The Austin dance venue hosts a packed three-day festival
By Jeff McCord
The Seismic Dance Event is coming back November 15th-17th. The dozens of performers include some very big names in the house and techno genres: Disclosure, Carl Cox, Eric Prydz, and Gesaffelstein. (Find a playlist of performers at this year’s Seismic Dance Event HERE.)
The acclaimed festival is taking place once again on indoor and outdoor stages at the Concourse Project. Industry mouthpiece DJ Magazine has twice nominated Seismic as the Best Boutique Festival in North America, and ranked the Concourse Project itself #5 among all the dance venues in the US, and #28 worldwide.
The Concourse Project has many devotees. Peter Porter is a network administrator for the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, and a Concourse regular.
”The size of the venue is one of the biggest things,” Peter says. “Once you walk into the main hall, it’s just a massive room. Their sound system and lighting is probably the top that I’ve seen, in Texas at least. A lot of other places around the United States don’t have something like the Concourse Project. And they’ve been able to bring out artists that haven’t traditionally been to this area of Texas. I recently saw Pete Tong, he’s a legend with BBC Radio. I didn’t think I’d ever see him. It was an amazing experience.”
My nephew, Robert Andrews, is similarly enthusiastic. He made the trip down from Dallas to see Max Cooper, and prefers the Concourse Project to anything that Dallas has to offer.
Yet unless you’re an avid dance music fan, you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of the place. How did Seismic begin, and how did this dance venue, housed in a nondescript building on the south end of the Austin Bergstrom Airport, even get started?
Slowly, organically. And Andrew Parsons and Kelly Gray came at all this from completely different directions.
”I’m from the Waco area,” Andrew, the talent buyer at Concourse, explains. “I started going to raves when I was very young. I have an older brother who got me into dance music at 13. I started DJing at 14, I started playing parties very young. I wasn’t allowed to go into clubs I was playing at the time. I was going back and forth because Waco is right in between Dallas and Austin, going to Houston where a lot of the big parties were 20 to 30,000 people. I moved to Austin because I was coming here more, and my brother had moved here, too. I got a job at Apple, and moved here for music. There wasn’t a lot of dance music stuff going on.”
KUTX host Soundfounder arrived in Austin in 2005 (coincidentally, so did Andrew and Kelly). He recalls a similar dance music deficit.
”I already had a sampler and turntables,” he says, “and I was into electronic music and beats and all this stuff. I moved here and immediately felt like the infrastructure here was lacking for world class electronic music. It had really branded itself as a guitar city.”
This wasn’t an issue for Kelly, Creative Director – Operations at Concourse. She moved to Austin from San Antonio in order to attend UT, and took a few years to discover a newly blossoming scene.
“I’m just realizing,” she says, “this is my anniversary week of my induction into the electronic dance music scene here. Halloween night, we went to a rave at the Enchanted Forest (a defunct Austin venue). And it was culture shock for me. I was always into music, but because I was in San Antonio, things were just more mainstream there. I was just enamored with what was going on; the people, the self-expression, the music. The next day I was trying to download anything I could and started learning. There were raves and warehouse parties, some smaller club shows with touring artists. I was dedicated to that and [Andrew and I] both were promoting. He would DJ. I started a dance group and I would try to grow the scene here. It was a very long journey, and we ended up starting RealMusic Events, doing our own events to start bringing some more diversity here. Not just mainstream dance music, but more up and coming acts across the various subgenres. It just continued to grow. We started doing stuff at different venues and by 2018, we started the Seismic Dance Event, our festival. By 2021, we had the Concourse Project. All of those years of building were necessary because you couldn’t just open something of the size and scale of the Concourse back then.”
Their partnership started some fifteen years back. Back then regular shows meant once a month. Around 2010, they did Mayhem; it was one show a week. Everyone thought they were crazy. Except the fans.
“We became partners at the original Kingdom downtown, and we started doing shows there in 2012,” Kelly recalls. “Andrew was the talent buyer and he filled the calendar, until it closed in 2018. But we were already in that stride. We always say that we haven’t had a break since. Until Covid.”
“It was a forced break” recalls Kelly. “I had a full time job at Google. I decided to finally take the leap to focus full time on all this because everything was growing and it was too much to juggle my multiple lives. And just a little bit later is when Covid hit. It gave us time to plan with our partner David Brinkley, (CFO & Conceptual Strategic Partner), who moved here from San Francisco and had a sister venue similar to Kingdom called Audio, which is still around and kicking. He joined us to plan and build out the Concourse Project.”
Concourse opened in 2021. The venue was large, 2000 capacity. But they planned for all eventualities.
“We actually built the venue to have a modular floor plan,” Kelly explains, “because we didn’t think it would be feasible to have a sellout show all the time. We have shrunken layouts. When we first opened, we had way more variety in size. We really do like smaller acts, they might be legends in other countries, but they pull maybe less here. So some would be 500, the occasional 7-800 show. And now a lot of them do hit just around that top capacity.”
”When we built the place,” Andrew continues, “we were still growing. And we still are. The scene is still growing too. From opening the Concourse Project to now, it’s gone faster than even we anticipated.”
They’re anticipating this year’s Seismic Dance Event. Asked to name some of their favorite bookings, they go on for a while.
“Carl Cox,” Kelly says. “Best energy, a titan of the industry, a legend from the early roots of the dance music scene.”
Disclosure? Andrew: “That’s one that I’ve been working on for so long. They’re so big, they usually stick with Live Nation, so to be able to get them on Seismic is a huge thing for me.”
On it goes. ARGY, Layton Giordani, ORBITAL, Sammy Virji, Riordan, Max Styler, Westend…. A diverse lineup that all get enthusiastic recs, and these are just off the top of their heads. Clearly, they’re both very invested. The booking of all these acts and the planning of Seismic is a labor of love and passion.
“The music is obviously amazing,” Kelly says, “but it’s also the opportunity to see some of the coolest production. It’s something that really motivates us. That’s what led to finding the space for the Concourse Project; that big modern warehouse industrial feel. Stripped down, bare bones infrastructure. But the focus is on really high tech production. So we do really cool shit.” She laughs. “Sorry.”
Her enthusiasm is contagious. And she’s not finished.
“We always have our little cliche moment, eye roll. People will go out there, folks visiting from different states. The first thing that they say. Wow, the energy, the people, it’s like a lifestyle festival. It brings a hyper dedicated crowd and everyone’s really cool and laid back with a really good attitude.”
Andrew gets in the last word.
“The vibes,” he says, “are top notch.”
