Operating at a "loss": Subsonic is about more than money

Festivals around the globe can only hope to have a name as recognisable as Subsonic’s, let alone the beautiful property that it calls home. Riverwood Downs is to many who know it, an onomatopoeic word, which sounds exactly like the smooth sub bass travelling across its meticulously mown lawns in the early hours of a summer morning.

The festival, now on the eve of celebrating its 15th birthday, has been diamond in the rough of NSW’s bush for multiple generations of attendees. A staple of Eora’s underground, Subsonic has long stood as an opportunity for excited new members of the broader community to learn the ropes of what the essence of ‘the doof’ truly is, and for the older, more experienced to revel in the world its organisers open the doors to each November.

This “adult playground”, as described by the organisers themselves, hasn’t been all fun and games however. The festival has in its decade and a half dealt with all manner of incredible hurdles that would have understandably sunk many other festivals. Intense pressure by local police, bushfires and COVID-19 just a few challenges to Subsonic’s otherwise intensely utopian image.

With the commercial success of dance music festivals around the globe, and even around Australia in the form of events like Pitch Music & Arts, Mode Festival, Let Them Eat Cake and a number more, these hurdles may, to the uninformed, appear as the same kind of business challenges that one could face in any industry.

But, unfortunately, that kind of thinking couldn’t be more wrong.

While it was said towards the close of our interview, I feel that mentioning this up the front, rather than at the end in some kind of ‘script flipping gotcha moment’, would allow more of an impact and give even more to the opinions and experiences of Subsonic’s organisers:

“We lose money every year. We pay for it from our day jobs. We pay for invoices from our day jobs. We run this business at a loss. We never pay ourselves wages,” Vanessa Fields said.

"We do this for the love. Its never been about money and have never turned a profit. 100% of ticket sales go towards delivering the best experience possible for our patrons," Scott added.

For a cultural institution like Subsonic to have never once earned money in its fifteen years of operation, while saying plenty about the state of Australia’s creative industries as a whole (perhaps best left to another conversation), also says so much about why and how the festival is able to feel the way it does.

Scott Commens and Vanessa Fields are Subsonic’s directors. Scott, a founding member of the team and Vanessa coming on board around 7 years ago, the two have been through thick and thin to ensure that the yearly festival can take place, and to the standard to which its punters and collaborators deserve.

Riverwood Downs in itself demands attention. While most know it to be Subsonic, and vice versa, for the 362 days of the year that it doesn’t function as a festival site, Riverwood Downs is family oriented luxury camping and accommodation. Award-winning, situated on “world heritage wilderness”, it’s a space that doesn’t immediately conjure an image of 5AM finishes.

Finding a festival site is no easy feat, particularly when dance music is involved. In his time as a psytrance promoter, Scott and his original team had plenty of experience when it came to looking around for spots, so much so that it became somewhat of a weekend job.

“Being a doofer, a big part of what we used to do was just dream about the next venue. Wherever we were, whether we were camping and not partying, we’d always ask ‘how amazing would it be to run a party here?’” he mused.

“It was a full-time job on weekends back then. Scouring the net and actually getting in the car and driving around,” he continued.

“From the moment we saw it [Riverwood Downs], the feeling was that we had to do a party here.”

Riverwood Downs may, to many, seem like a pipe dream. The word ‘luxury’ is rarely seen in tandem with the word ‘doof’, but Scott and his team saw an opportunity that they couldn’t pass up.

“We’re like, ‘well, there’s a hotel on site. This is going to have to be something bigger than just a doof’. We said we wanted ‘a dance party’, and they weren’t overly keen on that. That very much opened the scope of options for what we were going to do. I guess really, that’s how Subsonic formed.”

While the Subsonic we know today is an eclectic mix of genres, scenes and people, the Subsonic of yesteryear evolved from Scott’s own experience in promoting psytrance events. Subsonic has for many years paid homage to its psy roots, with a stage almost entirely dedicated to it running year on year only until very recently.

While the broader dance scene’s musical tastes both diversify and converge, Scott shared that in those early days it was a big and controversial statement for the festival to offer more than just psy.

“Generally [a more diverse lineup] was very well received on the whole. So, whilst we were crucified by some, they were the people that just didn’t come,” Scott explained.

It was up until this point that the bush had largely been reserved for more psychedelic styles of music, in Vanessa’s experience. “The city was where all the house and techno and all the other stuff was,” she explained. “There wasn’t really anybody doing outdoors events, like camping festivals, like this.”

Multi-genre events may paint a picture of festivals like Splendour, Falls or Groovin The Moo, with stages dedicated to bands, ‘electronic music’ and hip hop respectively. For Subsonic though, this ‘multi-genre’ approach meant involving many different genres across dance music, a normalcy which is in our modern festival landscape clearly a norm.

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This normalcy, as Vanessa put it, is one of many things that larger scale festivals owe to the doof scene. “You look across the board and you see so many outdoor festivals and all of them, whether they want to admit it or not, are a testament to the doof community and the doof scene, because that didn’t exist prior,” she told me proudly.

“It takes a few people kind of stepping outside of the box a little bit to take something into the next direction.”

This wide scope, both musically and culturally, has allowed Subsonic to operate in a variety of different subcultures all at once. Whether the grungier drums and rumbles of the River State, the whistles, kicks and snares of Paradiso, or the ever-evolving stage presence of its Main Stage, Subsonic is like a collected sample of NSW’s electronic music scene left to grow in the one place.

“We probably didn't realise it at the time, but where we see ourselves at the moment is being like an annual gathering for the underground music scene in Sydney,” Scott explained.

DUNJ, Dayshift, House of Mince, S.A.S.H, Prion Audio, Ghostly. These are just a few of the names to be found both in and around Eora, as well as taking over any number of Subsonic’s stages year on year.

Though a love of music is undoubtedly the factor that unites any punter, artist or promoter working in or around a festival, for Subsonic and NSW more broadly, it’s more than that. Scott and Vanessa, like many festival operators in NSW, have gone through their fair share of adversity. At a greater level, this adversity is something experienced in some small way by people all over the state, as regulations, laws and a general culture of conservatism has tended to quash the growth of dance music communities.

“Promoters are working so hard to make sure that the grassroots music and art scene in Sydney is a thing. The government has said recently that they’re going to come out and save music festivals, but they really only want to be supporting the big guys. It’s important to us that we provide this space, or this ‘adult playground’ once a year, and for everyone to be involved,” Scott reflected.

The modern trend of big promoters, festivals, radio stations and labels collaborating with local brands could to some extent imply that there’s a huge pool of money just waiting to be seized. In some respect, you wou;dn’t be wrong for saying that. Dance music has never been bigger.

However, for Scott, Vanessa, and so many like them, at the risk of sounding like a trope, “It’s never been about the money.”

“We don't want to take over Australia. We have our thing and we want to just do that really well,” Vanessa said.

Subsonic is for the community, by the community. But with fires, police, insurance companies and a pandemic trying their best to blow the home you made over, it begs the question:

Why would anyone in their right mind subject themselves to this year on year?

“For for years when we weren’t doing it, we were like, ‘surely someone else is going to do this.’ Then, when they didn’t, it was ‘I guess we’ve got to do it.’”

You can’t blame someone for not picking up that intense mantle of responsibility. By that same token though, the frequency with which festivals and doofs happen has meant that the average punter doesn’t necessarily understand the effort and risk that a festival like Subsonic takes.

So what could possibly drive someone to go back into the fire?

I asked Scott and Vanessa, and though you might think that this sort of question is all they ever ask themselves, they were stumped. We sat in silence a short while as both of them reflected, as if the desire to run Subsonic had become instinctual, rather than something they thought about.

“I always get the feeling when the gates open,” Scott said.

The two went on to discuss memories, rather than feelings, that have attributed to their desire to continue running Subsonic. I felt like at this point I’d left the room, allowing them to engage in a nostalgia-driven conversation usually reserved for the more intimate Subsonic circles.

“Stories happen at Subsonic that we could never forget. Friends proposing on stage, who now have kids together, running around Subsonic with their video cameras.”

“Every year people reach out via the inquiries email just to say ‘I got married and I met my partner at Subsonic’ or ‘hey we just had a baby’. It’s a really big part of what reinforces why we do it.”

Were Subsonic simply organising an event for family and friends, this story would likely never have any hurdles. However, being larger than a doof allows Subsonic to operate, to experiment and to programme its weekends in the way that it does. If this community-mindedness could always pay the bills, there’d be no cause for concern, but as dance music gets larger and promoters spend more money, smaller festivals are facing being priced out.

“The financial burdens that so many people take on to keep the grassroots scene is amazing. Events lose money all of the time. They're getting increasingly more expensive to run and to stay true to independent and Australian owned companies is really difficult when you've got international companies coming in and buying up festivals and completely changing the landscape.”

For Subsonic, this has meant not to be involved in booking artists that they used to love. “They're playing for insane amounts of money and doing one show and flying back home. They used to come to Australia and do a tour of the entire underground scene and connect with the entire community, but that’s become harder.

While dance music’s huge rise in popularity is, on paper, a good thing financially, it’s the monopolising and gentrification of the culture that leaves trusted brands like Subsonic in precarious situations that they’ve never found themselves in. Does it really have to be ‘go big or go home’?

“Why does somebody move to Surry Hills? It’s not what it used to be. I’m not saying dance music isn’t what it used to be, but this is the thing with art, isn’t it? As soon as something becomes gentrified, that’s what pushed people to find the next level of creativity.”

For Vanessa, Scott and their team, this challenge has meant finding themselves in musical areas they’d never thought. They’ve leaned further into collaboration, with emerging artists globally, and are hopeful that this need to adapt will be something that the greater community is receptive and supportive of.

To them, this change has allowed them to revisit what a festival truly is.

You shouldn't go to an event just because you know all of the names and they're already your favourite. People get disappointed. People build these people up onto a pedestal and they pay hundreds of thousand dollars for an act.

You have this very huge expectation that you've built up and if that doesn't deliver that's just the most heartbreaking thing.

There’s a point where popularity gets the best of a genre.”

As Subsonic prepares for its 15th birthday, it could be easy to compare it with other legacy brands celebrating milestones of their own. Strawberry just recently had a birthday of its own, Fabric has turned 25, Dekmantel just turned 10, and Pitch is just a few years off its own 10th birthday. But to compare Subsonic to these brands just wouldn’t be fair.

Much like Scott and Vanessa struggled to understand what kept them going, it’s hard to describe the vibrant, silly and often overwhelming feeling of what Subsonic is. The two’s favourite Subsonic moments felt like a perfect encapsulation of how broad this feeling is, with Vanessa immediately celebrating Honey Dijon’s closing set in 2018, and Scott reflecting one of the few times he managed to catch a set, for Nile Rogers and Chic’s 19 person band all the way back in 2013.

It’s at this point that Vanessa’s claim that they’ve lost money every year would come as a ‘gotcha’. “The article you’ve been reading has a whole new edge!” or some such twist.

Instead, keeping all of this in mind, it’s important to remember one simple fact about what Subsonic is:

It’s never been more important to support, cherish and celebrate the people who make some of the most pivotal moments in our lives happen. They won’t always be there, and we’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Until then though, happy birthday Subsonic.

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Tickets are still available to Subsonic via their website. It takes place from Friday, November 29 to Sunday, December 1.

Jack Colquhoun is Mixmag ANZ’s Managing Editor, find him on Instagram.