Interviews

Taking North-East by a storm - Forkaal

By Sumedha Tripathi
November 24, 2017
Taking North-East by a storm - Forkaal

We talked to the folks of LAC Group and getting the northeast in the music festival radar.

At a point where music festivals and their significance have steadily been emerging as one of the most capitalized stages in the nation-state. There could not have been a better time for yet another festival to join the troop. What can be better than having it in the pictureque North-East? Here’s bringing out Forkaal, one of its kind multi-genre festival. It's all based out of Northeast India aiming to pull music lovers especially to the land of North-East. Forkaal being a two-day festival had a stellar lineup; Vader, the Polish Death Metal Giant as the headliner, Indie bands like Demonic Resurrection, Kryptos, Girish and The Chronicles, Aswekeepsearching, Nicholson. They also served as a platform of exposure for a handful of bands from the Northeast. While this festival has gotten thumps up from several acclaimed music reviewers, launching it for their first edition was one hell of a tedious task. We did a small interview with the organizers of the festival, the folks from LAC Group.

In conversation with the LAC Group

Sumedha from Loudest: While starting the Forkaal project how many numbers did you estimate and how much was the margin? We expected a number of around 6000+ crowds in those two days. However, it didn’t go as we expected and we had a crowd of around 3000 people in the two days. We think since it was the first edition, we lacked many things from our end. In terms of the publicity, we believe we were not up to the mark as we couldn’t pull more people.   Sumerdha: What was the basic plan you had before starting the Forkaal Festival? Our vision is to create world-class one of its kind’s experimental music festivals which are aimed at taking people to different meta-physical realms of existence and help established North-East as the music, recreational & Eco-tourism hub in Asia in next 5 years. It is one of such leisure festival with tourism initiatives which seeks to promote North-East as the eco-tourism destination choice in the North-Eastern part of India.  One of the objectives is to provide the right platform for local artists.   Sumedha: How did you get the sponsors for the first edition since you are a new venture? Who were the sponsors? It was very hard to get sponsors. We reached out to almost each and every corporate house and kept visiting sponsors until a week before the festival. NOKIA was our main sponsor. Air Asia, Harley Davidson, Delta Publicity also contributed to the festival.   Sumedha:  How are you planning on growing the next gen of Forkaal and what were the loopholes? We realized for the next edition, we need more aggressive marketing campaign and a bigger team. There are places where we could have made some cost adjustment to minimize the overall budget. The first-hand experience has taught us a lot about the market. Sumedha: What are the future prospective plans for LAC? Currently, we are associating with some the of rock/metal festival across Northeast. The festivals are Sadiya Festival 2017, Assam; Capital Chaos Vol 4. In Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh, Winter Mosh 2.0 at Nongstoin, Meghalaya, and Extreme Slam Fest at Shillong, Meghalaya. We plan to associate with almost every music festival that happens across Northeast to create better networking in our area. Who's excited for the next? We at Loudest sure are! Check the festival out the Forkaal Festival page : here.

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