Mission Creek Festival

Mission Creek Festival is a 3-day music and literature festival that takes place every spring in downtown Iowa City, Iowa. The festival thrives on intimacy and visceral connections between artists and audiences. We host events indoors at traditional venues and local shops converted into performances spaces solely for the festival.

Schedule of Events:

5:00 PM - 8:30 PM: 2024 Lit Walk - Downtown Iowa City

The annual MCF Lit Walk returns in 2024 with several rounds of speakers at your favorite local hotspots. Bringing Iowa City to life in new ways, hear an unexpected variety of work from a mix of talented local and out-of-town writers. Stay tuned for more information on featured readers and local business locations.

7:15 PM: Single File - Riverside Theatre

Single File is two best friends using music to explore social, spiritual and emotional territories, conjuring both dancing and trance-like states, with vocals likened to Bjork and Imogen Heap.

7:30 PM: Strangers of Necessity - Gabe's

Strangers Of Necessity are an American hip-hop duo, based in the Midwest, consisting of prolific producer, CoryaYo and veteran lyricist, Fooch the MC. They linked via twitter and quickly became friends, sparking an immediate chemistry and need to make quality music together; hence the name Strangers Of Necessity. They instantly began recording music and doing shows locally, generating a nice buzz in the area. Their sound is best described as a fresh take on that golden era of hip-hop, blending tasteful jazz and soul samples, crisp snares, boomy kicks on wonky patterns with a soulful delivery, dense schemes and potent punch-lines that hit peaks before unseen. With their new single “Abundance” getting some looks and a new album set to drop later this spring, Strangers Of Necessity are geared up and ready to bring you fresh beats and rhymes that speak to right now; giving you that feeling that can only be described as “goose bump music.” Two people, two different worlds, one common goal… make good music.

For fans of Slum Village, A Tribe called Quest, De La Soul and Madlib.

8:00 PM: George Clanton - The Englert

George Clanton doesn’t just produce gleaming electronic pop, he produces nostalgia too. The Los Angeles artist’s process involves tweaking synthesizer presets, but beyond searching for the right melodies and textures, he’s hoping to come upon a sound that strikes a spiritual chord. “I’m looking for something that triggers a memory or an emotion,” he says. His lyrics are direct transmissions from his soul: raw, often off-the-cuff, evocative. When you pair those words with the gauzy textures Clanton’s become known for, his music feels like a dreamy filter you can put over your own memories. Every moment feels a little more colorful, a little more comforting.

You can hear the impact of this approach in his upcoming third album—take fuzz-pop anthem “******* Up My Life.” The track is both raucous and soothing, and as Clanton’s distorted croons echo across swelling synths and crushing breakbeats, he offers a mantra: “It feels alright.”

It’s a fitting return for an artist who’s spent the last decade cutting through the noise. In addition to making music, he runs the 100% Electronica record label with his fellow pop mutator and wife Negative Gemini. He also spearheads events, including weekly livestreams on Twitch. Being extremely online has allowed Clanton’s fans access to the depths of his personality, to connect with his work more deeply. “I think of myself as the ultimate DIY person,” he says. “Working the George Clanton way has made for a really unique career that hasn’t yet been fully recognized.”

Growing up, Clanton knew he wanted to be an entertainer, but he didn’t know how. His hometown of Ridgeway, Virginia, had a NASCAR track but no concert venues or record stores. So MTV was his primary education: videos by artists like 311, The Prodigy, and the Bad Boy Records crew taught the art of showmanship. He downloaded a lot of music from Limewire. During one session, a mislabeled download of what he thought was Oasis turned out to be shoegaze band Brian Jonestown Massacre, opening him up to the vast world of underground music on the internet, which led him to help form the scene that would dream up vaporwave.

Under the monikers ESPRIT and Mirror Kisses, Clanton became a key figure of the early vaporwave scene through his meditative lo-fi productions. The genre was then known primarily for its use of samples, but his 2014 album virtua.zip was a landmark: the first of its kind to be built entirely from original compositions. He also started singing on his tracks back then, adding a human touch and another layer of emotional involvement to the developing genre. In 2015, he dropped both aliases in favor of his given name, a symbolic shedding of creative restraints.

In order to reproduce his internet success offline, Clanton hustled harder. Moving to Brooklyn in 2015, where he worked a day job and made music at night, provided that motivation. Seeking a label but unwilling to compromise, he started his own. The label and his first album under his birth name would share the same moniker: 100% Electronica. His 2018 follow-up, Slide, further revealed his gift for deeply moving pop. One of the album’s most powerful tracks, “You Lost Me There,” was inspired by Negative Gemini leaving for work. The mild melancholy of missing your person for a few hours started to feel like the end of the world: “I just didn’t want to be alone because the house was empty,” Clanton says. “I try to find the extreme in the mundane.”

Clanton has also curated a tightly knit roster of artists ( Negative Gemini, Satin Sheets, Small Black, et al.) who continue to push the boundaries of vaporwave, internet music, and pop. He considers 100% Electronica his biggest achievement, pointing to the dedicated fans that see themselves in the music. “I feel like we’ve created a cultural identity out of thin air,” he says.

Clanton expanded upon that in 2019 with 100% ElectroniCON, the first vaporwave music festival, to give the community a physical space in which to interact. When live events were paused in 2020, he stayed connected through Virtual Utopia concerts, where artists perform in panoramic virtual reality environments, and weekly VR talk show THE BIG STREAM. Even though he had no framework for programming, Clanton taught himself to code using Python and C# languages in order to make these shows. He found a way to stay busy musically too. In a full-circle moment, he got to team up with one of his childhood inspirations, working with 311 frontman Nick Hexum on their psychedelic album George Clanton & Nick Hexum (2020), which landed Clanton on the Billboard charts for the first time (Top 100 Current Album Sales).

After a year spreading out across a number of projects, Clanton is now focusing on delivering a powerful sequel to Slide. Started almost immediately after Slide’s release, the new album finds him both musically and personally matured. It’s an elegant merging of all his past musical selves—of stirring rock, sweeping shoegaze, and niche electronics—augmented with more complex layers and physical instruments. It’s also a journey inwards as Clanton emphasizes personal reflection and self-improvement—themes he’s held close his whole career. “It’s definitely something that I need to get out,” he says of the music. “I want people to know that George Clanton is better than ever and something amazing is coming just around the corner.”

8:30 PM: Hatis Noit - Riverside Theatre

Hatis Noit is a Japanese vocal performer hailing from distant Shiretoko in Hokkaido who now resides in London. Her accomplished range is astonishingly self-taught, inspired by everything she could find from Gagaku — Japanese classical music — and operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, to avant-garde and pop vocalists.

It was at the age of 16, during a trek in Nepal to Buddha’s birthplace, when she realised singing was her calling. While staying at a women’s temple in Lumbini, one morning on a walk Hatis Noit heard someone singing. On further investigation it was a female monk singing Buddhist chants, alone. The sound moved her so intensely she was instantly aware of the visceral power of the human voice; a primal and instinctive instrument that connects us to the very essence of humanity, nature and our universe.

The name Hatis Noit itself is taken from Japanese folklore, meaning the stem of the lotus flower. The lotus represents the living world, while its root represents the spirit world, therefore Hatis Noit is what connects the two. For Hatis Noit, music represents the same netherworld with its ability to move and transport us to the other side; the past, a memory, our subconscious.

9:00 PM: Anthony Worden - Gabe's

Anthony Worden is an Iowa City based singer-songwriter who has made four full length albums since 2017 both solo and with his band, The Illiterati. Little Village says: “Anthony Worden is, in a word, ambitious. He wants to use every color on the palette in his songs — and even in the moments when it’s as much musicology as music, his delight in the source material carries no small joy.” Anthony is due to release his fifth full length album in Spring of 2024 entitled, “Plain Angels”.

9:45 PM: Indigo De Souza - The Englert

“I was finally able to trust myself fully,” says Indigo De Souza of making her masterful third album All of This Will End. When the North Carolina-based artist released her compelling and explosive second LP Any Shape You Take in 2021, it led to a successful year of sold out tours and rave reviews from outlets like Pitchfork, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Across 11 songs, the LP, which is out April 28 via Saddle Creek, is a raw and radically optimistic work that grapples with mortality, the rejuvenation that community brings, and the importance of centering yourself now. These tracks come from the most resonant moments of her life: childhood memories, collecting herself in parking lots, the ecstatic trips spent wandering Appalachian mountains and southern swamps with friends, and the times she had to stand up for herself. “All of This Will End feels more true to me than anything ever has,” she says.

Indigo finds recent inspiration from community and stability. “Up until recently, my life felt chaotic,” she says. “Now, so much of the chaos is behind me. I have an incredible community, I love where I live, and I’m surrounded by truly incredible people who are dedicated to deep connection and joy. My music feels like it’s coming from a centered place of reflection.” Opener “Time Back” deals with the necessary forward momentum she cherishes. It’s a song about rising out of struggle, putting things in the past, and moving on where she sings over comforting synths, “I feel like I’m leaving myself behind / And I’m so tired of crying / I wanna get back up again.” The track later explodes with her voice booming over a stunning arrangement. “You can fall into dysfunction or sadness, or allow other people to hurt you and not have boundaries,” she says. “There was a time in my life when that was a lot of what I was doing. I thought this track was a sweet way to talk about coming back to yourself, to your true self.”

Alongside the all-encompassing emotions captured in the first song, the album is bookended with the heartfelt and nostalgic closer “Younger and Dumber,” which Indigo chose as the lead single. One of the first songs she wrote for the album, the track began as a way of her speaking to her younger self. “While I was writing about the time when my music first started to take shape, it was also the worst time in my life and the most unstable I’d ever been,” she says. “I wrote this song paying homage to a younger self that didn’t know any better. I was flailing through life, trying to make something stick, and coming to terms with being on earth.” The song is her most intentional yet, where she sings, “You came to hurt me in all the right places / Made me somebody.” Though the track starts as a whisper, it slowly unfolds to something cathartic and explosive as she belts out, “And the love I feel is so very real it can take you anywhere.” With the clarity that comes with experience and healing, Indigo treats her past self with immense kindness. It’s her most stunning offering yet.

Creatively reenergized from having these songs pour out of her so quickly, Indigo and her band went to Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios with producer and engineer Alex Farrar, who also worked on Any Shape You Take. “We just clicked so hard,” she says. “We had such an organic energy flow and we felt really inspired by each other.” Tracks like the pummeling “Wasting Your Time” and the muscular single “You Can Be Mean” highlight the band at their most defiant and locked-in. With lines on the latter like, “I’d like to think you got a good heart and your dad was just an ******* growing up,” Indigo says it’s “about the last horrible guy that I let push me around.” While she lets her band loose in the arrangements, especially guitarist Dexter Webb and drummer Avery Sullivan, these songs come from her own vision. “This time, I was more true to myself and refused to allow other people’s ideas to shape what my songs sound like,” she says. “It also feels really special because Dexter was able to fully express his freaky alien guitar voicings, and played a larger role in the production.”

All of This Will End boasts songs that run the gamut of human emotion. There’s pain and sadness, sure, but there’s a triumphant spirit of resilience throughout. Take the single “Smog,” which is exuberant, danceable, and about the exhilaration that comes from breaking out of daily monotony. Elsewhere, she’s introspective, like in the soul-shattering “Always,” which excavates her relationship with her father. But in the single “The Water,” she transforms a childhood memory of visiting her best friend into a meditation on growing up and the fragility of relationships. Over a programmed drum beat, she sings, “I think about what it was like / That summer when we were young and you did it with that guy in his car.” Though she’s no longer as close to that person as she was when they were kids, there’s power in reminiscing.

In many ways, All of This Will End has become a personal motto for Indigo. “Every day I wake up with the thought that this could be the end,” she says. “You could look at it as a sad thing, or you could look at it as a really precious thing: Today I’m alive and at some point, I will not be in this body anymore. But for now, I can do so much with being alive.” There’s a peacefulness in acceptance throughout. As she sings on the title track, “I’m only loving only moving through and trying my best / Sometimes it’s not enough but I’m still real and I forgive.” She describes the experience of writing this song as “magic,” as if everything about it from the words and melody had felt timeless and intangible and that she was just writing it down. Like the hues of reds and oranges that her mother painted on the LP cover, All of This Will End marks a warmer and unmistakably audacious era for her. It’s a statement about fearlessly moving forward from the past into a gratitude-filled present, feeling it all every step of the way, and choosing to embody loving awareness.

10:00 PM: Sunny War - Riverside Theatre

“I feel like there are two sides of me,” says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.” That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out. “Everybody is a beast just trying their hardest to be good. That’s what it is to be human. You’re not really good or bad. You’re just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and you’re probably doing a ****** job of it. That’s okay, because we’re all just monsters.”

Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments (like the collage of voices that closes “Shelter and Storm”). She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song.

It’s a style she’s been honing for most of her life, at least since she took her first guitar lessons and fell in love with music. “When I was a kid, I was obsessed with AC/DC, and I loved dramatic ‘80s guitar bands like Motley Crüe. Later, I was obsessed with Bad Brains, the Minutemen, and X.” True to the punk ethos, her first punk band, the Anus Kings, made music with whatever they had at hand, and what they had at hand were acoustic guitars. That made them stand out among other Los Angeles groups at the time, and today Sunny is the rare roots artist who covers Ween and can drop a Crass reference into a song (as she does on “Whole”). “I don’t really make music with a traditional roots audience in mind. I like weird music, outsider music, like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson.”

Even as she was developing a guitar style that married acoustic punk to country blues, those two sides of Sunny were already at odds. As a teenager, she began drinking heavily, which led to her dropping out of school. She played punk shows, stole and chugged bottles of vodka, and quickly became addicted to heroin and meth. For money she busked along the boardwalks in Venice Beach, recording an album to sell out of her guitar case and letting that self-destructive side win most of the battles. But “the body can’t handle both heroin and meth,” she explains. “When you’re young, it’s hard to gauge that you’re killing yourself.” A series of seizures landed her in a sober living facility in Compton, so emaciated that she could only wear children’s pajamas.

Music remained a lifeline, and she fell in with a crew at Hen House Studios in Venice, where over the years she made a series of albums and EPs, including 2018’s With the Sun and 2021’s Simple Syrup. Twelve years after she kicked meth and heroin, Sunny is remarkably candid about this time in her life. “Everyone I loved died before they reached 25. They OD’ed or killed themselves. We were just kids who didn’t have anyone looking out for us. You’re not supposed to know so much about death at such a young age. Maybe that’s why I write a lot about not taking **** for granted, because it always feels like something’s about to happen.”

10:45 PM: Armand Hammer - Gabe's

Armand Hammer, the New York based hip-hop duo consisting of ELUCID and billy woods, return with We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, their first album in two years and first for Fat Possum. In the 2 years since the Alchemist produced Haram, ELUCID and billy woods have both released critically acclaimed solo albums. Back with their biggest record yet, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips features production from JPEGMAFIA, EL-P, Kenny Segal, Black Noi$e, Preservation, DJ Haram, Child Actor, Sebb Bash, August Fanon, and more, and will be released in full September 29th. Available to preorder now (while supplies last).

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