This Friday marks the final Outline Festival of the year at Knockdown Center, featuring Erika de Casier, Smerz, Clara La San, Fine, and urika’s bedroom—a lineup that spans the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark and Los Angeles. It also closes out a milestone year for the festival—its fifth anniversary—which it celebrated with its most ambitious global programming to date. We caught up with Jeff Klingman, founder of Outline and live booker for Knockdown, to talk about Knockdown’s legacy as a performance and exhibition space and where the festival is headed.
How has Outline evolved over its five years, and what does the fifth-anniversary programming reflect about its mission?
The benefit of doing it repeatedly over time is that we’ve been able to explore different genres and unexpected combinations of sounds. I think it’s fair to say I’m coming at the curation from a left-field, underground sensibility, but we wanted a concept that wasn’t defined by any one format or finite pool of acts. This has been a great year for the series, with multiple crazy lineups featuring artists from five continents coming together to perform. I don’t think the mission of the series has changed drastically from the start, but five years of programming has given us a track record that opens up more opportunities. I don’t have to explain as much to get folks interested in playing.
Knockdown can draw quite a diverse crowd. What kind of person gravitates to Outline specifically?
Given the ground we’re aiming to cover, it’s not always the same person from show to show. Pop fans and metal fans have both had their moments. But I am always keeping an adventurous listener in mind—someone who likes more than one thing and likes to be taken out of their comfort zone every once in a while. We’ve seen that New York is full of ’em.
Erika de Casier headlines, joined by Smerz, Clara La San, Fine and urika’s bedroom. What drew you to this particular group of artists?
Friday night is a sort of unofficial showcase for the underground Danish pop scene that’s blown up in the past couple of years, centered around the dreamy sounds made by former students of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory. Erika, Fine and Henriette Motzfeldt from Smerz all spent time there. We added Clara La San from the U.K. and urika’s bedroom from L.A. to the lineup to broaden the context beyond one art school campus and connect some dots to a wider world indie-pop scene.
With multiple Outline shows happening each year, we’ve always tried to think of the bookings as seasonal—a goth show in the winter, a party in the summer, etc. These artists made sense to me to host as the weather turned cold. This is a big-night-out-in-your-coolest-coat kind of show.
Outline began with visual installations and multi-sensory works, but recent editions are focused on music. What prompted that shift?
The first Outline, which happened on February 29, 2020, was the very last event that took place here before the pandemic shutdown, and Outline was one of the first big outdoor events we threw once folks were allowed to gather again 18 months later. We had a short time to figure things out at first—but a long time to think things over. As we’ve done more shows with more artists, I think I’ve grown more confident that we can focus on the best, most arresting presentation of the music, and that can be more than enough. Which isn’t to say that other elements off the stage—like specific lighting design, A/V presentations of certain sets or adding unique installation aspects—can’t enhance the experience. It’s something we’re thinking about.
Knockdown Center is unlike most music venues—50,000 square feet of repurposed industrial space with both indoor and outdoor stages. How does that shape the Outline experience?
It gives us the freedom to cater specifically to each lineup. For something more intimate, we could set a jazz lineup in our outdoor space, the Ruins, on a lovely spring evening. For shows that demand a bigger scale and more bombastic production, we can use the full space of our Main Hall. We’ve also got a tiny little punk room in the back, by the way, and we try to plant weird stuff in there for folks to discover as much as we can.
When the weather’s nice, we tend to use everything—let people cover more ground inside and out—to have different experiences at different parts of the night rather than be stuck taking things in from one vantage point. It’s a real luxury to give returning fans a completely different physical experience from the last time they were here.
Do you have a personal favorite performer from past iterations of Outline?
This is one of those semi-impossible questions in that I’ve never invited an artist to perform where I wasn’t already a big fan. We’ve been lucky enough to host real legends like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and ESG, plus some of the most exciting young bands out there. There have been 88 performances at Outline so far. But screw it—seeing the 1970s German rock band Neu! joined on stage by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is one of those rare, semi-hallucinatory moments that I never thought I’d see live in a million years.
What can fans of Outline look forward to in the future? How is it going to keep growing and changing?
We’re working on next year’s shows now, and what I can say definitively is that the next show won’t be like this one, and the one after will be different from that. The ultimate goal of Outline is to earn the trust of a big, intensely interested audience who may not know exactly what we’re up to but can’t wait to see what we’ll do next.
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