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In Edgewood Park, Seeing Sounds Hits Its Stride

Lucy Gellman | July 8th, 2024

In Edgewood Park, Seeing Sounds Hits Its Stride

Culture & Community  |  Music  |  Arts & Culture  |  Musicians  |  Westville  |  Edgewood Park  |  Arts & Anti-racism

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Top: The musician Floyd Zion, who came in from L.A. for the festival. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Edgewood Park was vibing. And vibrating. On a stage beside the skate park, the artist Raé Luna warmed up to the whoosh and thud of boards on concrete, running over lyrics in their head. Down the walkway nearby, friends bobbed to the sound, comparing notes on everything from flower crowns to punk music as a form of resistance. Further back, Ammar lifted the mic to his lips, and let out a yawp that sailed across the grass, gathering force with every pair of ears it touched.

A centering and celebration of Black creatives, that scene marked the third annual Seeing Sounds Festival, held Saturday afternoon and evening in Edgewood Park. Part grassroots movement, part cultural hub, and all love-letter to music and musicians, the event brought out over 1,000 people, with a final performance from Monaleo that kept the crowd bopping well into the steamy night.

It is the fuzz-kissed brainchild of musician Orion Solo (a.k.a. Trey Moore), who first dreamed it into being in 2022. Since that time, it has grown into a sprawling music festival with multiple stages, clothing and art vendors, an over-21 beer and wine garden, and indie artists from both New Haven and across the country.

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Top: The band Speakeasy, which kept the crowd on its toes in the late afternoon. Bottom: Seeing Sounds founder Orion Solo. 

“It feels amazing,” said Solo, shortly before taking the main stage to perform himself. “The growth [of the festival] feels really affirming, really gratifying. It was always the vision, so to see it happen is amazing. It’s cool to see people interact with the space, and that’s what it’s always been about. We just want to enjoy music and we want to be in spaces that are relevant to us, and that doesn’t exist widely.”

It’s been years in the making, he added. When Solo was a teenager, he started looking for places like Seeing Sounds—“places I either couldn’t afford to be, or places that didn’t exist,” he said. He longed to attend Camp Flog Gnaw (then called the Odd Future Carnival), the annual music festival that Tyler, The Creator has put on in Los Angeles since 2012.

But without the financial resources to get to California, “we just kind of sat and watched through our phones.” By the time he was 19, Solo had started calling carnival vendors to ask what it took to mount something like a music festival. They all gave him the same answer: It had to be big enough to be worth their time and investment. As he developed his own career, he never lost sight of that dream.

When he had the chance to mount the festival in 2022, Edgewood Park felt natural: he grew up playing basketball on the courts there, and the space was a fixture of his childhood and adolescence. Since that time, he’s grown relationships with not just musicians and vendors, but also C.I.T.A. Park, Wine Down CT, and The Devil’s Gear Bike Shop among others.

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“This is creating a space for people that’s needed, but also a space that’s wanted,” he said. “Both of those things are important to me. In New Haven, when we want money, we have to justify why we need it, why it’s important. That’s in the language of every grant. So for me, the answer should be as simple as this is something we want. It’s just a special thing.”

That sense of something special—and also sacred, young, vibrant and extremely alive—wound from one stage to the other and back again, criss-crossing the grass as friends laid out picnic blankets and lawn chairs, queued for arepas, smoothies and discs of fried dough, and caught up with each other beneath the trees. Beneath a bright, inflatable archway, attendees trickled in, flashing their QR codes as they flowed right into the park. 

Marveling at the afternoon’s clear skies on one end of the park, L.A.-based artist Floyd Zion leaned in, so close to the front row that it almost seemed that he would jump into a growing crowd. As a bass guitar played him in—Ammar, who later performed, has been learning the instrument—Zion took the mic, his head bobbing to the music.

“Fuck!” he pronounced, feeling the weight of the word in its mouth, and listeners began to jam, lifting their hands and pedaling their feet in place. Up front, the singer Rosalíe swayed to the beat beneath a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. As beads of sweat formed on Zion’s brow, she let herself sway to the sound, smiling as she soaked it all in.

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Top: Musicians Finn Wiggins-Henry, Rosalíe, and Tatyana Colón. Bottom: The audience builds for Raé Luna.

“We’ve been to almost every event since the beginning, and it’s just really cool to watch it grow,” she later said, standing close to the main stage with friends Tatyana Colón and Finn Wiggins-Henry. When Zion thanked the crowd for rocking with him, she was one of the first to cheer in agreement.

Down the park’s gravel pathway, dozens of vendors joined the festivities, chatting with passers-by as they half-danced to the ambient, ever-present music. Beneath one tent, Stamford-based artist Kyla Devine walked people through her work for Beyond Pain, a clothing brand that she founded after learning to bead and sew during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“It kind of spiraled into this beautiful mess that I love,” she told Cleveland native Kiera Hale, a temporary New Havener who had arrived to watch her sister perform in the band Speakeasy. As she spoke, Devine buzzed between delicate, hand-beaded pieces, stopping to fan herself in the rising humidity.

At a nearby tent for the Little Lion Collective, New Haven transplant Max Acenowr soaked in their first time at the festival. A student at Smith College, where they are studying Africana Studies and Gender Studies, Acenowr praised Seeing Sounds’ focus on spaces intentionally by and for people of color, and specifically Black people.

“I feel like for so long, Black creators have had to exist at the margins of white creators and white events,” they said. Something like Seeing Sounds flips the script. 

“I think it actively combats gentrification,” chimed in Tyf Boyd, who moved to New Haven three years ago from New Jersey. “In New Haven, that’s so often part of arts and culture.”

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Top: Little Lion Collective members (and fans) Kyle Acenowr, Max Acenowr, Jane Dowd, Cara Santino, Dean Andrade, and Tyf Boyd. Bottom: Cristopher Josef and Roliya Jackson.

That resonated for artist and researcher Roliya Jackson, who in April opened her flower business 13 Stems. Born and raised in the Virgin Islands, Jackson grew up surrounded by flowers, delighting in the frangipanis, hibiscus and oleander that bloomed on her grandparents’ land.

After coming to Connecticut for Quinnipiac University, where she studied biomedical sciences, she thought often of her love for botany. In April, she started 13 Stems as a side gig, balancing it with her work as a cancer researcher at Yale. Saturday, her flower bar became one of the most popular tents, with bouquets and flower crowns that were visible across the space.

For most attendees, the festival was a safe space to relax. In a line for fried dough, friends Elle Otu-Appiah and Kiyah Garnett both said they were surprised—and delighted—by the scene blooming to life around them. There for her second year in a row, Garnett called it powerful, particularly in its focus on artists of color. “I feel like it’s opened up a whole different world for me,” she said.

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Top: Elle Otu-Appiah and Kiyah Garnett (at far left) with several new friends. Bottom: Ammar. "Did y’all scream today?" he asked during his set. 

That was true for the musician Ammar as he took the main stage, his body a live wire against a giant, glowing Palestinian flag projected in the background (“I would share my social media, but this is way more important,” he said at one point to call-and-response chants of “Free Palestine!”) After crowd favorites like “Elephant in the Room” and “you’ll make a fool out of me,” he paused before announcing his final song.

“Alright. Alright, listen,” he said. “We need to fuckin’ rage for this last song. Like, we need to fucking rage.” Cheers and applause wafted through the air, not yet ear shattering. “So I like to start this song off with like, a scream therapy ritual. Did y’all scream today?”

In the front row, an attendee screamed, a shrill sound that became a throaty bellow, sharp enough to cut through the dense, humid air. “No no no no no. Save it! Save it. I’m gonna count down, three-two-one, and everyone is gonna fucking scream and lose their minds.”

The flag flashed behind him, its bands of green and red suddenly more vibrant. “Three. Two. One!” Ammar exclaimed. The scream that rose from the crowd was audible across the park.

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Top: Empress Arce of The Natural Devee. Bottom: Benie N'sumbu. 

In the grass, Seeing Sounds staffer Benie N’sumbu listened with a relieved, contented sort of smile on her face. Months ago, she’d never heard of Seeing Sounds, she said. Then a blurb on the festival popped up on Instagram—and she started seeing people who looked like her, and artists who were people she wanted to listen to. She applied right away.

“I love that this is a space for Black folks and queer folks to just enjoy art and each other in all of our glory and all of our natural selves,” she said.    

That resonated for musician Finn Wiggins-Henry, who was there Saturday as a listener rather than a performer. Since moving to New Haven to work for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 2018, they’d never seen something quite like Seeing Sounds. Both the vibe and the magnitude, they specified, are different from that of Arts & Ideas. 

“It’s amazing,” they said. “I need to learn from Trey."

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Top: Luna, who praised Solo for not dismissing her work after years of being ignored or shrugged off by male artists. Bottom: Psycho Fool's Bri Wilson.

Back at Coogan Pavilion, Raé Luna took the stage to cheers, the audience growing as she performed a set drenched in tight bars and thick, years-in-the-making lyricism. A writer and musician based in Waterbury, Luna first heard about the festival last year, through a friend who had worked sound for artists in the 2023 lineup.

When she met Solo, she was grateful, she remembered—he didn’t join the dozens of men who had dismissed her as a queer woman of color making art.

“This is dope!” she said as she came down from the stage, and was immediately surrounded by a gaggle of fans. “I’m lucky to have found it.” 

At a tent just yards away, The Devil’s Gear owner Johnny Brehon and Channel 1 Skate Shop’s Lou Cox stressed the importance of DIY community spaces, which had drawn them to sponsor Seeing Sounds. For over a year now, Brehon has opened the shop to photographers and indie artists like Solo, transforming the Chapel Street storefront into a gallery, concert venue, and gathering space.

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Lou Cox and Johnny Brehon.

“This is community!” Brehon said, his hand grazing an orange Skate Haven board. The boards, a collaboration with Mass MoCA, were among a few items that Brehon planned to raffle off over the course of the day. “A lot of these folks out here are our customers.”

Inside Coogan Pavilion, the afternoon was just starting to heat up, conversation cutting through the perennial smell of feet. At a rack for Psycho Fool, lifelong New Havener Bri Wilson walked attendees through her designs, vintage clothes hand-printed with words like GIRL and PARTY hand-printed onto them big block letters with five-pointed star shapes.

A linocut printer,  Wilson said she’s inspired by pop-inflected designs from around 2010, when she was in middle school. “As clichéd as it sounds, this was kind of a dream, to start my own brand,” she said. Because Psycho Fool is still new, she added, she was excited to share it with Saturday’s audience.

Back on both stages, there were hours of entertainment to go, and the party was just getting started. As the Jersey-based band Speakeasy took the small stage, artist Amira Brown took a moment beneath a tent to just listen. A member of a global art strike for a ceasefire in Gaza, Brown hasn’t produced new work since November—but was still glad to be in the company of other artists and vendors. 

“The music is boppin, I love the vendors—it’s a great event,” In every direction, it seemed, Edgewood Park was vibrantly alive. 

For more, click on the videos above.