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There’s something about music festivals—most people who attend them can relate that they’re incredible experiences, but it can also be hard to ignore the drawbacks to the staging of such large events. Festivals have a remarkable capacity to bring out self-centered behavior in their target millennial demographic—phone screens block out the faces of crooning performers while bodies force their way through the crowd past those who have been waiting outside for hours. Festivals are also vulnerable to the inevitable misery of adverse weather; multiple acts were rained out of last fall’s Boston Calling when a violent thunderstorm passed through the city. But amidst all this chaos, there’s a deeper reason people still flock to large festivals; they transcend the realm of pure entertainment and become a unique artistic amalgamation. The density and range of musical talent on display at a multiple-stage festival is, in the literal sense of the word, incredible. Boston Calling’s legacy is set to develop further this Friday.

The festival has wasted little time in establishing itself as a dynamic, populist event that works within tight temporal and physical constraints—every May and September, organizers transform the stark, boxy concrete of City Hall Plaza into a booming fairground where the bass frequencies can rattle your skull if you’re standing close enough to the stage. Like the Governor’s Ball in New York City, albeit on a smaller scale, Boston Calling has seen a rapid rise in prominence over the past several years and has become one of the city’s musical centerpieces.

The festival stands out not only for its substantial growth but also because of its distinctive vibe. This is due in part to its organizers, business partners Brian Appel and Mike Snow, both veterans of the Boston music industry. Both worked for beloved Boston radio station WFNX before it tragically went off the airwaves in 2012, after selling its frequency to the hulking media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications. Both men also worked for the now-defunct Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly publication that covered the city’s art scene. No new publication or radio station has cropped up to take the places that WFNX and the Phoenix occupied as mouthpieces for Boston’s music scene. With Boston Calling, Appel and Snow’s agency Crashline Productions has given the city a new musical center.

The unique personal histories of the organizers are apparent in the structure of the lineup. Aaron B. Dessner, a member of the band The National, serves as a curator for each iteration of the festival. Dessner’s influence gives the small lineup an unpredictable nature, especially with respect to genre. For instance, after featuring rap acts like Run The Jewels and ILoveMakonnen in the spring of 2015, Boston Calling presented a fall lineup that does not feature any rap.

“It’s a combination of a lot of things, and we don’t necessarily go into it with a blank Excel sheet when we’re going to start booking and say, ‘This is our hip-hop slot, and this is our DJ slot, and this is our gospel slot,’” Appel says. “The lineup is a reflection, typically, of what Aaron Dessner and the curation team feel is important in the zeitgeist in the moment.” Consistent with that spirit, this year’s lineup is quite timely—for instance, CHVRCHES will release their sophomore album the day before they take the stage at Boston Calling. The festival has brought some big names to the heart of Boston in the past, ranging from Nas to Beck to Vampire Weekend to Neutral Milk Hotel, and this year’s lineup includes standouts like Father John Misty, The Avett Brothers, Alt-J, and Of Monsters and Men. “When Mike and I are standing there on the ground during the festival, we can’t believe the difference just in terms of efficiency versus when we started just back in 2013,” Appel says.

—Staff writer Michael L. McGlathery can be reached at mcglathery@college.harvard.edu.

Alt-J

Alt-J is difficult to categorize. The band—founded in 2008 at Leeds University and currently made up of lead vocalist Joe Newman, keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton, and drummer Thom Green—has a three-year discography spanning musical styles from Southern rock to indietronica, winning it the nebulous and meaningless genre title of “alternative” and making it a perfect fit for the wildly eclectic atmosphere of Boston Calling.

Despite (and perhaps because of) this lack of concrete classification, Alt-J has enjoyed commercial success: Their debut album, “An Awesome Wave” (2012), won a Mercury Music Prize, went platinum in the UK, and sold over 1 million copies worldwide, while their second album, “This Is All Yours” (2014), was nominated for this year’s Grammys and BRIT Awards. Alt-J’s Facebook page declares that they “continue to excel as a genre-defying act,” and under Facebook’s “Influences” category, band representatives have offered an apathetic “Haha” (no word on whether Haha is, in fact, a musical influence).

In any case, whether it’s the steady thrumming of “Breezeblocks,” the loose Americana vibe of “Left Hand Free,” or the ambient experimental rock layers of “Bloodflood, pt. II,” Alt-J promises one thing—lots of blended sound layers. The sounds in Alt-J’s songs draw from commonly used instruments—a bass guitar and drums—as well as more eccentric ones—drummer Thom Green has used the back of a saucepan instead of a cymbal, and a riff in the band’s Bollywood-esque song “Taro” is played on an electric guitar using a roll of electric tape. With the support of oddly hypnotizing lyrics, often unintelligible except for tiny, rhythmic snippets—for example, a continuous repeat of “tralala” in “Fitzpleasure”—and startlingly evocative music videos, Alt-J creates a mesmerizing sound-visual landscape for listeners to explore.

Check this group out if you want to sound edgy when people ask you whom you saw at Boston Calling—then you can explain that the band’s name is styled Alt-J, which you can input into a Mac keyboard to get ∆, and maybe make a reference to the Illuminati. Haha.

—Staff writer Melanie Y. Fu can be reached at melanie.fu@thecrimson.com.

CHVRCHES