City Skies is a community to celebrate live electronic music, human performers, and the range of gear that enables the creation of new sounds and music.
City Skies is about electronic music, but is also about human performance. We produce events and promote performing and recording artists working across electronic music genres.
Explore the history of the City Skies Electronic Music events. And, in the future, enjoy new events we have planned.
City Skies started in 2008.
Atlanta in the 2007-2008 timeframe was taking the brunt of the Great Recession. Local venues that catered to electronic musicians often were either EDM/DJ locations or performance art spaces. After performing in Different Skies and electro-music events around the country, Jim Combs thought he could create something similar to promote live electronic music in a comfortable listening room environment.
City Skies was originally conceived as a one-off, three-day Electronic Music Festival and birthday party held in the Atlanta area in May 2008. The list of performers included musicians from around the U.S. heard on Music From the Hearts of Space, Echoes, Star’s End, Soma FM, StillStream, and more.
The event was so successful, a monthly event was started five months later and the yearly Festivals were repeated in 2009, 2010, and 2011.
Musical styles ranged from ambient to downtempo chillout to Berlin school to space rock to experimental. The City Skies ethic was that all music was intended to be performed live, because there were plenty of existing venues for dance/DJ style in the area.
City Skies is an extension of the Different Skies concept.
City Skies is an extension of the Different Skies Space Music Festival. Different Skies was a week-long, artist-in-residence type of program, held at Arcosanti, Arizona an hour north of Phoenix in the Arizona desert from 2003-2012. Musicians from around the world flew in to participate.
Arcosanti is described as an “urban laboratory”, and serves as a prototype for Paolo Soleri’s archology (architecture and ecology) experiments. Different Skies contributed to Arcosanti’s mission by 1) providing culture to Arcosanti residents and patrons, and 2) donating proceeds to Arcosanti’s non-profit organization. More information on Arcosanti and Different Skies can be found at http://www.arcosanti.org and http://www.differentskies.com
City Skies keeps an eye toward the future.
From the November 8, 2010 Beatlanta.com article by Chris Fuller:
The City Skies Electronic Music Festival and Events started on May 2nd and 3rd, 2008. Initially conceived as a one-off festival in Decatur showcasing electronic musicians from around the country (real electronic music performed live by humans is its motto), it has become a monthly event and a yearly festival held at the end of April/first of May.
City Skies is the brainchild of Decatur resident and musician Sensitive Chaos, aka Jim Combs. We spoke to Jim via email and asked him about the City Skies phenomenon.
“The first City Skies Festival was really started when I sent an invitation to about 20 of my electronic musician friends to come to Decatur for my birthday and perform with me at my regular set at Kavarna. This was in late 2007. I expected one or two to accept. but all of them said yes, and oh, by the way, can I do a set, too? So I asked the folks at Kavarna if I could hijack a Friday and Saturday on their schedule for my little soirée.”
That first Festival was a great success and featured 16 acts including Richard Devine, Giles Reaves, Jan Pulsford, Tony Gerber, recompas, Random Rabbit, and Kevin Spears. The event drew performers and audience members from over 11 states. The entire festival was also netcast live on StillStream.com to an international audience.
Combs was asked by Kavarna owner Wystan Getz if he’d like to do an ongoing event, and in October of 2008, City Skies went monthly (usually the 2nd Saturday night of each month), typically with four acts on the bill, all netcast via StillStream.
The 28th show will occur on November 13, 2010. City Skies also repeated the multi-day festival format in May of 2009 and April/May 2010, expanding to a Thursday night/Friday night/all day Saturday program.
“When we started, there seemed to be a big hole in electronic music performance venues in the Atlanta area. There were big dance clubs and DJs on one hand, and arts venues like EyeDrum on the other. My first Atlanta band TouchXtone (Creative Loafing Best of 2005 Local Electronic Act) luckily secured a monthly gig at Java Monkey from about 2003-2006. I saw firsthand that live electronic music could draw and keep an audience in a relaxed, sit-down environment. During the same time, I had also been performing at several electronic music festivals around the country, specifically the electro-music festival in Philadelphia and the Different Skies Festival at Arcosanti, Arizona. I started dreaming about an Atlanta electronic music festival, but either the venues were not conducive to what I had in mind or the cost was too prohibitive to attempt.”
“When I started my solo Sensitive Chaos band, I took on a host/sound engineer role at Aurora Coffee’s Songwriter Series and booked myself as the opening act. Putting electronic music side-by-side with alt-folk, alt-rock, rock, and jazz performers for those shows further reinforced that there was an audience for electronic music beyond the clubs and art galleries. When the Songwriter’s Series moved from Aurora Coffee to the newly opened Kavarna in 2007, I felt like I had finally found the right venue. When I sent my invitation to my friends to come play at my birthday party and got the phenomenal response, I stumbled into making that little dream a reality.”
“City Skies has been able to feature performers I consider to be national and international stars with major media exposure like Atlanta’s Richard Devine and Josh Kay, Nashville’s Jan Pulsford (Thompson Twins & Cyndi Lauper), Giles Reaves, and Tony Gerber, New York’s Richard Lainhart, and Milwaukee’s Paul Vnuk, Jr. We’ve also been able to give a supportive and consistent launching pad or a re-launching pad to a whole series of folks like Fader Vixen, Reklein, tay0, Randy Garcia, Zachary Hollback, Duet for Theremin & Lap Steel, Maui Threv, Indigovox, Kevin Spears, citizenGreen, Suicide Lane, Spy Magnet, Chris Wilfong, 84001, Mark Mahoney, Michael Peck. And the list goes on and on. We also showcased international performers Fractale from Paris, France and Modulator ESP from Nottingham, UK.”
“What I think is unique about City Skies is the diversity of performers and styles of electronic music. I grew up when FM radio would play Wendy Carlos next to Gino Vannelli next to Elton John next to the Beatles next to Tangerine Dream next to Yes next to Morton Subotnick. The common thread for me was how the synthesizers or studio effects were incorporated into the music. So City Skies will always be a mix of electropop, experimental, ambient, space music, Berlin School, progressive, house, technofolk, shoe gaze, jazz, world, drone, and something you’ve never heard before. Sometimes the program revolves around a common genre, sometimes a nice evolution of genres, and sometimes it’s just ninety degree turns all night long.”
“The other unique thing about City Skies is the intimacy of the venue, Kavarna. Richard Devine said it best in an interview he had in Electronic Musician magazine last year. He said, ‘I’ve been recently doing the City Skies shows [in Atlanta]. It’s funny, in my hometown, I’ll play for 50 people in a café, but then I’ll go play in the U.K. in front of 5,000 people. It’s really weird how that works out.’ Richard has performed at all three City Skies Festivals and one event. Each time he has brought a different set of equipment and done a very different set. City Skies is the kind of place where even the biggest stars can experiment, perhaps show a more personal side to their music than a 5000 person venue. Richard Lainhart on his Buchla 200e debuted a Messiaen piece, one Messiaen had created for Ondes Martenot. We set up in quad for the performance. The room was packed. You could have heard a pin drop, it was so beautiful.”
“I’ve been sifting through all the recordings we’ve made of the performances over the past few years, preparing a playlist for our Holiday Party in December. A Best of City Skies playlist. What I realized or remembered listening to the recordings is how good the shows have been. I’ve enjoyed every show, but it takes listening to all of them to get a sense of how consistently good they are. Plus all those moments of magic that are off-the-charts great. I’m so privileged to get a chance to experience it.”
“I’m glad to see so many more venues for electronic music here in Atlanta than when City Skies started. I’d like to think City Skies was a little catalyst that helped energize the scene. We’ll keep going as long as there are bands that want to perform and have people show up to see them. It’s a pretty simple business model, but that direct connection between performers and fans is what it’s all about.”