REVIEWS: June 2006 Archives

so yeah man, what a week. the festival crept into high gear just as i came down with a wicked cold in my chest. i blame curtis, and that darn little son of his. ooooooh you!!! tuesday we hung out at disjecta setting up, putting together a stage, building the PA, the backdrop screens and parachutes, and all that. i deeper night and i was sneezing like crazy. wednesday i went to work, trying to get it all done by well before 4 so we could continue getting ready. honey and mellisa and susan built the water balloon water bed and i set up the bbq grill. we got the food ready and all of that. around 5 or so a few kids had shown up but not enough to feel good about starting the sets. so we waited a while. of course, with 17 bands playing i was a little bit stressed that it was going to make us run really, really late. but it was cool. nick aka tunnels was a gentleman enough to play first and he started the day off with some deep minimal drones which seemed to connect cosmically with the sun in its slow decent from the sky. laurel did a beautiful little privacy set next and things started to get rolling. susan had talked to honey about doing a pash set at the festival about a week ago, and im glad we found the time to let her do that, her set was a quiet brief study in internal imaginations. people started to show up as the watery graves hit the stage, crunk piano and drum abstractions. i was already getting really really busy as the bands all started to show up and wonder when they were playing, people started cooking food and i was doing sound too. and stressing about time. grand junction played as the sun went down and the longest day faded into what would turn out to be a long long night. i ran home to get my gear to do a white rainbow set. my mind was racing. couldnt really calm down in the way that i like to before i play music in front of people. i felt like i took too long to set up and when i was playing all i could think about were the million other things about the festival racing through my mind. i brought the beats instead of doing much of an ambient set. its less strain on my brain. just get the drum loops going, play some phaser fuzz solos, and i was done. by the end of my set it seemed like the party was going full tilt, with tons of dudes showing up and hanging outside on the disjecta dock smoking drinking and making burgers. nova played a nice set of psychedelic blues, chrome becomes you were a nice folk duo and corvette was a deeply trippy journey into flange bass and very stark synth notes. with her voice floating freely on top it sounded to me, in all the best ways, like some sort of electronic female jandek. and i totally mean that as a compliment. jackie-o motherfucker were in rare form. seems like with dana and nick on drums and guitar, and tara jane on bass in the background, things were just clicking right for tom. it was a classic guitar psyche set that swayed nicely between like an early dark star era dead zone and total psyche freak blow out.
by this point, though, the festival was running about 2 hours behind schedule with 5 more bands to play. and these awesome dudes from a show across town ditched their show to try and play as well. and it was well past midnight. i feel bad that acre came all the way down from oly to have his show cancelled across town and then we couldnt find him a spot to play at the fest. dudes should come see him this friday at the towne lounge with white rainbow valet and lichens! davis did a fucking amazing a john henry memorial set after jackie-o, but i think a lot of the crowd was tired and ready for bed, and after he played, most of the crowd baled. this was a bummer for me because all of my favorite bands of the night had yet to play. liz's grouper set was deeply narcotic and made me feel sleepy. i only wish i could have just drifted off, but i had to keep on working! valet/w mark burden was my favorite set of the night. i know im very biased but honey kinda killed it. set started off with classic looped stark minimal tribal blues guitar and vocals, with mark rumbling in the background on a tom tom. it was when the loops built into the second song, with layer upon layer of vocal and buzz saw fuzz solo and then deep hassellian harmonized vocal wails, with mark getting louder and louder until it was a weird wall of psychedelic terror explosions, omg. yes. i felt bad that zach and j.p. had to play next. by this time it was only the deepest of trooper that were left and we were all exhausted. they pulled it out and im sorry i forget the drummers name but even at 230 in the morning he was a nice edition to the sound. i walked around the vast caverns of disjecta and let the tones soak through me. by the end of their set, it was debatable weather dark yoga should really play. matt was asleep in his car. i was kind of at wits end. honey had just given all her juice to her own set. but we decided to soldier through it anyway. im glad we did. it was the perfect way to go out. it felt llike the most festival oriented set of the night with dan and matt holding down a deep groove and brian and i wailing hendrix solos and honey chanting about freedom until well after 4am. then we all pretty much collapsed and went home. i could hardly sleep, it took me so long to let the stress of running a festival out of my system and i had to wake up at 8 to take some wine down to beaverton. thursday was one of the hardest days in my life. i ended up falling asleep at the table at l'astra while having lunch. honey took me home and i felt right to sleep and basically woke up on friday and worked again.
saturday honey and jason and curtis and davis and i all went back to disjecta to play another show. it was kind of absurd, but if felt good to be there and not feel responsible. what a crazy week. i feel open now, that nice feeling after you're done with a huge project. relaxed for the first time in a few weeks. ready to let new inspiration find me when it wants to. ready to gently ease back into all of the other projects that need to be completed. ready for the summer.

ps if anyone has any photos of the festival i would love to see them!