Recording: Lavender Town

Artist: Lavender Town

Song: Song of Storms [composer: Koji Kondo]

Recorded at Sankofa Square (Intersection 2025: Day 2: All Day Music Marathon, August 30, 2025.

Lavender Town - Song of Storms

Back from a year's hiatus, the Intersection Festival was once again bringing some unconventional sounds to the unsuspecting public. The now formally-retitled Sankofa Square sports a decolonized name, but a slightly more carceral vibe — surrounded by metal fencing and closed off by gates right up 'til showtime, there was less of a random just-wander-through sense of invitation than there used to be.

There was also a slightly different curatorial vibe in effect. In the absence of Burn Down the Capital's Tad Michalak, Andrew Noseworthy stepped up as the main programmer, giving the day a flavour that'd be familiar to those following people | places | records, the "DIY genre-fluid 'zero profit' artists-first" label he is involved with.

"Jazz" has a long tradition of using popular forms as the frameworks for more exploratory musics, so it makes perfect sense that this twenty-first century band might be more drawn to, say, video game themes than Broadway numbers. The pieces they tackled were imbued with top-shelf musicianship, which might have helped to get the attention of passers-by (especially Luan Phung's guitar solos), but it was that populist material that helped gather a crowd in front of the stage.