No lyrics? No problem.

Hi,

I'm traveling this week, so I won't be sending my usual "what to do this weekend" post tomorrow. But I do have one cool event on Saturday evening that you might want to check out: The Speak No Evil music festival. It's a one-day showcase of instrumental bands in Nebraska that's happening in downtown Lincoln.

Last week, I interviewed Josh Hillers, one of the festival organizers and a member of local band Within Wilds. Josh and I talked about the festival; instrumental rock; music genres; the state of Lincoln's scene; and Josh's social media/music promotion venture Cratershine. (Also, one of his many side projects is putting together Spotify playlists of new releases from Nebraska artists. Here's a link to the latest one.)

You can find my interview with Josh below! But first, here's what you need to know if you plan to attend:

Thanks for reading!

~ Ty

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What's the best way to describe the Speak No Evil music festival to people who are hearing about it for the first time?

It's a mini-festival. Basically, we've got two venues that bands are going to be playing all night long. So it's kind of like a smaller-scale Lincoln Exposed.

But there is a theme, and the theme is that all of the bands are instrumental. There aren't going to be any vocalists for any of the bands.

Why instrumental music specifically?

From a personal standpoint, I like instrumental music a lot. I think that it's an art form that is maybe underappreciated a little bit. You think of a band and you think of a singer and a guitarist and a bassist and a drummer, right? And I like things that are not always the norm. How I experience music is: I'm listening to the music more than I'm listening to the words. People put a lot of emphasis on the lyrics and the words and what the song means, and I don't listen to music that way.

I appreciate and absolutely love when there are really good lyrics. I actually went to school and got a degree in English. So I promise you: I like words and I like lyrics. I'm all about it. But for me, that's just an extra bonus, right? You can have a great song that has terrible lyrics, and you can have a terrible song that has great lyrics.

Totally.

I've also been in an instrumental band myself for something like 12 years now, and I like a lot of the instrumental bands around here, and I thought, "Well, I'd love to play with those bands. It makes sense for us to play with those bands. Why don't we make it into a big thing and get as many of them as we can all in one place?"

I met up with Rod, who is a DJ on 97.3 The Source, and we played one of his shows. (He was hosting a series of shows that were fundraisers for the station that he works for.) And Rod told me, "You know, my next goal is to grow this and start doing festivals." And I said, "Well, I've got an idea for a festival for you. I don't know if it'll ever happen." And he's like, "No, let's make it happen."

So we did.

Who are some of the bands folks should look out for?

I'll mention Machete Archive. They're probably the longest-running instrumental rock band in Lincoln — or in Nebraska, most likely. I don't have proof of that, but they are certainly a very long-running rock band that's instrumental. So I have to mention them. They're almost kind of like the headliner because they've just got such a history, and they're very talented technical musicians.

Another band I like to mention is Whip Sigils. They're very unique because they actually take old songs from the Renaissance — 1500s, 1600s, or something like that — and then turn them into these weird prog rock pieces with a normal, more traditional drum set and some guitars. But then they also get some of those older instruments out — and I don't even know the names of these — but they plug them into an amp and layer all these different things. You're not going to see another band like that.

Tell me a bit more about your band.

Yeah, so my band is Within Wilds. We've been playing together for something like 12 years. I've lost count.

We're just the three piece — drums, bass, guitar. When COVID hit, we took a break like pretty much everyone did, and the bassist decided not to come back at that point. So maybe 2023 or 2024, we started over. All the songs at that point were pretty much new, and we got rid of the old material and started fresh with a new bassist.

It's hard to describe our genre, but I do say kind of a marriage of prog rock and some doom influence. But we just try to be really dynamic with it. A lot of loud parts, heavy parts, soft parts, all kind of mixed in. It's not always easy to pinpoint exactly what genre you'd call it. It might depend on what song you're listening to.

I like that you don't try to pigeonhole yourself or the festival into a specific genre category. I'm sure it makes it harder to talk about, but I do feel like a lot of bands end up transcending one particular niche.

I don't want to criticize any bands. I'm not calling anybody out, but I think it can be a little boring sometimes when a band is just like, "Oh, we are this genre." Great, you do it so well — you are that thing. But why should I listen to you versus the 1,000 other bands in that same genre if you just sound like all the other ones, you know? What are you doing that's actually pushing the art form?

You mentioned you're conceptualizing this as a miniature Lincoln Exposed. Are there any other festivals or shows that you've been inspired by?

Lincoln Exposed and Lincoln Calling are the diagram that we started from. Again, we're much smaller scale. But Lincoln is blessed with this great block of venues downtown that makes this super easy and convenient to do. It made sense to try to shoot for that.

When people think of a festival, they think of maybe multiple days or it's outside or things like that. So I try to say, "It's a mini festival" or something like that. But the dream of course is to grow. This is the first year.

Maybe someday, in five or ten years, it is a more traditional outdoor festival over multiple days. That's a lofty goal but something that we can always shoot for.

It seems like the Lincoln scene is a really cool place to be making music. From the perspective of someone organizing a festival and someone who's in a band: How is the local scene doing?

I will preface by saying I've never lived anywhere else long-term, and I've never been in a band anywhere else. But certainly from the inside, it does seem very welcoming, very easy to get into.

All the bands — the people I've met in bands — are all so chill and so good about helping each other out and doing all the stuff that a local scene should do to keep each other going.

Can you tell me a bit about Cratershine?

I was doing social media for my band, and there were just certain things that I was doing for the community overall that didn't really seem to fit the band per se. So I ended up breaking off, making my own social media for that.

The emphasis is on the whole community, focusing first on Lincoln, but then Nebraska in general — just to give some of that spotlight to the local scene. One of the biggest things I try to do is highlight new releases. Any bands that are out there putting out music right now, I try to track all that, keep an eye out for when it's happening and put them on a Spotify playlist.

I've got a Spring in Nebraska 2026 playlist that I've put together. Any genre, I'm not picky about that. It's just: Did you release it this season and are you from Nebraska? It doesn't have to be Spotify either. I'll highlight Bandcamp releases too.

At the end of the day, it's just for the community. I'm not doing it to make a living off of. Most of the stuff I do is just free publicity for people. Because it's easy to do. It's free. Hitting the share button is free. If someone sees the thing that I shared and likes that band, then that's a million, trillion times more than if I hadn't clicked the share button.

Is there anything else you wanted to mention?

I think that a lot of people think of concerts as, "You're going to see this multi-millionaire on a stage, and you're in the nosebleeds and you paid $400 and there's gonna be pyrotechnics and it's gonna be cool, but you're not gonna be able to see it, it's gonna be on a screen." A lot of people think that's what concerts are, and I personally have a much better, enjoyable experience going to a local, smaller venue — like the ones downtown.

I mean, you pay five bucks and then you get to be close enough to touch their guitar pedals. But don't touch their guitar pedals.

PSA: Don't touch the guitar pedals.

Don't do that! But you're close enough that you could.

This connection that you can make is so different, and the music is just as good, if not better than some of those people in the big arenas. I'd argue that there are plenty of local bands that are better in lots of ways and more my taste.

I'm not trying to say anybody's a bad musician, but there are so many super talented musicians making super interesting, unique music and putting on great shows. And they are in a bar like Duffy's or Bodega's instead of in an arena. Then you get to say hi to them after and actually talk to them — and not have to be a million miles away and then get stuck in traffic for two hours while everyone's getting out of the parking lot.