A Top Five event to see this summer is the UrbAlt festival in New York City— if it’s an actual real thing, that is, and not just an internet dream-vision I had last night.

According to the web and some of my friends, UrbAlt is a real thing and “totally major,” too— a four-night series of music and video performance spread from the beginning of June this year through the end of July— a multicultural, multigenre, avant whatever that is culturally energizing and also highly political, not for any speeches but just for being what it is: a gathering of independent talent that crosses borders of all sorts and encourages experimentation in a do-it-yourself format. In other words, exactly the sort of thing I would go for fully and be mocked for by people around me. This is allegedly the second- or third-annual UrbAlt fest and masterminded, like the others, by Boston Fielder of MuthaWit. Performers include Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio, Mars Volta, Kaki King, Faith, Nerdkween, Res, Oh My Goodness and a host of other New York City and Atlanta gems.

That’s what my “well-placed sources” say, anyway. There’s just something makes me think fuzzy about it. For examples, Sad Android and the Dragons of Zynth sitting down and penning testimonials about the fest for the UrbAlt MySpace page is exactly the sort of idiot weirdness goes down in my head when I sleep. There’s also the facts that the website is nonfunctioning, that the PR person named “Shena” doesn’t answer the information number that was not easy to find, that the UrbAlt MySpace page is fucked up in the typical MySpace way— short on useable information and long on impressionistic material, like posters everywhere and YouTube videos and two really good stripped-down songs apparently taped at one of the fest performances but without any artist information attached. Last, there were no reviews on either the New York Times or the Village Voice websites, which of course may well only mean that they were amazingly good shows and off the map and out the box and etc and so unattended by the city’s “tastemakers.”

In any case, last chance to see if any of it is real is to get yerself over to NYC for the grand finale on the 21st. The ads say it’s happening at the Apple Store downtown (weird) and that the show will be a tribute to Barry White. See y’all there for maybe the best nothing at all that ever was.