U.S. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost brings MadSoul Music Festival to Orlando this weekend

The MadSoul Music Festival, curated by Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, United States congressman from Florida's 10th District, takes place Saturday at Loch Haven Park. MadSoul is a music fest with a difference, intertwining performances and art with advocacy and activism. Festival-goers will hear from local and national civic leaders as well as music from Muna, Palomino Blond, Kaelin Ellis, I Met a Yeti, Nohemy and more. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Anna Eskamani and Rep. Justin Jones are just a few of the civic leaders speaking between sets at MadSoul.

Frost started MadSoul in Orlando with his friends Niyah Lowell and Chris Murie back in 2015, and they've used the proceeds from each iteration of the festival to support mutual aid in the community. The proceeds this year will go partially toward the A Love Supreme PAC, which donates to local abortion funds, and to some other LGBTQ+ and community organizations. This year's MadSoul is the most ambitious undertaking yet, with performers doing their thing on two separate stages in Loch Haven Park. Here are our picks for the absolute can't-miss sets:

Muna are a queer band that actively use their growing platform for unabashed activism while making music that fans resonate with and dance to. This made the group ideal headliners for MadSoul (well, that and incredible songs). The indie-pop band have notably toured with Taylor Swift and are climbing the charts and racking up award nominations all over.

Lin-Manuel Miranda — known for having taken Broadway by storm with his original productions Hamilton and In the Heights — is also an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights, social and political causes related to Puerto Rico, and diversity and better representation in the arts and government. A local student choir will introduce and "play on" Miranda with a song from Hamilton, before he speaks about, well, whatever the hell he wants.

Maddie Barker is a singer, songwriter and producer from Orlando. She was formerly a part of rap and arts collective seeyousoon and she's now out on her own as a solo artist. Barker's solo work is emotive, adventurous and passionate music that mixes pop with electronic textures and hip-hop. The artist's goal is to help listeners "escape from the adversity of the modern age."

Nohemy, based in Puerto Rico but having gotten her start in music here in Orlando, is a singer, rapper and songwriter who specializes in Latin dance and reggaeton music. No less than the WNBA used her "Game Boy" single to mark the league's 25th anniversary. Live, Nohemy is an artist not to be missed, entrancing audiences with her storytelling through music and the energy she exudes on stage.

See you in the pit.

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Photo by Mauricio Murillo

Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost

Rock the voters: Maxwell Frost talks MadSoul

Orlando Weekly: What made now the right time to bring back MadSoul?

MAF: This is something that as soon as I was elected, I called my friend Niyah [Lowell] who founded this with me and I said, "Now that the campaign's over, we can do MadSoul again."

Then I got this idea that, you know, MadSoul has always been a very political endeavor. We've always donated our proceeds to local nonprofits. So why wouldn't we just do the same thing, but through the campaign? For a couple of reasons. No. 1, we have more resources to be able to make the festival really what it should be. But No. 2, that way we can involve more organizations that are doing really good work locally in Orlando, and support and help them. So that's why we ultimately decided to bring it back but through the campaign.

OW: Combining advocacy and aesthetics can be a tricky thing. Do it wrong and it's joyless.

The big purpose of MadSoul is advocacy, supporting local groups and bringing the arts and advocacy together, and one of our mottoes in our offices is that we're always looking for ways to bridge the gap between "cool" and "consciousness." I think music and the arts give us the opportunity to do that in a different way. There's a very fine line between cringe and cool and we're trying to do things here in an authentic way.

OW: Tell me about putting the lineup together.

We put together a wishlist and we went out and we got pretty damned close. But where it ends up is where it was supposed to be. I wanted it to be a really good balance of local and national, but focusing on local. If you look at the lineup, most of our artists are from Florida, and are from Orlando.

MadSoul is a multigenre festival. For instance, before you're going to see Lin-Manuel speak, there will be local students that do a Hamilton song, and then right after that, on that same stage, we have I Met a Yeti performing — an Orlando-based post-hardcore band. MadSoul is like a playlist that I've made for everybody and we're all just listening to it live together.

OW: It's a two-way street. The audience trusts you to curate a good lineup but then you trust them to go on the entire journey with you.

It's a risk, right? I'll tell you something that we're struggling with right now on the creative side. With MadSoul we made this decision that we would never put out set times like other music festivals do. And the reason being is when you have much bigger artists and a few regional artists and local artists, sometimes a lot of the audience might only come to see the big artist they want to see. But the purpose of MadSoul is to really expand people's palates, get people to listen to local music and see what we have going on here in Central Florida.

OW: I like that you don't release set times; that's such a noise-show thing to do.

We want people to come and stay the whole time and check out all the amazing artists and speakers that will be there. We have some great local artists who have a big following. Performers like Kaelin Ellis, a great artist who lives here and who's been really killing it and working with some really big artists nationally. Nohemy, who's built a big name for herself in reggaeton, she's originally from Puerto Rico but she lives in Orlando. We have Palomino Blond from Miami, who we've booked before. And who doesn't love Palomino Blond? It's just going to be a great day.

OW: Will you make time to take in any music at the fest?

There's a team of actual producers doing the day-to-day, but I'll be running around doing a bunch of different things. My main job pre-festival was booking the lineup, and I'll be there to make sure that everything goes well with our artists. But I'll be floating around. I'm going to enjoy a lot of the sets and try to be present for everybody speaking, for everyone playing, because No. 1, I'm a fan. I love going to shows. But also, I just want folks to see that I'm there to support these artists.