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For those of you who couldn't make it to this past Campfire Sounds, you can read about it in The Wire and see the beautiful photographs of it by David La Spina. Look for video of our two performances on our website soon.
Review from September issue of The Wire magazine
Campfire Sounds 2006 Festival
at free103point9 Wave Farm, Acra, NY
Review by Justin Stewart
"Who wants to carry a harp down a hill?" asked one of Stars Like Fleas'
myriad performing members, shortly after the Brooklyn sometimes duo,
sometimes-sprawling collective finished the first of their two sets
early Saturday afternoon. They had to move from the second to the main
stage, no mean feat considering the latter was less a stage than a
small clearing beside a thick-trunked tree about half a mile up the
hill. The performance had been well worth the trek, both for onlookers
and the harp, guitar, xylophone, violin, cello, flute, sax, keyboard,
drums and wind chime-carting Fleas. Minus electricity, and thus shorn
of their usual sub-surface buzz and drone, the group more than
compensated with a boost in bleating unadorned melody, stretches of
silence (or at least no music, as leaf rustle and amazingly well-timed
bird caws plugged the gaps) and playful resourcefulness, exploiting the
percussive possibilities of twig snapping and tree-as-drum to the
fullest. An early festival high point, the set, perhaps more than any
other, encapsulated what is so novel about Campfire Sounds; that is,
the placement of avant folk acts heavily reliant on software and
gadgetry (and mostly hailing from densely packed urban areas) into a
summer idyll setting.
Now in its second year, Campfire Sounds is somewhat of an anomaly among
events at Wave Farm, the experimental internet radio station.
free103point9's second home (after Broklyn). There is less bias for the
recondite and the theoretical, or "Transmission Arts", as founders
Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe have named their primary focus, and
more space for artists packing honest-to-goodness songs. That isn't to
say that Campfire Sounds lacks for experimentation, or that other Wave
Farm events like Spectral Garden or the frequent exploratory Webcasts
are classroom cold, just that this is the fest most apparently suited
to spreading down blankets, lighting up the grill, or simply
disappearing into one of the property's numerous hammocks to the tune
of a uniformly agreeable roster of acts.
The lush acreage of Wave Farm is located in the Catskill Mountains,
about a two and a half hour drive from New York City. The safe remove
from anything urban seemed to put outfits like the feral freak-act
Bunnybrains in their proper place and further extract the organic
sounds and sylvan themes that groups such as The Fleas and The Dust
Dive explore in their instrumentation and lyrics on record. The Dust
Dive's Bryan Zimmerman went so far as to wear his environment, draping
himself with bog grime and megaphoning his poignant little-boy-Iost
vocals, accompanied by original member Laura Ortman's plaintive violin,
while knee-deep in a pond for his group's first set. Afterwards,
Zimmerman complained of baby leeches that had tumbled down his shirt
but that had, admirably, led to no interruptions.
Melanie Moser kicked things off on the generator-powered main stage
with some lightly strummed folk in the Sandy Denny mould, decorated
with effects pedal loops and some awkward George W Bush sound clips. A
second Dust Dive set and one of several gap-filling DJ sets from Roe
who, in keeping with the festival's unbuttoned looseness, stuck mostly
to recognizable reliables from the rock world, led to an atmospheric,
sound-dense performance from the decidedly un-folk (avant, freak, or
otherwise) Latitude/Longitude. Battling the threat of rain and a
finicky power source, the NYC duo still managed to distance themselves
from the other acts through the attention to detail exhibited in their
maze-like, peculiarly haunting treks.
Stars Like Fleas' choice timing, right as the newly bright sun began
lowering behind a distant Catskills mountaintop, would have excused and
even made a sub-par set magical, but the group stole the show with a
transcendent performance, with not one of the dozen or so members'
joyous contributions wasted. Uninterested in mere complacent layering,
they offered the urgency and surprise of a more earnest Akron/Family.
Unison chants of refrains such as "forever always" remained bearable
thanks purely to their charisma.
Following a head-scratching mindfuck circus show from Beefheart
disciples Bunnybrains, experimental guitarist Gown delivered Campfire
Sounds' loudest shockwaves, his delayed fingerings cresting into
glassy, torrential sheets of echoing chaos. More in line with his
collaborations with Thurston Moore (under the name Bark Haze) than his
frequent Christina Carter teamings, Gown's maelstrom left noise-leaning
onlookers in awe and more than a few neighbors undoubtedly poking their
heads out of their farmhouses in confusion many acres away. Rain delays
bumped Samara Lubelski and MV + EE with The Bummer Road's sets past the
midnight hour, welcome luck especially suited for the former's fragile,
whispery musings. Lubelski, dimly lit by only a few surrounding tiki
torches, plucked and whispered tunes some degrees removed from her work
with groups like Hall Of Fame and Metabolismus.
With an audience roughly three or four times the size of 2005's and
with the continuing expansion of the Wave Farm (a new study centre
opens in 2007), it's likely that this young festival will see several
more years. More fun, depending on your definition of the word, than
the typical freel03point9 happening, it wasn't exactly Woodstock
hedonism. As at the station's installation or sculptural transmission
sessions, artists tried to somehow incorporate the acoustics of the
bucolic surroundings, with varying degrees of success. Radios wedged
into trees scattered across the property and tuned in to the live
broadcast of the event, saturated the entire farm with the crackling
tones, in a perfect gesture of union between microradio and fringe
music.
http://www.thewire.co.uk/current/live.php