http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/arts/ … l?ref=arts

DID ANYONE HERE ATTEND? GOOD? BAD?

Famous to a Picky Few: An Elite Gathering of Beloved Cult Acts
By JON PARELES (NY TIMES)

CHICAGO, July 15 — An unlikely mixture of modesty and effrontery defined the Pitchfork Music Festival, held at Union Park here beginning Friday night with nine-hour shows on Saturday and Sunday.

Scale matters to the Chicago-based Pitchfork, one of the earliest and most widely read music blogs (pitchforkmedia.com), which prides itself on finding the next small thing. Its festival was full of lesser-known bands on independent labels, as reflected in low ticket prices: $15 Friday, $25 Saturday or Sunday. With three stages near one another and only two acts ever overlapping, it was possible to hear all 39 acts at the festival, though not their every note. Vendors were chosen to represent the handmade, the rare and the vintage, including vinyl albums and out-of-print T-shirts.

At the same time the festival deliberately bestowed the Pitchfork imprimatur. Pitchfork covers the independent, the new and the obscure, making songs available free as MP3 files and reviewing music with a ratings system that goes down to a decimal place. (Leave it to readers to figure out the quality difference between 8.3 and 8.4.) Pitchfork can build the Internet buzz that turns a local band into one with fans worldwide — a few here and there, but now aggregated online.

All those overlapping cults add up to an audience like that of a midsize arena show, and it sold out at 13,000 on Friday night and, in its expanded form, 17,000 each on Saturday and Sunday. Pitchfork draws what may be the most studious, even analytical crowd of any American rock festival. In the polite silence as the rock band Grizzly Bear tuned up between songs on Saturday afternoon, someone yelled a quintessentially Pitchfork comment: “You’re pretty good!â€