Day for Night

Remembering Houston's Day for Night Without the Mythology — Omar Afra on Substack, 2026. A first-person retrospective on the festival’s art program, audience, economics and relationship to Houston.

The Hype Magazine’s September 2026 account draws on the primary Day for Night collection. Its budget figures remain Afra’s retrospective estimates, not audited accounts; the contemporary sources and disagreements recorded below remain controlling.

• Omar Afra — Festival producer and founder, 2015–2017 editions

  Supported by source 1, source 2, source 3.

Founder's role period and sources: Omar Afra's publishing and festival record.

• The Festival Arms Race: How Immersive Production Changed the Economics of Live Music

  How stages, video, architecture and visual art raised festival production expectations, fixed commitments and financial risk for independent operators.

• Day for Night, 2015–2017: sound, light and summit programming

  A cross-year record of how Day for Night programmed music, visual and computational art and, in its final edition, a talks summit — built from the documented rosters in the Live Index archive.

• Houston festival attendance and economic-impact evidence, 2009–2017

  Every attendance, price and economic figure published for Free Press Summer Fest and Day for Night, recorded with the measure it represents, the party that produced it and the limitation that applies.

• Comparing Festival Ticket Prices: Day for Night, 2015–2017

  Day for Night's announced ticket products for 2015–2017 — $185 GA and $750 VIP in 2015, 'from' prices in 2016, GA access in 2017 — and why offers are not average prices.

• Historical festival project record

  The machine-readable dataset generated from these archive records, with JSON and CSV releases.

• Rosters are reproduced from the announcement that carried them — the organisers' own release in 2015, and contemporaneous broadcast and music-press coverage in 2016 and 2017.
• Music and visual-art rosters are kept as separate lists, as the festival announced them.
• How to read ticket prices across editions: each price is an announced offer tied to a product and the days it admitted — two-day GA in 2015, 'from' prices in 2016, GA covering two of three days in 2017 — not an average paid or a measure of attendance. The comparison is set out in Comparing Festival Ticket Prices: Day for Night, 2015–2017.
• The end of the project is recorded because a factual archive that stopped in 2017 would misstate the history. Only the corporate outcome is recorded, from contemporaneous reporting.

Record last reviewed 2026-09-24. Machine-readable copy: historical-projects.json.

Day for Night was produced out of Free Press Houston, the Houston alternative monthly published between 2003 and 2018. Material from that publication — recovered articles, newspaper issues, artwork, contributor records and festival material — is preserved by the independently operated Free Press Houston (2003–2018) archive. Its day for night collection gathers the material held for this project specifically. It is not a Live Index publication and Live Index does not hold its material.