A music festival’s physical proximity converted an audience member into a record-label founder.

Evidence

The sets, which began at four in the afternoon and finished at midnight, were followed by panel discussions that ran until three in the morning. Bernard Stollman, who lived two blocks away on Riverside Drive, came to all the shows. “There was no electricity,” he recalled. “The only lighting was from candles on the crowded tables.” True or not, the power was in the music. Stollman found Shepp outside having a smoke, and invited him to record for his new label, ESP-Disk, along with all the other artists he found. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 578

Categorization

• XREF: The label founder living two blocks away and recruiting on the spot is exactly the physical-proximity-plus-cheap-rent condition the reader is cataloging as a test case for why culture stagnates now.
• SEED: Stollman’s candle-lit discovery of ESP-Disk’s roster is a vivid anchoring anecdote for an essay on how recording labels were born from scene adjacency rather than business planning.