind of my gist i guess tell me about those early spf 420 parties yeah i always use it as like a way to present something a little different

That i couldn’t like pull up to a club or whatever and do so i just like set up candles and uh just sat in my bathtub and played music and tried to make it like intimate in some capacity you could barely hear the audio sometimes

Which was all part of the appeal so it was just like a nice way to kind of like connect and have these like imaginary shows with your friends from different cities and countries i wonder what you thought of fortnite’s big marshmallow event which they kind of promoted as like the first

Video game live stream a lot of that big like edm industry tries to constantly like rewrite history and say like this person was the first to do this and or that and even pre spf or whatever you know like this was happening in like japan at hatsune miku

Concerts like you know over a decade ago so i don’t know it’s it’s cool to see that people are starting to like find their own way to to do it with their like little pockets of the internet i think that’s the most important part when the marshmallow stuff was happening

And lots of people were talking about it one of the spf 420 people sent me a message about like what you guys are doing is great like keep it up and that was like very inspiring thing here because it was like such a legendary group of people back in the day open

Pit’s minecraft music festivals include the hugely successful 2018 colchella and then firefest spelled with an eye not a y like that one and the met gala spoofing mind gal these glasses make us look really fancy and important eh i know it’s like we’re at the met gala in minecraft mind gala september 14th

And 15th 2019. they were really just born from the desire to have a nice birthday party back in 2018 because just like yo i’m gonna throw my birthday party in minecraft to sort of like go a complete opposite against the sort of american cliche of like going to the

Club on your 21st birthday there’s been like url events where like people would like record their sets and be sort of like internet radio style but i was like what if we somehow figured out a way to combine them and it had like 400 people come and i was expecting like 40.

I was like downstairs eating cake with my family and i like ran upstairs and i could just see i like saw like the minecraft like console and it’s just like people like flying trying to connect so like obviously the server that i was hosting in my bedroom just crashed

Immediately the fact that sort of so many people were just excited about it was so bizarre that fateful decision to buck cool birthday trends and stay inside with his friends would ultimately lead all of us into the butt of a giant rat walk me through the the site that you built the whole

Design was this big mystical world with this huge tree and a huge rat and then the venue is inside the tree it was just like an open sky behind the stage and then the moon was right there so when people are performing you’ll just like see them in front of the moon

It’s part of the artwork for for geck’s upcoming album what’s inside the wrap there’s a parkour inside the ride there’s like a jumping challenge some people will spend their whole time inside the rat jumping around this like test course it also has this huge ass

We modeled it off of the rat in in um this video that hunter gex posted where it’s like a 3d model dancing rat 100 upcoming album is a thousand gigs in the tree of clues and this huge tree we built literally is filled with clues for example charlie xcx’s new song

One of the lyrics is about clementines so we built a clementine form underground we rebuilt those moser which is a store that fracks and guppy like named their song after we’re kind of leaving it up to the fans to just find lots and lots of stuff

But we have some merch here this one is just based off of you know one of their their real tour merch sweatshirts and that what max is wearing on his face is like the two members of hundred gets from their album cover so it’s like earrings so you just wear them yeah yeah

So roughly how many hours did it take multiple people to build this i’d say collectively at least 500 hours i think having like another really strong like creative team like 100 gex sort of have this idea of what they wanted and give us sort of a direction

I think really enabled us on top of having a professional builder to create something like really cohesive and really beautiful yeah it’s definitely more focused than any of our previous events this one is very specifically like it’s an enchanted mushroom forest this is gorgeous it’s making me like uh and i’m not just

Saying this it’s making me like a little emotional openpit books their url shows just like you’d book an irl show the lineups tend to be diverse but lean towards artists who have been born or popularized on platforms like soundcloud or associated with progressively minded electronic labels like pc music

But those of us without the video game either because we have no idea how to play or we lack the funds to do so can still watch on twitch or youtube or join in a very very active chat on discord you know trends on twitter people talk about it on the internet

And sort of wherever you are you can like join in the conversation that way it’s something that we’re constantly trying to push more and so like for example having the twitch streams now um was another element of accessibility so people who can’t afford minecraft or can’t run it

Can still see the in-game world and experience that and we’re always trying to push having more people of marginalized groups like on the lineup and and get people involved who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance our events like exist because of the community we have people like from the community volunteering their time to

Like build stuff or like moderate them or play sets there’s definitely a culture for sure because of how like involved the community it is it’s not superficial in any sense this whole notion was exceedingly nice and charming before we were living through a global pandemic but musicians like everyone

Have been forced inside and there’s no denying that we are living through a fearsome enthusiasm for the livestream the music industry realized that everyone was [ __ ] like for this summer and eventually this year we just had like hundreds of dms like hey like let’s get

On a call because like we were the only group of friends group of people that had like ever done an online event of this scale like successfully what do you make of what is happening in the music industry right now it’s good that people are experimenting the more live streams that happen the

Better they get for everyone at least until we get a vaccine like i doubt that colcell is or sorry coachella the real one is going to happen this fall yeah colchella is going to be the only cello it’s sort of easy to understand why artists are are drawn to these

Experiences because so much of what’s happening on the internet right now kind of looks a lot like this it’s not not real television you can only watch so many badly framed acoustic performances before it gets kind of depressing but there is nothing depressing about these amazing fussed over festivals that openpit is creating

Because of all of our events being like for charity and all them being for like the community i’m so proud of like everything that we’ve done and like being a part of this team means like so much to me for some of us it’s literally been like how we got to

Know each other even before we had anything called open pit the first time i really spent a lot of time talking to robin was for max’s 21st birthday and robin likes to tell people how like i thought he was a total [ __ ] during my birthday party which i did

But like we’re like best friends now so so many of us are kind of a part in the world obviously max and i live really close together but um you know um is in new york other friends are all across the u.s and europe and so

There’s really no other way to kind of get everyone together in one place square garden was a communal event we were there together for one night it was really really nice during charlie’s set was the only time the servers were working perfectly and i was like this is like exactly what

Open pit is meant to be like in that moment like everything’s working and like there’s like a billion people enjoying it at the end of the day we raised a total across like minecraft youtube twitch and selling shirts uh fifty thousand and seven u.s dollars for feeding america that’s gonna

Make a meaningful difference in people’s lives even though i haven’t fully processed it it’s the part i’m most proud of it’s mostly proud of like the team itself it’s almost two years ago to this date may 16 2018 was the minecraft birthday party coming from doing that which was just like [ __ ] around

In my house to like two years later throwing this event that raised fifty thousand dollars i never expected it i think did you hear from gangster or any other artists that you guys were excited about playing too ducks were like blown away by the world we built

They were like pretty astonished at it and spent a lot of time like exploring i wish that there’s some way to know everything that like the 17 000 like players did because like some crazy stuff happens like you see screenshots of a bunch of people dressed as garfield and you’re just like

What is happening here i need some context you know like i just want to know what happened that led to this scenario city footage courtesy of earth cam doing an interview for tv right now yes uber’s dad made it on tv he brought me my stimulus check isn’t it oh nice

It literally is it says president donald j trump you have a truck yeah yeah cover the address let’s see oh my god i wasn’t supposed to get one i’m a i’m a dependent