Last year, the inaugural House of Creatives music festival snuck up on Miami. With just about no warning, it announced a lineup consisting of Flaming Lips, Crystal Castles, Breakbot, the Drums, Empress Of, Shigeto and more. The concert, which took over the North Beach Bandshell, ended up going flawlessly, a welcome addition to Miami's burgeoning festival scene.
Thankfully, House of Creatives is back again this year with a new venue and equally impressive lineup. Psychedelic rock heroes MGMT will join the British indie group alt-J at Virginia Key Beach Park on November 11–12. Other acts filling out the bill include Metronomy, Washed Out (the dude behind the dreamy intro music to Portlandia), Sir Sly, Wild Belle, WhoMadeWho, Caveman, Surf Curse, Salt Cathedral, Delsonido, Peyote Coyote, Private School, Tremends, Kids and more names to come.
Right now, early bird passes for the two-day festival are going for $99 via hocfest.com. Prices will go up the closer we get to November, so if all this sounds peachy to you, whip out that credit card now.
In the meantime, we caught up with Carlos Aybar (the COO of Mishu Music, the company behind HOC) to chat about year two.
So you're back for the second year. What made the team decide to come back and do it again?
We have a long term goal here to make Miami a true destination for live bands, so year two was always in our plans. We were able to get the engines running a lot earlier this year and we’re stoked to announce the 2017 lineup and really put all our love and energy out to Miami in the coming months.
How was throwing a music festival in Miami different than you expected?
We’ve had a lot of experience producing the Isle of Light festival in the Dominican Republic, so we felt confident taking off in Miami, but we definitely had a learning curve. Working with the city and learning the market behavior is certainly differently than back at the island, but I think we got the hang of it and we’re well on our way to smoothing out the ride.
I think you caught a lot of Miami off guard with the quality of your lineup last year. What was going through your head when Mishu was selecting this year’s lineup?
We definitely book bands that we love and knew there were others in the 305 that were hungry for some indie live acts. Specifically, when we saw the opportunity to bring the Flaming Lips, we knew it was going to be special and they knocked it out of the park. For this year, we knew we had to top 2016, and with alt-J, MGMT, Metronomy and Washed Out, I think we’ve succeeded.
You’ve moved venues this time around. What appealed to you about Virginia Key?
With the overwhelming response we got from the first year we knew that we had to be able to grow into a larger venue in the future, and the Historic Virginia Key Beach Park allows us the flexibility to do just that. We’re still a boutique festival and the setting will feel quite intimate (for festival standards) but with greater fan support, we’ll need more space and, hopefully, this will be our oceanside home for awhile.
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