Event Producer Announces Plans for 6-Day, Multivenue Music Festival in Portland’s Central Eastside
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Scott Crane grew up in Detroit but started visiting Portland regularly in the ’90s.
“My love for Portland developed around my coming here for shows,” says Crane, an entertainment industry veteran whose experience includes producing events at South by Southwest, Coachella, Fashion Week, the Oscars, and Sundance—and producing the Oakland Music Festival and San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival.
Now, Crane plans to bring that experience to bear in Portland with Soundscape Northwest, a six-day festival scheduled for April 27 through May 2 across more than a dozen venues in the Central Eastside. Festival organizers say more than 100 bands are slated to perform, with confirmed artists such as Y La Bamba, Novena Carmel, who hosts Morning Becomes Eclectic on the Santa Monica NPR affiliate KCRW, will serve as the festival’s host in residence.
Now Crane hopes to bring the exciting but intimate vibe associated with MusicFest Northwest and the long-defunct Seattle festival North by Northwest, not to mention the early days of South by Southwest, when the Austin festival was better known as a place to see up-and-coming bands in tiny venues, rather than a forum to watch panel discussions about marketing and tech.
“What I think our community needs right now is less noise and less volume and less crowds and more human interaction,” says Crane, whose multimedia production company, The Storied Arts, is producing the festival in collaboration with Austin-based Tiger Bomb Promo. “Maximizing profits, maximizing eyeballs for brands and all that—that’s just such an empty endeavor. It’s just not what I want. What I want personally is living room shows.”
Though Crane compared Soundscape to large, established music festivals like SXSW and New York’s CMJ Music Marathon, which began in 1980 and continued until 2015—and was the place for up-and-coming bands and music industry pros to converge—he also hopes it can be an economic driver for the city.
“All of our venues have been suffering. You know, they’ve had a really rough go of it the last five years,” Crane says, noting the recent closure of Lollipop Shoppe, “a cornerstone of the neighborhood.”
He also notes that artists have begun in recent years to boycott SXSW due to sponsorships by the U.S. Army and the defense contractor Raytheon, and the contraction of the festival’s schedule to exclude the showcase shorthanded as “music weekend” because it traditionally ran the second weekend of the event. (Festival organizers have told Variety the festival will continue to showcase music alongside its other offerings, though they confirm the 2026 event will last just seven days.)
Soundscape will also offer Portlanders—and, Crane hopes, visitors from all over the world—the opportunity to “vote with their wallets,” as 10% of profits will support public radio stations.
More details and a sign-up for the festival’s mailing list can be found at soundscapenorthwest.com.
