San Diego IndieFest is back this year in a new location as it continues its evolution as the first exclusively independent music festival in the country.
City Heights will host IndieFest 9 on March 28. It features 50 musical acts including New York indie-rock band Bear Hands as a headliner. There will be three stages and an impressive mixture of styles from local and out-of-town artists.
Festival founders Danielle LoPresti and Alicia Champion live in City Heights with their son. They said moving the festival to City Heights Urban Village on University Avenue was a no brainer.
“City Heights is the most culturally diverse neighborhood in the U.S.,” Champion said. “IndieFest is all about celebrating diversity and the elements that make our community unique and special. We’re moms now, this is where our son is growing up. We want to directly affect this part of town.”
IndieFest is collaborating with the City Heights Development Corporation to put on the event. This year’s theme is “Rock To Stop Violence.”
“This is really close to our hearts, it always has been. We care a great deal about social justice and that has gone into every IndieFest we’ve produced,” LoPresti said. “But now there’s a new personal connection. We’re raising a beautiful young black boy in America so when we see what happens, the racial profiling that is still happening in our country, it touches us in a way beyond what we felt before, which was a lot, and so when we say ‘rock to stop violence’ we’re not just talking about racial violence we’re talking about all kinds of violence and we address that in various ways throughout the festival.”
 Members of indie-rock band Bear Hands sitting behind a fence, 2014. | Bear Hands |
LoPresti will be performing with her band the Masses on Saturday.
Since it started in 2004, IndieFest has moved from Bankers Hill to North Park to Liberty Station. Organizers took a break in 2014 to focus on LoPresti’s health.
“We had some recovery to do after IndieFest 8. We had all kinds of factors come in to play, life happened, cancer happened, so we had to regroup and scale down a little bit,” LoPresti said.
This year’s festival is pared down from IndieFest 8 at Liberty Station and will take place over one day instead of three.
IndieFest runs from noon to 11 p.m. Saturday at City Heights Urban Village. The event is free for City Heights residents. For ticket information, go to the IndieFest website.