Long Days, Long Months: 11 August

Another set of My Space blog postings from 2006:

1/
Two places stand out in my memories of southwestern Wisconsin, from the most-of-three-years I lived there: the House on the Rock and the farm where the Pasture Music Festival was held.

First, a word about Wisconsin - no, the Mid-West, as we still quaintly call a region whose borders we don't exactly know: it's flat... until you get to near the Mississippi River, where it gets hilly and greenery-y and pretty. And there, there's no sprawl. You're in the country, then you're in a town, then you're not. It's like you're in Europe. This is our setting!

2/
One day, I ran into an old friend from college while walking along one of the two lakes Madison sits between (not the one Otis Redding died in [Lake Monona], the other one [Lake Mendota]). Turns out, she's going to grad school too. We hadn't kept in touch. As Madison seemed eons away from Atlanta, this coincidence was a little eery, surreal-like.

Another day, we went with some of her friends to the House on the Rock. Apparently, the man who built the house, and collected the massive collections of stuff contained in it, was some sort of sex freak. Or, perhaps, allegations of such arose simply because of the peculiar lay-out of the original house - it's all low-ceiling rooms, with beds and large love seats built into the walls, the decor of stone and wood evoking a sense of private affairs, locked away in an intimate setting sometime in the swinging '70's. Sounds fine to me. I don't see why we have to go digging into the man's past. Just keep wishing you had his house.

After all, there's the mechanical orchestras. Yes, orchestras of robots playing the standard instruments of the European orchestra. The rigidity and regularity of their movements gives the music the sharp, dissonant quality of electronic music, heightened surely by the fact that supposedly one only hears recordings of the orchestras now. Nonetheless, I bought a CD of the music. That's what I call "americana," not some drunkard townie pretending he's a southern good ole boy.

Most of the other parts of the collection pale in my memory next to the mechanical orchestras. There were lots of dolls though. And knick-knacks. Yes, that sounds right.

To top it all off, there's the Infinity Room. Protruding over a valley (remember, the house is on a rock, except this part, which sticks out from the rock) and consisting entirely of window panes, the Infinity Room is diamond-shaped: the ceilings form an angle above you, the bottom a sharper angle, though of course there's a flat floor above it for you to walk on. The room gets smaller as you go along. Eventually you have to stop; after this point, the floor moves upward, and somehow or another - through the use of mirrors, I guess - the room is made to look like goes on forever, though in fact it reaches a point.

3/
In 2003, Madison started showing signs of the new directions manifesting themselves in indie/experimental music, with a surprising number of local artists engaging in the surprising resurgence of electronic "noise" music, a university residential co-op hosting one concert featuring Jackie-O Motherfucker and The No-Neck Blues Band and another featuring Nmperign, a duo of Greg Kelley and Bhob Rhainey, from Boston - two rare American improvisers who play in the "quiet," flightly yet drone-tastic, extended-technique-heavy sound that at the time was becoming very hip in European and Japanese improvised music.

Some of the folks involved in putting on these concerts, who worked under the moniker 23 Productions, in the summer of 2004 organized the Pasture Music Festival, to take place on a communal farm about 90 miles (if I remember right) west of Madison.

4/
Driving to the Pasture Music Festival was uneventful, though I did almost get a speeding ticket. Those Wisconsin policemen: they're probably too nice to give anyone a ticket; they just warn you, and nicely send you on your way. While I was pulled over, the promo car sent to the festival by Red Bull passed me. It was a car with a big Red Bull can in the back, instead of what would usually be the backseats of the car... probably - I can't recall exactly. Apparently, it didn't stay long. The driver dropped off some free Red Bull, as he was supposed to do, apparently because the organizers had convinced the company that the people who'd be attending the festival would be turned on to the beverage. I think the free cans were all gone by the time I got there.

The day's performers were split into two groups: those that performed during the day, outdoors, on a modest stage facing a sloping hill providing seating/laying-down space for the audience, and those that performed in a dilapadated barn at night and early in the morning. Of those that played outside, I only recall Plastic Crimewave Sound; they were good. I bought a CD by Dredd Foole and the Din (featuring Pelt, Chris Corsano, and Thurston Moore) called 'The Whys of Fire' which, as it turns out, sucks ass. No shit... I've not heard too many records which have received such wide-reaching acclaim but have been just-plain awful. Thankfully, Pelt's records are blissful drone fests.

Christina Carter of Charalambides played solo, and didn't seem into it - didn't play long. Loren Chasse, part of the Jewelled Antler collective from San Francisco, did a conceptual/ performance-music piece under the moniker 'Of.' He has a long history of doing works that rest somewhere between field recordings and electro-acoustic music. He laid out a roll of white paper the length of the barn, and put leaves, twigs, etc., on top. He walked up to each member of the audience and rubbed some leaves, twigs, etc., near their ears, so you could hear them up close. Matt Valentine and Erika Elder played, as did Wooden Hand and the Vanishing Voice (or is it Wooden Wand... I don't care); the former did some nice stuff, but like the latter are too much of a fake-folk "let's pretend we're hicks" act. [M V and E E, as they tend to call themselves, have gotten a lot better since then]. Born Heller played too - a couple, Josphine Foster and some dude. Since then, both have turned up in Athens - Foster playing solo an especially mellow week-day night at Tasty World, and before that the dude playing with a jazz group called Dragons 1976. They're from Chicago.

By the time the second-to-last and last groups - Pelt and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone Trio, respectively - performed, several people were asleep on the floor of the barn, wrapped up in sleeping bags to guard themselves against the surprising cold. Yes, though it was July (or was it August? I don't remember...) it was really fucking cold. Luckily, as I was in the process of moving, I had my huge winter jacket in the car. I put it on over my t-shirt.

Both Pelt's and Son of Earth-Flesh on Bone's sets were the epitome of great "ambient" music; they fit the occasion wonderfully. I distinctly remember walking into the barn when Pelt had already started. The sounds floated off into the ether, inviting you in, to hear them close-up. Son of Earth were playing mostly electronic instruments, which was especially intriguing given the acoustic-ness of most of the artists performing that day.

Alas, I had not planned on the day's festivities lasting so long into the early morning. I had a drive ahead of me, through a fog so thick I usually could only see a few foot in front of me. I was alone on the roads, and yet I was still going under the speed limit, because I simply could not see. The sun was rising by the time I got back to Madison. The site of the fog looming over farm fields in the dawn (everything was blue, I swear) was beautiful.