Bottling Smoke Festival - Echo Curio/Mr. T’s Bowl

I can’t say I’ve attended a tremendous amount of festivals over time – somewhere between ten and fifteen, which more than a few folks I know in Europe probably make in the space of one or two summers – but I can say that it might be unlikely for me to attend one again soon where in the space of an art gallery’s main room there was both a tall clown alien with huge black boots and a small hyperactive dog that amused itself by sniffing one of the tape players that made up the core of one performer’s instrumentation. Then there was the three year old banging on the empty suitcase that had been miked up by another performer. Later, when sheets of overpowering, grinding guitar and vocal feedback were being generated by a separate act, said three year old was seen holding onto the bars outside the front window and headbanging like nobody’s business.

If nothing else, I knew I was in the Silverlake/Echo Park area of Los Angeles – something that I approved of wholeheartedly. It’s one of those areas in any city where people rub up against each other for many different reasons, not least of which is cheap rent, and more than many spots in the city you get a sense that people actually live around here rather than mysteriously cocooning themselves away after two to three hour drives home so they can catch House on time. Things can sometimes be bemusing sometimes, to say the least – at one point one of the festival organizers needed to move his car from the front of the main venue, since he had temporarily parked illegally to unload some equipment. Out of nowhere a police car appeared and two cops stepped out. The organizer asked for forgiveness and said he’d move the car, but it was only then that we noticed that one of the cops had just readied his shotgun and the other already had his revolver out, passing by me by about two feet already in a ready-to-fire stance suggesting that we get out of the way. A friend and I decided it was time to go, as the police went ahead with the business of arresting somebody two doors down. The one thing that hit me later was that I was expecting a movie camera and was honestly surprised not to see one. That, happily, was the only unsettling moment of Bottling Smoke, a three day festival put on as a collaboration between the Oklahoma-based Digitalis Industries, a thriving label and writing site with a focus on modern psychedelia at large, and the Echo Curio, the art gallery which hosted the show and whose owners and runners participate in numerous affiliated musical projects of their own. The subtitle for the event – “The CD-R and Its Hidden Music Industry” – summed up the approach, with documentation noting just how much the culture of burned CD production, its limited runs and handmade art, have resulted in a new craft industry that dropkicks the vinyl private presses of the seventies and the tapes of the eighties into something else again, something that one event, much less one or two genres-as-such, only begins to scrape the surface of. But it also addresses the sense of something tactile in this modern day of music, a dissatisfaction of the dominant online model – or rather, a desire to extend the reach of that model into something that parallels file-sharing and MySpace downloads. Perhaps it is the nature of modern psych to be this way. If the gatekeepers and hidden enthusiasts of two decades back were lonely prophets – Spacemen 3’s obsessive exultation in sound is so omnipresent a model now that it almost beggars belief to recall just how isolated they were at the time – then they were also ones that adhered to an idea of craft, perhaps most readily seen in writing with Ptolemaic Terrascope and similar publications, too organized to be labeled a fanzine, too happily bearing the marks of writing-on-the-page to be called slickly mass market. The festivals that have sprung up in ever increasing amounts in the way of the various Terrastocks and ArthurFests and any number of interconnected avant-garde/noise/folk/rock gatherings all value this idea of craft one way or another – something solid, tangible, something not for everyone but for those who appreciate it amidst all the wreckage of everything else. Taken to extremes this view can be a restrictive limitation – personally I want people to hear all this music that I enjoy, I want it to be out there and not kept back – but as a description rather than a limitation, it celebrates something that any amount of cynicism about music can’t quash: the impulse to create and not simply consume, even if only on the smallest of CD-R runs.