The Noise Pop Festival, which was founded seven years ago in San Francisco and is now branching into Chicago, prides itself on a lack of hype and slickness. But Jordan Kurland, a 27-year-old Chicago native now booking and managing bands in San Francisco, and founder Kevin Arnold are looking to take it beyond a home-grown assemblage of indie-rock shows held together by one Rolodex.

Having joined Arnold's expandingly popular festival in 1997, Kurland is hard at work producing Noise Pop Chicago 2000 with Arnold and Chicago's high-end management firm, the Billions Corporation. The five-day-long Chicago festival is the first step beyond San Francisco for the event. It's also the possible launch of a national umbrella under which local stars of music-rich cities can make a more prominent case for themselves without playing third fiddle on a couple of dates of a summer shed tour. And Noise Pop will try this without any major-label hoo-hah or panel discussions, thank you very much.

Noise Pop Chicago runs Wednesday through Monday (5/10-15) at various Chicago venues. Among the dozens of artists scheduled to appear are Sleater-Kinney, John Doe, Modest Mouse, Jeff Tweedy and Jim O'Rourke. For more information about Noise Pop Chicago, visit liveDaily sister site chicago.citysearch.com.

Jack Shay, music editor of chicago.citysearch.com, spoke with Kurland about the present and future of Noise Pop.

LiveDaily: Can you give us some background on the festival?

Jordan Kurland: Noise Pop started in 1993, when my partner Kevin Arnold founded it--the buyer of Kennel Club in San Francisco had an open night and basically said, "Why don't you get together something." So, Kevin called up a bunch of friends with bands in a similar genre. It was a growing community at the time, but it was certainly second fiddle to what was going on at that time, kind of the Primus-style, hip-hop, thrash-funk thing. And it came off great--the Fastbacks came as a surprise guest--and it kind of grew from there.

What's really great about Noise Pop is that you see CMJ and North by Northwest and South by Southwest, and they're all great events and they serve their purpose, but with Noise Pop it's always just been about the music. It sounds cliché or cheesy, but it really is a music lover's music festival. We try to provide intimate shows inexpensively. For me it was a no-brainer, getting involved.

When did you decide to branch out beyond San Francisco?

Kevin and I had been talking about it for a while, and I always thought Chicago would be a great city because, well, A: I'm from here [laughs]. And there isn't really anything of this ilk in the city, and some of the other cities we looked at might have had something at least somewhat similar. There is such a great, great scene here--I mean, this isn't just blowing smoke, but I really feel like this is the best music community in America. It's like the best of both worlds: there's a lot of labels here--a lot of booking agencies, managers, whatever--but at the same time, it's not like New York or L.A., because [Chicago] is not all jaded [like those two cities] because the "Industry" has a presence.

Why the format you've chosen? I mean, getting the Billions Corp. to manage and book here, using mostly Chicago artists, and co-producing Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music?

We didn't want to come into a city and be like, "Hey, we're the Noise Pop Festival from San Francisco and we're gonna rock your world!" We didn't want to be these total carpetbaggers, and also, we don't have the knowledge. And intricately and deeply woven into Noise Pop is that it's a reflection of the city it's in. It grew out of being a local festival ... and we wanted to have some folks and relationships we trusted that could help guide us in that direction. Billions was literally at the top of the list, but I didn't think it would ever happen ... but their enthusiasm has been amazing. They did all the booking, and we had a few suggestions, but 99 percent was them, and they've been interfacing with the clubs day-to-day and the artists and all that good stuff. And we've focused more on the back end, the website, ads, the posters and sponsorship. And it was great for a change for me, to be relieved of the booking responsibility.

You also have some DJ and electronic stuff going on here. Was that conscious?

Yes, that was pursued. [The Billions Corporation] works with a lot of artists in that genre. And that's something that with San Francisco would have been an obvious move for this year, too, but we just didn't really get our s*** together, for lack of a better term. Because there haven't been a whole lot of new genres of music created. And what's happened in electronic and DJ culture, it's one of the styles that's still developing. That and hip-hop.

So, what is really the ethos of Noise Pop as it goes beyond San Francisco?

It's a way of bringing together music fans in a city. And I certainly think that the type of music we booked, it's definitely geared towards--I don't want to say pretentious--but it's for the more avid music fan, more educated, or maybe thinking things out a little more. And Chicago probably doesn't need that, it has such a great music community. But it's a way of saying, you're going to be able to go out for five straight nights, and see not just one great show, but two or three if you wanna run from show to show. It's about shedding light on a local music scene and seeing some great national acts. I wish I wasn't so broad, but Noise Pop is still evolving.