Terrastock celebrates music written about in The Ptolemaic Terrascope, an obsessively detailed "illustrated occasional" co-published by Phil McMullen and the Bevis Frond's Nick Saloman in England for the past nine years. (Riffing on the zine's medieval illustrations and appreciation of dated styles of music, Mojo magazine called it the pair's "Branechyld.") While everyone involved recoils at the bald, all-encompassing use of the term, most folks would give a listen and say Terrastock traffics in psychedelia. Understand, however, the bands involved know there is more to psychedelic music than Carlos Santana's guitar spasms or Pink Floyd's trippy Ummagumma.
The best of the Terrastock bands don't simply mimic a tired form. Instead, they adopt some of the stylistic tics and experimentation in order to transcend the mundane, go beyond everyday experience, and get to the spongy parts of the brain -- the original intent of '60s psych. "It's almost weird to call something psychedelic because there are so many different subtitles that go under it," says Bardo Pond guitarist Michael Gibbons. "Terrastock reflects that."
There are roughly five subgenres that span four decades' worth of performers. There's the full-blown retro psych of the Major Stars and some of the Bevis Frond's work, descended from guitar freak-outs from Jimi Hendrix to Gong. Space rock, or neo-space rock, acts like Windy & Carl and the local SubArachnoid Space are more concerned with sound and texture than form or structure. Acousticky experimentalists like Tom Rapp and the Mountain Goats are more folk than psychedelic, but their songs are usually thoughtful and slightly askew. Bands like the Olivia Tremor Control and the Loud Family play with post-Sgt. Pepper's embellished pop conventions. And then there are the wild cards: fans of Terrascopic music such as the Young Fresh Fellows, too smart and mischievous to be called just a rock band, or ... Mudhoney?
"The lineup of this year's Terrastock is pretty much representative of the various different styles, genres, and vintages that we regularly cover. There's bands here that no one would ever think of describing as 'psychedelic,' but they're all 'Terrascopic' to some extent," writes McMullen in an e-mail interview.
Providence, R.I., hosted the first Terrastock a year ago, ostensibly to help raise money for Ptolemaic Terrascope. When bands like the Bevis Frond and Flying Saucer Attack, who had not performed in the States, got on board, the benefit turned into a genuine happening. Nearly everyone who attended the 500-person show at an out-of-the-way brick warehouse is still gushing about the experience. "It was like a family reunion of 500 people who didn't know each other," says Windy Webber, the bassist of Windy & Carl.
San Francisco was a natural site for Part 2. McMullen asked Windy Chien, who owns Aquarius Records in the Mission, and Kathy Harr, who books tours for four or five of the Terrastock bands, to help him organize the festival. What they ended up putting together includes performances by 38 bands at a double-staged nontraditional venue (originally the International Ballroom, changed to Custer Avenue Stages at the last minute), with accouterments like a photo show, a kitchen, and a merchandise section where various labels and bands can sell records and fanzines. The two San Franciscans paid particular attention to keeping the ticket price as low as possible ($50-60 for three full days of music). "It was very easy to sign on when you know that it's not about money. It feels more pure," says Chien. "There is a place for things that make money, but this is not one of them."
By word-of-mouth and the power of the Internet, where many bands and fans of Terrascope exchange messages on mailing lists like DroneOn, Chugchanga, and TerraObscura, 700 tickets sold out in just a few weeks. (San Franciscans bought about half of the passes; the rest were sold to foreigners and people from all over the States.)
Even though the crowd is hardly massive -- one wag dubbed the festival "Woodstick" -- for many of the bands, Terrastock presents a chance to play for some of the largest crowds they'll ever see. Most of the groups that will play Terrastock have seen the harsh light of the commercial world and ducked into the nearest tunnel. They simply are not making commercial, or in a few cases even remotely accessible, music. "[For] most of the people that are playing at this festival," says Windy Webber, "just that they can do music and play for people and share time with their peers, that is enough."
Note: Terrastock II begins Friday, April 17, at 4 p.m. and continues through Sunday, April 19, at Custer Avenue Stages, 1598 Custer (at Rankin), near the intersection of Third Street and Evans. Although the festival is sold out you can tune into live broadcasts and Webcasts on radio station KFJC-FM 89.7 and www.kfjc.org. Also, Scott Sterbenz airs a wrap-up program of music, interviews, and highlights on KUSF-FM 90.3 Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m. At press time the Terrastock schedule was still volatile and subject to change; the most current show times will be provided at the venue.
Roy Montgomery
New Zealander Roy Montgomery began recording with the Pin Group for Flying Nun, the admired independent label, back in the early 1980s. (His first two releases were FN 001 and 003.) In the 1990s, he began playing art rock with other islanders in Dadamah, as well as composing soundtracks for university film projects in the group Dissolve. Movies and Montgomery are a fine match. The guitarist sends cinematic aural postcards, or site-specific pieces of music based on places where he has traveled. Scenes From the South Island, which was recorded in 1994 and '95 in New York and San Francisco and released by S.F. label Drunken Fish, uses heavy effects and four-track recording techniques to make guitars wash, fade, and roll like synthesizers.
The Mountain Goats
Sometimes John Darnielle has found friends or collaborators to play with him, but for almost a dozen full-lengths on record, CD, and tape since 1991 the Mountain Goats have been little else but the Southern Californian native, his howling voice, and his furious acoustic guitar strumming. Darnielle believes in the inextricable power of the love song. With romantic love -- and it is almost always romantic -- at the heart of each song, he writes about several recurring subjects: hounds, the fall of Rome, Aztec deities, weather patterns, going to Georgia or Bristol or Chino. Nearly all those themes are on last year's Full Force Galesburg, in addition to a significant new obsession with word and language and the existential and interpersonal dilemmas they create. On "Masher," after coming out of jail -- "I don't mean jail exactly" -- Darnielle softly sings, "I am losing/ Control of the language again." And on "Snow Owl" his lover "took apart the alphabet letter by letter." Another new development: something approaching complex guitar playing; quieter, more confident singing; and a departure from worst-is-always-best boombox recording fidelity.
Kendra Smith
Someone once said that bassist and singer Kendra Smith was both the Nico and the Moe Tucker of the Dream Syndicate, the Los Angeles paisley underground band that made Velvets-esque devotional music. Later, with guitarist David Roback in the group Opal, Smith helped craft the hazy, lazy, addled prototype for Mazzy Star. After leaving L.A. and the trappings of civilization (like phones), Smith moved to the woods of Northern California, ostensibly quitting music and other people. A battered and chipped green pump-organ brought her back. That organ drones at the center of almost every wildly different song on 1995's Five Ways of Disappearing. It's the sound of invocation on "Bohemian Zebulon," a quiet hum at the back of "Temporarily Lucy," and foil to the guitar and harmonium that sparkle on "Space Unadorned."
Brother JT & Vibrolux
Brother JT is John Terlesky, who, like several of the performers at Terrastock, has about a zillion side projects. Terlesky's pedigree goes back to 1986, the genesis date for the Original Sins, a Pennsylvania band that pulled a magic bus into an oily garage. On solo records like 1996's Rainy Day Fun Terlesky flirts with Syd Barrett-style folkiness. His band Vibrolux give more method to his madness. That same year saw Doomsday Rock, with Brother JT & Vibrolux trafficking a darker, sludgier psychedelic warped by end-of-the-world movie samples and fuzzed bass -- on the bell curve of an LSD trip, Doomsday was not the rainbow explosions of the peak, but the twisted cartoons that keep you from sleeping at the end of a long come-down. In short, someone did eat the brown acid.
Brother JT & Vibrolux also open for the Bevis Frond (see next page) Thursday, April 16, at 9 p.m. at the Great American Music Hall. Tickets are $10.
Damon & Naomi
This pair -- two-thirds of the pretty, literate trio Galaxie 500 -- craft pretty, literate pop songs full of abstruse poetic references and philosophical questions masquerading as simple lyrics. More Sad Hits, recorded in 1992, was drenched in glorious reverb, courtesy of longtime collaborator and Galaxie producer Kramer. Playback Singers, the duo's third album, this time recorded on their own, creates moments of distance within immediate clarity on "Turn of the Century" and wistful longing born of love on "Kinetoscope." Nods to a Terrascopic planet include covers of Tom Rapp (the psychedelic folk singer who recorded as Pearls Before Swine) and Masaki Batoh, of Japanese throwbacks Ghost. The liner notes, quoting a slogan from Indian movie musicals, say, "Compromising quality of reproduction for the sake of nostalgia," and do not lie.
The Olivia Tremor Control
While not completely developed, the roles of the three first and still principal bands in the Elephant 6 collective are becoming increasingly defined. The collective's center of gravity, the Apples in Stereo (who aren't playing the fest), still deliver sugar and reverent nostalgia: They're the taste buds and the memory of the collective body. With smart lyrics and confessional singing on their second record, Neutral Milk Hotel (see next entry) are the brain and the mouth. The Olivia Tremor Control, who have not yet followed their debut triple album, sometimes experiment with found sounds on record but ground most live performances with delicious pop songs lushly played by the band's five core members and whomever they can pull up onstage. They are the ears and the fun. Or something like that.
Neutral Milk Hotel
"And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion -- maybe a summer night sometime -- when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it's just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important, really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind." -- Rod Sterling, 1959, quoted in The Journal of Ride Theory No. 3
Windy & Carl
Two of the purer practitioners of what is called space rock -- or more specifically the ambient side of the genre -- bassist Windy Webber and guitarist/keyboardist/effects pedal coordinator Carl Hultgren are more interested in texture than form. Portal, recorded in 1994 and 1995, used a few chord changes and song titles ("Ode to Spaceman," "Sound Ignition," "Gravital Loft") to establish a theme of space and exploration. The cool waves of compositional sound on Antarctica -- part of the local label Darla's Bliss Out series -- made the 1997 album into three pieces about exploration of a more terrestrial sort.
Windy & Carl also play Wednesday, April 15, at the Bottom of the Hill at 9:30 p.m. The Alchemysts, a South England psychedelic punk trio, and Grimble Grumble, a Chicago-based ambient experimental outfit that uses traditional rock instruments, open. Tickets are $6.
Major Stars
They used to call this acid rock. Guitarist Wayne Rogers has navigated a half-dozen improv-driven outfits over the last decade, including Crystalized Movements, B.O.R.B., and Vermonster. One-half of Major Stars, Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar, played with Galaxie 500's Damon Kurkowski and Naomi Yang in a short-lived side project called the Magic Hour. Apparently that quartet spent too much time touring outer planets and inner space. MS's new record, The Rock Revival, is just that -- a revival of late '60s/early '70s guitarists who played Hendrix-style throbs over a steady blues rock 4/4 that allows for endless jams, solos, and then a few more jams, just for good measure. Four songs here play for 39 minutes.
The Bevis Frond
Without Nick Saloman, who essentially is the Bevis Frond, there would be no Terrastock. Saloman started playing music in the late 1960s in England, but didn't formally begin the Bevis Frond until 1986. Sounding impressed with all things psychedelic, from the jangly jams of "Eight Miles High" to the acid drip of Cream, from the damaged folk of the Soft Boys to the sludgy heaviness of Iron Butterfly, guitarist Saloman and various co-conspirators (occasionally enlisted from more celebrated space-rock aggregations like Hawkwind or Camel) have released a dozen albums and a truckload of singles, several of which are collected on this year's North Circular. Yet Saloman is more than a revivalist. Instead, he uses those various sounds as platforms for his own songs, well-crafted, occasionally twisted gems that explore relationships ("He Had You"), autobiography ("Eyeshine"), and the clueless mainstream record industry ("That's Why You Need Us").
The Bevis Frond also play with Brother JT & Vibrolux (see previous page) Thursday, April 16, at 9 p.m. at the Great American Music Hall. Tickets are $10.
Silver Apples
Silver Apples are legendary in some circles for being one of the first bands to embrace machines and odd technology and then give them human emotion. The late-'60s duo paired Danny Taylor's avant-drumming style with Simeon Coxe's jury-rigged banks of oscillators, sound-generating machines that vary, fluctuate, and repeat noise waves. At the time, nothing else sounded like the two-chord noise and droney racket that Silver Apples made. Coxe stumbled back into music a few years ago when he discovered that his old records had become commodities among a new generation of experimentalists. Drummer Michael Lerner and keyboardist Xian Hawkins play with Coxe on his two most recent records, Beacon and Decatur. On 1997's Beacon, the group's jerky rhythms and repetitive phrasings sometimes sound ridiculous, self-serious, and overwrought -- like a parody of the music that the old Saturday Night Live Sprockets ensemble might dance to. But once in a while there are moments, like the oscillation twirl and electric crickets that work themselves into "I Have Known Love," that are genuinely weird enough to impress even the harshest cynic.
Silver Apples also play Monday, April 20, at the Bottom of the Hill at 9:30 p.m. with Bardo Pond (see below) and Primordial Undermind, who traffic in textural psychedelic guitarwork and propulsive rhythmic drive. Tickets are $7.
Cul de Sac
At their best, Cul de Sac, a Boston-based four-piece, capture human connections and relationship dynamics within instrumental songs. Last year's The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, the group's fourth full-length -- titled after a revelation the band's guitarist had while working with flat-picker John Fahey -- used interplay to express a tug of war between collaborators. On "The New Red Pony," the record's best track, Fahey plucked a gamboling solo for half the song while the rest of the group created an incidental backdrop. Fahey's acoustic guitar faded to Jones' heavy, heavy electric, saturated with effects. Fahey shot back a set of crippled blues riffs that sounded like he was learning how to walk again. As Fahey finished, the studio mikes picked up a brief snippet of dialogue. "Hey, let's hear a different key," he said. Time stopped for half a second. And then Jones' guitar came back down to slay the wounded in the final 20 seconds of the song.
Bardo Pond
Sometimes Bardo Pond make songs. Sometimes the Philadelphia quintet make noise. Sometimes the two happen to coincide with one another. Lapsed, the band's fifth full-length effort, is a tumultuous stew of feedback that burbles with elements of My Bloody Valentine overdrive, New York no wave, and -- rarely -- old-school psychedelia. Often the compositions begin as actual songs before slipping, ever so gradually, typically one instrument at a time, into a distorted squall, a ceiling of noise. Other times ringing guitars and flute provide graspable melodies as the rhythm section plods and airy vocals float over top of the noise. Sounds pretty good any time, a lot better when you're stoned.
Bardo Pond also play Monday, April 20, at the Bottom of the Hill at 9:30 p.m. with Silver Apples (see above) and Primordial Undermind. Tickets are $7.
