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ATP Cancels Tokyo Festival Curated By Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rourke

ATP Tokyo Festival I'll Be Your Mirror

Despite throwing some of the best festivals we’ve attended, All Tomorrow’s Parties continues to struggle with logistics. Earlier this year, ATP announced that their inaugural venture into Japan, part of the British promoter’s international I’ll Be Your Mirror series, had been postponed from its original mid-April slating to “late 2012” due to low ticket sales. Now they’ve cancelled the event entirely, citing “the venue’s availability and scheduling problems with artists.”

Sonic Youth collaborator and experimental rock guru Jim O’Rourke was chosen to curate ATP Tokyo and had reportedly already booked a handful of interesting propositions including Neu!’s Michael Rother, Codeine, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Magic Band, the Necks, and local post-rockers Nisennenmondai, among others. ATP apologized in their statemnet, adding, “Refunds are available from point of purchase to those who have not yet claimed them.”

September’s East Coast I’ll Be Your Mirror was scheduled for New Jersey’s Asbury Park until June, when organizers announced it’d moved to Manahattan’s Pier 36. Louis C.K. dropped off of the bill then, but they managed to pick up Frank Ocean for the Greg Dulli-curated event, and all’s well that ends well. Around the same time, however, fest director Barry Hogan shared that he’d liquidated the company and transferred its assets and name to a new entity.

Hogan then said ATP remains “committed to hosting world class events. Since our inception it has been our mission to provide quality concerts for discerning music lovers around the world – our number one priority has always been the bands and the fans and we work hard, sometimes under difficult circumstances, to achieve the highest standards possible. It is a tough climate out there, but this restructuring will ensure that ATP is around for many more years to come.”

We hope so. Otherwise, where are we going to wear our hand-me-down gown?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_KiU5P4ihIQ%3Frel%3D0