The Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger, who has temporarily gone solo with her excellent LAST SUMMER disc, will be playing 4Knots on Saturday (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
South Street Seaport, Pier 17
Saturday, July 16, free, 1:00 – 8:00
www.villagevoice.com/4knots
For ten years, the Village Voice sponsored the Siren Festival, a free, all-day celebration in Coney Island that featured a virtual who’s who of the indie music scene, including such emerging and established groups as Superchunk, Guided by Voices, Sleater-Kinney, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, TV on the Radio, M.I.A., and Matt and Kim. As much fun as Siren was, it was held on two stages several blocks apart, so if you wanted to see bands in both places, you had to run back and forth down the boardwalk and lose your coveted space at one stage and hope you’d be able to get a decent spot at the other. There will be no such decision making at the inaugural 4Knots Music Festival, which has replaced Siren as the Voice’s annual summer party, and the venue has moved to the much more manageable South Street Seaport. The lineup consists of three Brooklyn bands, Mr. Dream, Eleanor Friedberger, and Oberhofer, along with San Juan’s Davila 666, New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus, and the headliner, the Austin-based Black Angels. If it gets too hot, you can take a break in the 4Knots Indoor Lounge at 210 Front St., with DJ sets from 2:00 to 12 midnight from Brahms, Punches, Finger on the Pulse, iPhone FJ Bugs Duck (Dan Deacon), and Yeasayer. As with the now-silenced Siren, 4Knots offers a great opportunity to check out a wide range of cool indie bands, and it’s all free.