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

With this set, the festival as function, an exaltation of that impulse and an invitation to share in it, made sense. Bottling Smoke was a free festival, one section aside that had to be held at the rough but right converted rec-room space of Mr. T’s Bowl a few miles away – such a working venue needs a small cover charge, but the Echo Curio itself was open to all to wander in as they saw fit. The idea of a separate backstage area for artists was ridiculous, and probably at any one time half the crowd watching a performer would have been someone else on the bill, seeing what other people were doing. Old friendships were renewed, new ones made – standard procedure perhaps at such gatherings but no less important for that. Scaled down in miniature – a main gallery room where the performances were, the back room were a short film on Digitalis and CD-R culture was constantly running, a driveway area behind the building where the merch tables were set up – it followed a familiar format still. But it was also wonderfully unfamiliar – no security with attitude, an audience quiet and concentrated on the performances rather than talking loudly over them, a casual daylight atmosphere for the most part while still being in an enclosed space rather than outside somewhere, getting sunburned. Always an important thing, that last point, if you’re me and need 30 SPF to survive extended times outdoors.
Which in ways just leaves the performances to talk about. This may sound flippant putting it that way, but if music is community – consider the cabins at Bowlie or ATP as one incarnation – then the performances reflected the energy and feeling as much as led it. To my mind the experience is already blurred between show and conversation, noise and relaxation, a mélange rather than an oppressive event, and I only write a day after it is over. So the impressions will have to do this time around, for once, not a full accounting per se, or even a chronological listing of highlights. Instead the mind’s eye sees many things – the sisters of Pocahaunted, sitting facing each other across their twin mike setup low to the ground, invoking wailing demons in the dark after midnight. Xela, crouched over a set-up of pedals and other effects generators, creating unearthly flows of collapsing sound and keening into the middle distance, then soon after the performance almost certainly cheerily searching for a good drink, preferably bourbon. The Starving Weirdos, a collective known for very rarely touring outside their remote northern California base, setting up the stage with small Greek pillars, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and some candles, everything else plunged into near absolute blackness behind these pieces as they creating an immersive atmosphere of found natural sounds and ensemble performances that doesn’t bear easy description. Ilyas Ahmed’s reflective, effortless elegance on acoustic guitar in the dark one evening, then again on another afternoon, backing up the more chaotic shifts and wry musical twists of Theo Angell, touching on everything from soft melodic fragility to screeching chaos. Heavy Winged closing out the second night with some of the most intense guitar work heard in a long while – living up to the name brilliantly, suggesting an angel bearing down on the world with dark stormclouds creating by its flight – then chatting amiably the following day about the raptures of My Bloody Valentine. Valet’s deft, extended songs that found a balance between overload and understated hooks, alien but accessible, just her and her guitar and a pedal or two seen against the light of the afternoon sun through the window. Brad and Eden Rose, the gently spoken masterminds behind Digitalis, seemingly everywhere at once, much like organizers on the Echo Curio side of things, Grant, Tim and others I regretfully am forgetting.

But if I had to pick a highlight, Adam Forkner’s performance in his White Rainbow incarnation might just be one of those shows that I’ll be proud to tell people I was at. And here it all seemed to come together – seemingly no space to move or breathe in the room, but still not horrifically crushed or crowded either, watching Forkner, facing away from those in the room, carefully crouched over an array of pedals and effects and more, and, slowly, deliberately, moving from initial drone to a celebration, percussion created by everything from his voice to bottles to gongs and more, sampled, layered, a one-man band sounding like it was filling the universe - something elemental, monumental. Closing on a separate drone, vast and final, it ended to cheers, shouts of joy, applause upon applause. Some minutes later I found myself talking with him for a bit, noting how we had some mutual friends. That kind of show, that kind of experience.