MADISON, Wis. -- On paper, the new Forward Music Festival looks like a local music hipster's daydream come true.

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According to the blueprints, the two-day event is conceived as the Madison equivalent of such multi-band get-togethers as Austin, Texas' South By Southwest and New York's CMJ Music Marathon, and picks up from the noble attempts made with the now-mothballed Madison Pop Festival. The concept comes straight from the enterprising brain of any twenty-something music blogger: Draw together an eclectic constellation of rising music stars and noteworthy has-beens before you've heard of them and long after you should have.

What makes the Forward Music Festival unique -- besides designating the city's isthmus as its ground zero -- is its organizers' emphasis on celebrating the Upper Midwest's connections to the cutting edge of modern rock and hip-hop, as well as mingling them with a healthy sampling of the local scene's very best.

This dream is now on the verge of becoming a ear-pleasing reality. The festival is set to kickoff this Friday and comes precariously close to delivering on the organizers' initial promise. Headlined by alt-country siren Neko Case, former Husker Du frontman Bob Mould and a reunion of Madison-born, noise-rock veterans Killdozer, the festival boasts 69 other local, regional and national acts flooding into most of Madison's downtown music venues in short order.

And with a price tag of a paltry $25 per day ($40 for both Friday and Saturday), the festival's admission is not only an humble invitation to play social butterfly, but also offers a cheap education of what the young, cool people are listening to these days either on their iPods or at the club around the corner.

We recently chatted with Wyndham Manning, the 22-year-old recent University of Wisconsin grad who's one of the festival's five organizers. Manning helmed the Madison Pop Festival and was former director of the WUD Music Committee on campus. Besides working at SRO Artists, a Middleton performing arts agency, Manning is also member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. He gave the scoop on how this all came about:

Channel 3000: How long have the preparations been going on?

Wyndham Manning: Well, we've been doing this as the five of us for about a year now as far as the major planning goes. Jesse, Bessie and Kyle started about a year and a half ago coming up with the idea and Jamie and I joined sort of joined on later. (Editor's note: Besides Manning, the festivals other organizers include Jesse Russell, Bessie Cherry, Jamie Hanson and Kyle Pfister.)

Channel 3000: How did you guys get together?

Manning: The reason we got hooked up with the rest of them in the first place was we did a festival called the Madison Pop Festival that was very similar in structure, but it was only a campus-wide thing for the past three years.

Channel 3000: So what's the future of the Pop Festival?

Manning: The vision for both of these two festivals is almost exactly the same. So we just decided to run with this one and it sort of rolled into this festival.

Channel 3000: What's the overarching goal for this festival?

Manning: It's twofold. It's to highlight the local, Madison scene and to highlight artists from around the area. So the Midwestern music scene as much as the Madison music scene and to try to build some community around to what we have already, what we have already locally, including the venues and the bands. But also some of the regional acts that make up that Midwestern sound that everybody always sort of talks about nobody know what it means.

Channel 3000: So it's about gathering them together and giving people a reason to see them?

Manning: It's pretty much a celebration. It's like the Taste of Madison … or the Wisconsin Film Festival, (where) you get to sample a little bit of what every venue or every band has to offer but for music fans instead of culinary fans.

Channel 3000: So the local component was important?

Manning: It was very important. Almost half of our bands, if not a little bit more than half, I think, are local bands. We made a concerted effort on every showcase, even the biggest showcases, to make sure there was at least one local performer on those bills. Because we want to celebrate what we have already as some of the acts that just pass through.

Channel 3000: Were there any parameters in terms of the acts you were choosing whether it be genre or …?

Manning: Not at all. We went for a Midwestern thing so almost all our bands have some connection to the Midwest, whether it be their record label or they lived here or they were born here or they're rooted here still. That was really all we went for. There are a couple of exceptions to that rule, but they are pretty hard to find.

Channel 3000: Speculating on some of these artists' connection to the Midwest kind of prompts someone to play a game like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (where a participant must find a way to connect one person within six related people to the "Footloose" actor.)

Manning: Exactly. It's still funny that you can have somebody like Neko Case, who has these random Midwest connections, and then a band like Flosstradamus, which is an electronic DJ group, which is almost exactly the opposite in terms of sound but is still united in this geographic sense and it still sort of works out. The fans are somewhat similar. It's trying to track down that Midwest sound again.

Channel 3000: Was the roster of acts compiled from lists of who each of you wanted to draft into this?

Manning: We all got together and we spent a good couple of months just putting together a dream list of all the bands we wanted to see. And that list ended up being 200, 300 artists. And then we started to send e-mails to see who was available and from that … we sort of played with it from there. While there may only be maybe 10 artists from that original list, there all bands we're excited to have.

Channel 3000: Was there any of the particular acts that you obtained that you feel was something of a coup in your mind?

Manning: I think Killdozer was obviously a great one. We found out about that one very early. They were within the first five bands that we had locked down and so that was a major point of the festival for us. As far as the most unexpected that we were able to book that would have to definitely be Neko Case. She's eluded this market so many times. She has had to cancel her last two performances here for various reasons and it's by far our biggest act. It's pretty amazing to have an artist of her stature on our bill.

Channel 3000: Where is the money to book these acts coming from?

Manning: We've all individually seeded it. We're all in one-fifth of all the acts there. It was a risky financial endeavor, but we were all pretty committed to it from the start and it's worked out well for us. We're all a little bit poorer now, but hopefully after this weekend, it will all workout.

Channel 3000: What benefit of this is to the local artists?

Manning: The main thing for us is just highlighting what we already have, using the bigger acts -- and I hate to say this -- as bait to get people to come out to these venues. These are great venues and so many opportunities out there and so much great music that comes through here the rest of the year. It's very disappointing for us as music fans … to see these shows half empty. We feel like it's an issue of getting people out there and getting them familiar what our city is like and what we have to offer.

Channel 3000: How many bands are on the bill? And how many clubs have you lined up

Manning: It's 72 bands and eight venues. It's pretty extensive. It's a pretty incredible deal. I forgot what the price works out to for each band if you buy one of the general admission tickets, but it's pretty cheap.

Channel 3000: Why the $25 price?

Manning: All five of us are music fans. None of us are professional promoters. So when we came up with the idea for this festival, we put it together with the idea of what festival would we wanted to go to. We built this festival around what we as fans would expect from a music festival going on in town. We wanted to keep the tickets cheap. We didn't want a huge corporate presence. We kept the capacities low. We gave an option for everyone to get into every show they wanted to. Every decision was criticized and was the result of months-long discussion and debate. The ticket prices (were) no small part of that. That was probably the hardest decision we made. We knew we wanted to make it cheap and accessible to everybody without selling our souls to any corporate devil.

Channel 3000: What's been the response so far?

Manning: It's been incredibly positive. We've heard a couple of random complaints about the ticket prices, but to be completely honest, we're sort of unsympathetic to that because we've completely put ourselves at a disadvantage in everything we've done so that the fan is first. Almost everybody has a completely positive impression of what we're doing. It's hard to say before the festival happens because I think that everyone's eyes are on us as some grand experiment, but I think it will go really well.

Channel 3000: Speaking personally, which of these acts are on your priority list this weekend?

Manning: The big ones for me are probably the ones going on at the Majestic. I'm really looking forward to seeing Dan Deacon, Leslie and the Lys, Flosstradamus, Mason Jennings and I think everybody in our group is looking forward to the Killdozer show since this only the second time they've reunited in 12 years.

Channel 3000: Has this process worn you out such that you want to do it again next year?

Manning: It's completely worn me out, but that is one of the exciting parts of it. It's like giving birth to a child. It's the closest thing I can envision to having a small child. You take care of it all the time, you're a little strapped for cash, but in the end, you see the (end product) and hopefully you're pretty happy with the result. To answer your question, I hope so.

Note: The Forward Music Festival runs from Friday through Saturday. See Web site for showtimes, tickets and venues.

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