Electric Eclectics is all farms and friendly puppies, sunburns and DJs-until-dawn, weird music, less weird music, sound art, old stuffed animals, contrasts. Rolling hills and cigarette smoke, dog hair and earplugs, heavy bass and indecipherable speech, multi-way cuddlepuddles and body odour, sunglasses and hats and cutoffs, attenuation, synth-pop, more loops than anyone can count. Sarcasm and argumentation, napping and sound art. Serious and humourous. Relaxation and irritation. RVs and people sleeping in fields. Old ladies who groove. Young men who drink and swear. Thunderstorms and sweat. Expensive food and waking up. A festival with a view.

 

An ancient, sheeplike, yapper-type dog lopes creakily across the front of the stage while a thin woman in a white tank performing feeds her voice back and back again; another woman leans on her partner’s legs, reading a Global Justice textbook, listening.

 

Giant bubbles fly kamikaaze into speakers emitting psychedelic guitar and trumpet, feedback and disruption.  A tiny, impossibly adorable pug puppy chews on a visitor’s shoelaces as she makes conversation with its owner.

 

Tony Conrad, legend, dozes on an old couch cushion, in red tulip-print pants, belly poking out from under his t-shirt, on a muddy pavilion floor while a pair of middle-aged white men improvise around an Indonesian pop tune on a suling and kacapi.

 

A stuffed Psyduck watches from the crook of a nearby tree.

Two men converse. One talks to the other about his father, also an electrical engineer. The latter tries several times to turn the conversation towards the artistic profession of the former.

 

People sprawl facedown on blankets and quilts: the smell of hay, tepid beer, white noise. Someone in a bandeau with a red parasol waits for a conversation to end, mildly perplexed.

Sweeping riffs like an electronic whale, a singer in a gas mask. Everyone’s ears are lit up with orange stoppers; a man chews corn on the cob in time with the flexing pulse. A large stuffed dog takes shelter on a table in the tent. Yellow-skirted girls with buzz cuts and bangs sit on the grass, hug their knees. A beautiful photographer and his sunburned, goateed boyfriend walk down the hill.

A crowd of hipsters dig through the toy chest, pulling out plastic pastel castles and spiky baseballs, tiny Buddhas and souvenir teeth. A woman crabwalks gracefully into position in front of the stage for a photo, striped shirt dress, energetically sprung hair. Gordon Monahan changes from short khaki shorts into a psychedelic pair of patterned pants. Synthesizers rattle the earth, the sun goes down.

Eating almonds, drinking warm Stock Ale, doing logic puzzles between sets – in which auction position is the Forrester’s cedar chest? Was it made in 1904 or 1910?

A guitarist makes decidedly non-guitar-related sounds emerge from the speakers, and our ears attract the silences. Someone’s laugh punctuates a pause. A collie cross leans on my leg while we discuss the mildly intoxicated state of the curator. Wine. Beer. Ashtrays. People on the hill watching the sunset. A DJ in a blue wig with a hamburger sits behind me and croons to yet another dog.

 

“How many EE’s have you done?” asks an artist, meaning the festival. “None today,” mishears a grinning man, and she laughs. “No, I meant – ” “Oh, you meant – ”

A couple of girls with a pug-mix named Esther ask if I know whether any of the upcoming acts “sound more like music” and recommend an upcoming electronic music festival. “Like this, but with ten stages.” ‘If there are ten stages it will be nothing like this,’ I think and compliment their dog’s name.

 

A man and his laptop, a woman and her memories of Berlin. Synthesized bass drum and the silhouettes of five tall pines. Slideshows interspersed with videos, storytelling in every medium.  An incredibly fluffy dog chases a flashlight beam – like a cat with a laser but with additional wagging – and is disappointed when the bearer turns it off.

Danielle de Picciotto has a beautiful voice, vowels round with accent, telling not-quite-bedtime stories to the assembled appreciative. We hold our breath at the climax, applaud, hopeful for more which she does not supply.

Colin Bergh, personal legend, appears on stage: a beard, a double-necked guitar. Most of us are frozen, hypnotized. One girl is intoxicated and keeps giggling loudly, but apart from her, we are still. I watch the night while he loops haunting melodic fragments.

Wyrd Visions, live at Electric Eclectics 6

A small boy in a cowboy hat sits in the middle of the field in front of the stage, on his own, at midnight.

We watch a film projected on the side of a trailer, Scopitone, a music videos from the ‘sixties – and someone shoots off fireworks on the other side; crackling and coloured smoke, the tips of green sparks.

Walking back to the tent: in French, Itsy-bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini as the soundtrack to a view of the Milky Way, pouring across the sky, the best stars you’ve ever seen.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 10:42 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.