There are two ways to look at a music festival.
The first is as a punter: scanning the lineup, dropping your money months in advance, navigating timetable clashes, dehydration and the inevitable post-gig blues that follow. The second is to wonder how any of it happens at all: how dozens of artists, venues, schedules, budgets and personalities somehow come together into a single event. Even rarer, how any of it happens at a reasonable price.
What was once a question of logistics, however, has increasingly become one of survival. Festival titans such as Bluesfest and Splendour in the Grass are among the casualties of a live music industry that has spent the past few years counting its dead instead of counting ticket sales. An unfortunate third question has therefore emerged: can festivals survive at all?
Ahead of Against The Grain’s block-party festival takeover of Brisbane’s Clarence Corner as part of Open Season, I sat down with GRAIN founder Chris Langenberg, a man who wears more hats than most people own. Across the festival, he serves as curator, promoter, programmer, graphic designer and occasional problem solver, helping steer one of Brisbane’s most ambitious independent music events. It’s the latest chapter in a ten-year journey that has seen GRAIN produce more than 165 events around the country, working on shows with some of the world’s biggest names, from Fontaines D.C. to IDLES, and culminating in a homecoming ten years in the making.
The journey from humble online publication into an influential grassroots music brand wasn’t a linear path, Langenberg says.
“It started because I was going to so many shows,” Langenberg explains. “There was a band called Big Bad Echo playing at The Foundry and I realised all these bands I loved weren’t really getting coverage. Other artists were getting press, so I just kind of started a magazine”.
It might seem like a foregone conclusion now, with a ten-year celebratory festival on the horizon featuring names like Stereolab, Pond, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, and The Belair Lip Bombs, but Langenberg says there was no grand strategy.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughs. “I used to take photos at school. I was in a band and we’d get contacted by media outlets interstate that wanted us to pay for coverage. So I started interviewing bands and reviewing shows. There was no plan”.
Today, GRAIN exists as both a publication and a promotion company, producing events tailored to Brisbane’s music community and abroad.
“We try to put on shows that are more interesting than the standard three-band lineup,” says Langenberg. “I always want there to be care behind it. That’s what sets GRAIN apart. At its core, it’s about putting on shows”.
That philosophy sits at the heart of Against The Grain, which returns this year from an eight year hiatus, bigger than ever, as part of Open Season.
In recent years, Open Season has become one of the brightest fixtures on Brisbane’s cultural calendar, filling venues across the city with a carefully curated mix of local, national and international artists. As both a Brisbane local and a lifelong music fan, it has reignited my genuine excitement for live music which was slowly being replaced with the fear of industry wide failure. More than that, it has restored a belief that, despite the challenges facing the industry, there are still people willing to take risks, back artists and build something meaningful for their community.
For Langenberg, partnering with Open Season represents a significant milestone in GRAIN’s evolution.
“Open Season jumping on has been incredible,” he says. “It legitimises it. Having that brand awareness behind Against The Grain has helped push it further and given us opportunities to book artists we might not otherwise have had access to”.
Learning from past mistakes, however, Langenberg has become increasingly focused on making select events that matter more.
“Over the years I’ve learned that you can overload. You smash out too much and it leads to burnout. I’d rather focus on one really purposeful event and make it special than overexpose it”.
With the power to program a festival – and the inherent risk that now comes with it – comes a question that every music fan has probably asked themselves at some point: who would you book? As a kid, the answer usually lives in the back pages of school books, with dream lineups and impossible festival ideas. For Langenberg, the difference is that those fantasies eventually became part of his day job.
“My process starts with a dream lineup. You put together the artists that would be so sick to have. Then availability cuts half of them out, and then money cuts out even more.”
Funding remains one of the biggest challenges facing independent events. Even once artists are secured, there are countless logistical hurdles.
“The Revive Live grant made a massive difference. Without that, this festival would probably be a quarter of the size.”
“You’re balancing genres and scenes because you don’t want to pigeonhole the event into one thing. Then there’s timing, artist schedules, budgets. Sometimes you have bands you desperately want but they just aren’t available. Sometimes artists pull out after you’ve announced them. That’s just part of it.”
Against The Grain’s lineup moves comfortably between genres, and reflects the microcosm of intersecting musical die-hards and the city that helped create it.
When asked what Brisbane’s music scene means to him, Langenberg immediately returns to memories of venues and communities rather than individual artists.
“There were glory years where you’d go to a venue and just see who was on. You knew you’d run into mates. It was easy and accessible.”
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – image supplied
He points to venues like The Foundry, The Brightside and community-driven events that created identities of their own.
“Venues become brands. People know what they’re getting when they walk through the door. That’s why consistent events matter. They create scenes. People trust the curation.”
For Langenberg, that sense of identity is increasingly important as Australia’s festival landscape continues to struggle.
“I think a lot of festivals have lost touch,” he says. While rising costs are often blamed for the industry’s difficulties, he believes the issue runs deeper.
“Everyone talks about cost of living, and that’s definitely part of it. Going into the Valley can be expensive. But I think some festivals lost touch with the people who actually built them. If you’re charging hundreds of dollars for tickets, you lose accessibility. The local scene is the people who come to your shows. That’s your foundation. Some festivals just expect things to stay the same forever.”
The solution, he believes, is surprisingly simple.
“You have to think about the punter. Make the ticket as affordable as possible. Stay connected to the community. That’s where it starts.”
That community-first philosophy ultimately defines Against The Grain. More than a festival, it serves as a snapshot of Brisbane’s potential to host events on an international level while giving room to its creative ecosystem. It’s a celebration of the artists, venues and audiences that sustain it.
“I think the whole thing is a celebration of community,” Langenberg says. “It’s a celebration of what we’ve been able to build with GRAIN and a showcase of what’s possible with Brisbane.”
He pauses before delivering what may be the simplest summary of the festival’s mission.
“It shows what Brisbane can be if it wants to be.”
Ten years after a young music fan started a website because nobody else was covering the bands he loved, Against The Grain stands as proof that grassroots culture still matters. In a national music industry searching for answers, that might be exactly the kind of story worth celebrating.
Against The Grain takes place this Saturday June 20 as part of Open Season, taking over The Princess Theatre, Brisbane Brewing Co, Echo & Bounce, Season Three, Woolloongabba Art Gallery, C’est Bon plus an outdoor carpark stage. A showcase of local, national and international artists, it is both a celebration of the past decade of GRAIN and a statement about what Brisbane’s music scene can achieve, if it wants to.
Get yourself along and support live music. Tickets are available HERE
Against the Grain 2026 lineup:
Stereolab | Pond | Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever | Protomartyr | The Belair Lip Bombs | Acopia | Cola | Concrete Surfers | Good Boy | Gut Health | Hatchie | Media Puzzle | Peachy | Pool Shop | Public Figures | Selve | Slowrip | Special Features | Swapmeet | Tomorrow’s Forecast | Twine | Way Dynamic | Xiao Xiao | 01 Thurman | Deejay Hotline | Karishma | Natural Steps | Sacha | Alexiou | Squidgenini | Will Knott | Milo Eastwood | DJ Jnett | Adriana
More info & tickets: HERE
Open Season Winter 2026 lineup:
Gil Scott-Heron by Brian Jackson & Yasiin Bey | Mogwai | Current Joys | Dry Cleaning | Ben Gerrans| Bradley Zero | Mulga Bore Hard Rock| Sparks, Artificial (Live + AV) | Matt Berninger (The National) | Cat Le Bonm | Alison Wonderland | Wednesday | Sorry | Quivr Laneway Party: Centrefold | Kae Tempest | Saint Levant | The Black Angels | Nowhere Fast: The Photograph of Paul O’Brien | Assembly Vol. 2 | Clara La San | Rum Jungle | Against The Grain Festival | South System Ft. Rona | Shady Nasty | Ben Kweller | Hiatus Kaiyote | Deafheaven | Cruisin’ For A Bruisin’ | Skin – Voiid Collective & Bcharre | Peach PRC | Skin On Skin | Full Flower Moon Band | Silversun Pickups | Blak Day Out | Eddy Current Suppression Ring
More info & tickets: openseason.live
header image: credit Lachlan Douglas (somefx)
