WRAP-UP: Substance 2022 Shines as the Year's Most Vital Underground Festival
The 2022 installment of L.A.’s Substance festival exceeded our expectations (high as they were), and we’re still coming down from what we experienced as one of the most passionate and relevant weekends of underground music, performance, and community in 2022. Self-described as “LA’s Dark Underground Festival,” the event deftly delivered a weekend to long remember via its formidable lineup of performers, DJs, and visual artistry.
The weekend got off to an early but welcome start Thursday evening at Rubycon Records with the Pre-Substance party, a pleasantly packed event that afforded us an opportunity to enjoy brilliantly blistering sets courtesy Comfort Cure, Spike Hellis, and Plack Blague, DJ contributions from Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire, and more.
Presented by Restless, the return to the festival’s original, hauntingly historic setting of The Los Angeles Theatre was a masterstroke, creating a uniquely striking environment for the stellar local and international lineup unlike any we’ve inhabited. As with any festival —though especially with a stacked lineup like the one Substance 2022 boasted (see flyer below)— we were rarely able to see a complete set of every artist we would have liked, but that didn’t stop us from trying, of course. Festival schedule never far from hand, we happily and repeatedly rotated through the festival’s three performance areas: the downstairs Ballroom, Middle Stage, and of course the Main Theatre.
And the same can be said about our signature WMF Polaroids: we jumped at every opportunity that presented itself to document the talented artists who seemed to fill every nook and cranny of the delectably decadent Los Angeles Theatre, yet still only captured a fraction of the shots we would have loved to add to our ever-growing image archive of crucial underground artists. Photo ops encroached by space-time demands notwithstanding, the batch of Polaroids we managed to snap did turn out fabulously, and we are delighted to share them here now and for the future as our own humble way of celebrating the extraordinary event that is Substance.
And now the countdown begins for Substance 2023…
