The inaugural Subsonic Music Festival is due to drop this weekend, set to take over Barrington Tops’ Mountain Valley Resort with a cracking lineup of international electronic artists that includes Salmonella Dub, Alex Smoke and Format:B, as well as an impressive assortment of local artists too. Prior to the event kicking off on Friday, co-founders Scott Commens and Marco Mazucco chatted with ITM about their bold attempt to shake up the local festival scene.

“When we think of festivals, we think of multi-day events with various musical styles being showcased,” Commens says. “You can hardly call a half-day or day event in the city a festival. Our event different is a chance for people to escape and lose themselves for an entire weekend.”

Indeed, the event is one of the more eclectic and underground dance music showcases staged in Australia in recent times, with influences drawn from parties around the world. Mazucco found Germany’s Fusion Festival particularly inspiring: ”I went overseas and checked out a few festivals… Fusion had been running for 15 years in the bush. We used to do parties like it, in the same style, but this festival, it’s now up to 70,000 people, with over 20 stages, crazy installations… I was surprised that it was a really non-commercial event. The lineup is announced one week before the date – it’s not about the DJs, it’s having a great vibe, just everyone there for the music, the art and the love.”

With Mazucco and Commens both having worked on Earthdance in years past, the pair were eager to do another festival. While the Subsonic Music Festival came as something of a natural progression for Commens, who has been focusing his attention on the nascent Subsonic record label in recent years, Mazucco returned to Australia with the inspiration for the new event. Central to the idea was the right location, which the pair found at the Riverwood Downs Mountain Valley Resort, a few hours north of Sydney. “It was Scott who discovered Riverwood Downs,” Mazucco affirms. “Once we started advertising the festival we found out it was a really well-known spot. When Scott first took me there I was amazed; the people running the resort were super nice, the place is really well maintained… you’ll be hard-pressed to party at a place like this anywhere in the world.”

Despite the novelty of their concept, the organizers of the Subsonic festival are eager to preserve the party as a passion project, a rare alternative in the streamlined festival climate of the present. “I’d like everyone to value the festival for what it is,” Mazucco states. “This is a long term project, and I’d like to create a similar scenario to the Fusion festival, where people come just because they know it’s the Subsonic festival and it’s going to be good, and not only because their favourite DJ is playing… I would like to get the festival to the point where I can go overseas and find the DJs who play the best music; not the most famous ones, but the ones who are doing it for the right reasons and who know how to party. That way, people might not know who is playing, but they will know there will always be cutting-edge music at the Subsonic Music festival.”

Subsonic Music Festival takes over the Mountain Valley Resort in Barrington Tops from Friday 4th to Sunday 6th December, tickets on sale now at ITM.