Omar Afra dug up the receipts from Houston’s weirdest, most ambitious festival era, and yeah, it’s a lot.
If you were anywhere near Houston’s DIY and warehouse scene in the mid-2010s, you probably have a Day for Night story. Maybe it’s Aphex Twin playing in the rain. Maybe it’s turning a corner inside a gutted federal post office and walking straight into a Björk Digital installation. Maybe it’s just the general sense that something was happening in this city that, on paper, made no sense.
Cofounder Omar Afra has now gone back through the actual paperwork, and it turns out “made no sense” might be underselling it a little.
A newly assembled collection at the Free Press Houston Archive pulls together three editions’ worth of schedules, site plans, staff records and 32 recovered articles, plus a whole separate archive just for the art program. It’s basically the director’s commentary track for one of the most chaotic and ambitious things to ever happen in a Houston warehouse district.
Some numbers, for the uninitiated: the 2015 edition sold out at around 20,000 people. By 2016 the festival had taken over the old Barbara Jordan Post Office — 1.5 million square feet — with Björk Digital alone eating up more than 35,000 of it. VIP tickets ran up to $700. And somehow, according to Afra, none of the three editions actually made money. He’s put the per-edition cost somewhere around $6 to $7 million.
The lineups still read like a fever dream: Aphex Twin, Björk, Nine Inch Nails, Travis Scott, Run the Jewels, ODESZA, SOPHIE and Arca sharing a building with a visual arts program built around light, code and spatial sound — Refik Anadol’s Infinity Room, NONOTAK, Golan Levin, Damien Echols. Not a side-stage afterthought. The actual point.
What’s interesting about the archive isn’t just the nostalgia bait, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the stuff nostalgia usually cuts out: the missing radios, the forklifts, the moment someone realized several tons of gear had been promised to a floor that could not physically hold several tons of gear. The unglamorous machinery behind the lasers.
Afra’s take, now that the numbers are public via the Free Press Houston Archive, is that Houston wasn’t just a convenient host city for Day for Night. Most of those tickets went to people traveling in from somewhere else. Houston was exporting the whole idea and making people fly here for it.
Was it sustainable? Absolutely not, and Afra will tell you that himself. Was it worth digging back up? If you were there, you already know the answer.
