Scene Makers Q+A: Childhood pals helm Minnesota’s biggest rural EDM festival, Infrasound

They grew up together in the Twin Cities and fell in love with a genre of music widely associated with urban settings. So what are Alex Heiligman and David Liberman doing putting on a big electronic dance music festival way out in the boonies?

The Hopkins High School grads, both now 35, will once again present their Infrasound Festival this weekend at Harmony Park in rural southern Minnesota, near Albert Lea. A seemingly unlikely mix of hi-fi visual and sound production, underground producers/DJs and woodsy lakeside camping, the festival has lasted 13 years in a variety of out-there locations. They now claim more than 4,000 attendees.

Here’s an edited conversation with Heiligman and Liberman about the event’s unique success and challenges.

Q: How has Infrasound survived 13 years in rural locations like Harmony Park?

A: Heiligman: The first festival I went to when I was 16 was at Harmony Park [2005′s Yggdrasil fest]. From the moment on, I couldn’t get enough of the place and music festivals in general. When I went to other festivals after that, none of them lived up to the kind of homey vibe of Harmony Park. They felt more rigid. Finally, in 2019 we were able to bring Infrasound there.

Liberman: We started it in Austin, Minn., then moved to Black River Falls [Wis.] then to Highbridge Hills just south of Ashland [Wis.]. Coming back to southern Minnesota helped strengthen that Midwest fan base. It’s cool to see the support grow from like 400 attendees in 2012 to where we are today.

Q: Has it been hard to convince performers to come out to these far-off locations?

A: Heiligman [also a founder of Minneapolis’ Snowta festival]: I already had good relationships working on events in Minneapolis, so that helped convince performers to give it a try early on. But yes, just dealing with the logistics of getting to a more out-there location can be difficult. It’s a lot to convince someone to come that far, but once people started to see what we were doing from the artist side, word of mouth caught on.

Q: Your audience comes from all over, not just the cities. Is your festival proof that electronic dance music isn’t just for city kids anymore in the digital age?

A: Heiligman: The internet helped get the music out there more for sure. Before, you had to kind of be told about it or find it.

Liberman: You’d be handed a flyer for a party in downtown Minneapolis, and that’d be it. Back then, Alex was good at finding so many artists through MySpace [laughs]. One of the artists we work with on the management side, Ganja White Night — who’s incredibly successful at this point — Alex discovered them on MySpace from a small town in Belgium. While some kids were watching TV, Alex was scouring the internet for new music. So yes, there are pockets of people all over the country who love this music now.

Q: A lot of people think of a festival like this as one where it’s a bunch of hallucinogenic-popping kids tripping in the woods. Does that stereotype hold up nowadays?

A: Heiligman: I feel like every music genre has its stereotypes like that. There’s some small truth to it, but we have a Facebook group with threads on it where people are asking where the sober campsites are, where they can find what we call the calm camp just for people to chill out. So no, I don’t think there’s a lot of truth to it, and I think that same stereotype could be said of a lot of other types of festivals.

Q: One of the unique things about Infrasound is you say there isn’t a main stage. How does that play out?

A: Liberman: Each stage is designed for different times of day. One is for daytime. One has a big LED wall that’s more for visually driven performances. Our silent disco [via headphones] is an attraction in and of itself. It’s inside this hangar and we use high-powered projectors on the white canvas overhead. That comes into play at 1 a.m. when the sound ordinance kicks in, and we can’t have amplified music.

Q: How did you guys get into booking events like this in the first place?

A: Heiligman: I grew up playing bass guitar. I was always really interested in getting the heaviest bass sound. That’s how I discovered electronic music, particularly dubstep, which I didn’t even know was called that back then.

We would go to Chicago and Denver to see some of these artists, and we’d spend a lot of money doing that. We were at a show in Chicago talking to the artist [Vibe Squad], and he asked where we were from and why we were following him. And he said, ‘Why don’t you just book me in Minneapolis?’ We never even thought that’d be possible. Back then, though, it was actually cheaper to book him in Minneapolis than it was for us all to travel to see him. It was a eureka moment.

Q: What are your personal favorite memories from 13 years of Infrasound?

A: Liberman: Mine is the beachside sunrise set in 2015. It was kind of the first year where it really felt like the event had clicked, and we had good attendance. We had a sunrise performance by a special artist [Tipper] as the final performance of the whole weekend. We were sitting down in the sand, me and Alex and another good friend. I remember thinking this was something I wanted to do for a very long time.

Heiligman: I’d go back to our first year. It was not a good situation financially. I had been booking shows for like three years at that point, and all of my success was wiped out by that first festival. We lost everything we’d made up to that point. It felt like a disaster. But when I got home and started reading the internet, I saw all these people saying things like, “That was the best weekend of my life! I can’t wait until next year!” That was an eye-opener. So we picked ourselves back up and did it again. And I’m glad we did.

With: Joker, Eprom, Ternion Sound, J. Kenzo, dozens more.

When: 1 p.m. Thu.-Sun morning.

Where: Harmony Park, Clarks Grove, Minn.

Tickets: $105-$250, infrasoundfestival.com.