Tempe Noise Takeover returns for another weekend of local music

Tempe Noise Takeover, formerly Tempe Noise Pop Takeover, continues through Sunday in two locations: Yucca Tap Room and Time Out Lounge.

The festival, which began in 2023, features local bands and artists from across the state for a free charity concert event.

E.P. Bradley is one of the organizers of the event, along with his girlfriend, Kayla Long, and other local musicians.

Bradley’s goal with the event is to expose Arizonans to artists they may have never seen before while providing money for charity.

This year, the proceeds of the event will be going to Abortion Fund of Arizona, which provides financial help to those seeking abortion services in the state.

“Our big thing is that they just have to be pretty much, like, noisy, interesting bands that are really good live,” Bradley says. “So you're putting on a really good free show, you're hooking up a bunch of bands, introducing a whole scene to each other and you're donating to charity at the end of it. It's like a triple win.”

Bradley explains the positives and negatives of the 2023 event and how they helped to improve the upcoming 2024 festival, including Tempe’s last minute cancellation of the all-ages venue.

“Two weeks before we were supposed to go, the city of Tempe shut down our all-ages venue. We had three venues, and one of them was an all ages. We found a replacement, and then the city of Tempe said no to that replacement. So that all happened within like two weeks to 10 days before we were supposed to go,” he says.

While the rest of 2023’s event was mostly successful, the organizers would soon feel the bitter sting of the legal system. The original name of Tempe Noise Takeover was Tempe Noise Pop Takeover, but earlier this year, the Noise Pop Festival based in San Francisco sent a cease-and-dedist to the organizers, claiming that “Noise Pop” is a copyrighted name that cannot be used.

“We named it the Tempe Noise Pop Takeover in the beginning, because that's the name of a genre of music that I super dig, and kind of seemed like an envelope that would encompass most of the bands that were playing,” Bradley says. “Noise Pop the festival, which I wasn't really aware of, did not like that choice on our part. They hit us with a cease-and-desist, and we went back and forth with the lawyers.”

The lawyers suggested 20 different names for the event, including Tempe Harmony Festival, which Bradley found comical. Eventually, the organizers decided to drop the “Pop” from the name, leaving them with Tempe Noise Takeover.

“The name isn't the festival itself. The festival itself is who's performing and who's going. We lost one word. We ended up losing one word and decided not to fight it too much,” Bradley says.

“I have nothing bad to say about Noise Pop themselves. They did a move, but they weren't like, super disrespectful about it, or anything like that.”


For Bradley, the event isn’t about money or fame. Instead, he simply wants to expose a larger audience to local bands that he believes deserve more attention.

“The big thing is you will find your new favorite local band here. Like, the genres range pretty wildly, but all the bands are good, and good live, which I think is something that we don't always pay a ton of attention to in this day and age of streaming and things like that,” Bradley says.

Josué Kinter and Bogan Via are both popular local artists that will be performing in this year’s festival. Neither attended the first festival, but both expressed excitement about performing this year.

“There's some of us, especially those of us who are maybe now in our late 20s or 30s that don't get to go out and see every show, especially every local show,” Kinter says.

“So it's great to have an event where I could pay 10 bucks – I think this one's donation-based, which is even more wonderful – and I can see like 20 bands from the local scene, and almost get a sampler, an idea of what's going on. There's a bunch of bands on the lineup this year that I've heard about, but I have not really heard anything from, that I'm excited to see, because I was excited to see what the buzz is about with them.”

The musical duo Bogan Via, composed of Bret Bender and Madeleine Miller, have been performing for over a decade. They also expressed their excitement for meeting new bands and discovering new music at the festival.

“I think it's cool because there's such power in numbers. When you get so many artists from the community together, you kind of anticipate that a lot more people might come out, because maybe they've heard of, you know, two bands on the from the whole list of the day, and then they're just exposed to all this new music that they never would have heard before,” Miller says.

“It's also fun as a band to meet all these people that we don't know or we maybe haven't met, because then you kind of build these connections and you become friends.”

Bogan Via will be the closing performance of the festival on Sunday. They will be performing what they call a “superset.”

“We've prepared a kind of cool projection show. We use projections for our live shows to aid in telling a story with the music. We’re gonna play a 45-minute set with the cool new instrumental opener. Some OG’s that people hopefully know and like, we're gonna play those of course, but lots of new music, music from our last album, and kind of just a bunch of stuff trickled in there, new and old,” Miller says.

The duo released a collaboration song called “Different Side of Me” with Denver-based producer Katnap in August.

Kinter will be performing on Sep. 7, his first live performance in six months. Kinter will perform two new singles, “PSYCHO” and “Yr Not Safe”.

“We're kind of coming back with a little bit more energy and raw power,” he says.