What exactly is Madison Popfest?
That definitely was not a question asked by the handful of
students squatting Indian-style on the stage of an otherwise vacant Music Hall
Friday night. Instead, they simply absorbed in rapt attention the sing-song
spoken word recounting of Bri Smith's journey to Germany, complete with a
treatise on spelling reform and a performance art piece in a court jester
tragedy-comedy ski mask, featuring the multifaceted foreign personas of "Pizza
Face" and "Creepy Face."
But the question remains nonetheless, with probably only two
or three acts one could conceivably define as "pop" appearing in the city's
annual exploration of the cutting-edge trends in popular music, which is
sponsored by the Union Directorate and ran Thursday through Saturday.
So now you ask: Will this random sample of acts big and
small answer that burning question, or at least tell me more about "Pizza Face"?
Let's find out.
Learn to Party with Andrew
W.K. — That's Two W's, Two Dots, One K
Music, of any sort, was not on the table Thursday night, but
the energetic crowd in the Memorial Union's Great Hall didn't seem to mind, building
up to a roar and standing ovation for the introductory speaker of Popfest,
Michigan rocker Andrew W.K.
Without a word, Andrew went over to a piano in the corner of
the room and in a deep, lounge leisure-suit voice, thanked the crowd for
attending his "fun fun party lecture." He then proceeded to "show" the crowd
how he parties, pantomiming a freak-out and waving his chair around on stage in
a helicopter spin.
Andrew W.K. admitted he was no degree-carrying partier,
saying, "I'm only an expert on myself, and even that's pretty amateurish."
However, he was bound by his role for the evening to both speak and motivate,
teaching us to better live our lives through a commitment to partying.
"Partying can be many things to many people," he noted, saying we should take
ownership of our own action, as "we can only do what we want to do. That's all
we do."
After a quick shout-out to his "inventors" (parents) in the
audience, one of whom attended law school at the University of Wisconsin,
Andrew W.K. spent the rest of the time opening up the floor for questions and
requests from the audience. Some highlights:
Q: What if you party too
hard?
A: "You need to make use of your supple body" before your
hipbone turns to "foam."
Q: How can you low-impact party with bad kneecaps?
A: Flail upwards from the hips.
Q: What's the proper diet for partying hard?
A: Your body comes with its own internal system called
hunger. If you're trying to gain weight, however, you should eat while eating.
Q: How can you be more like Andrew W.K.?
A: The way to be more like me is to be more like yourself.
The Three Faces of
Bri Smith
Lest the sobriety of a roundtable on the Madison pop scene
and the soothing if generic strains of guitarist Vid Lipert fully deflate the
crowd Friday night, after the antics of Andrew W.K. left so much promise for
things to come, the infectious wackiness of Best Friends Forever was wisely
added to the schedule. Bri Smith's solo work, as she confessed to the fans
gathered at her feet, may not "count as pop" (or "music," really), but it
certainly was earnest, crowd-pleasing and iconoclastic, and what more can you
ask for from your popular culture?
The UW Music Hall looked suitably festive for the occasion,
with wood cloud cutouts dangling precariously above a harvest scene littered
with tiny toy army men — at times too precariously, as several times, pieces of
set threatened to bury the performers underneath. The choice to relegate most
of the acts to the Music Hall also seemed suspect, as the hall was empty except
for the big name act — which not-so-ironically was the rising Madison local
band Pale Young Gentlemen.
So when Bri Smith brought out a coat rack with a ski mask on
it, it seemed like just another prop.
Little did we realize the girl-next-door charms of Smith,
bobbing up, down and around the stage while chattering over cheerful hip-hop
beats, were to be suddenly replaced with the donning of the hat by the harsh
accent of her German compatriots, who played devil and angel to her arrhythmic protests:
"But I don't like parties … that much." The audience, perhaps having taken to
heart the previous night's lessons, imitated a raucous party with shouts,
catcalls and a lyric-halting cell-phone call, much to Smith's sincere delight.
Billy Harvey
Wearing a green and gray suit jacket, Billy Harvey offered
up Craig Finn-like insights and nursery rhyme asides while playing against a
bassy, rhythmic mixture of audio loops and delay pedals, then proceeded to
spread a metallic sheen of guitar noise over it all. He then switched things up
with a sparse acoustic song, pivoting on the chorus "Turn, turn, turn." Harvey
sang it in a sweet, hushed voice, though the song took one too many turns and
veered off-course. Other highlights included a "joke" song about a girl in a
candle shop on the beach and the knee-bouncing shuffle of "Piggyback." He also
spotted a piano on stage and tapped out a nice tune, though he prefaced it by
saying he's never played it in front of an audience.
While continuously pealing off his many layers of clothes,
Harvey offered up an ominous sales pitch: "You can say Billy Harvey gave me a
CD when his legs still worked."
Harvey had more than a few bum lyrics, however: "There's
you/ There's me/ Fighting the everlasting war." Particulary painful and
cartoonish on a song where he swiped Ben Folds' hook from "Rockin' the
Suburbs." Despite his inconsistency, his winning personality made you wish him
future success.
Disco Never Tasted So
Good
The night ran woefully over schedule, and by the time the Pale
Young Gentleman ended their set of Don't-Call-It-Chamber Pop, nearly all of the
audience cleared out. That didn't stop Baby Teeth from putting their all into
some feverish dance music, however. The trio, comprised of a blindingly
red-shirted drummer, a '70s glam-rock throwback bassist and a hip-shaking
keyboardist, sang arena-sized songs with titles like "Swim Team" and "Snake
Eyes" — about coming up empty. Their indefatigable spirit was the stuff of
sweaty disco nights, training montages, come-from-behind sports victories and
Mentos commercials, and soon the remaining audience members piled up to the
front of the stage, dancing with their all.
Circuit-Bending
Showcase: Demolishing Your Toys Really Was the Best Part
A workshop on circuit-bending was understandably the
least-attended event all weekend, tucked in a nook of Lakefront on Langdon Saturday
night and shrugged off by the roving gangs of football fans and their quizzical
Parents Weekend guests. But for those who dared face their childhood friends
and brutally rip open their guts to move around wires and link new sound points
on its circuit board, a whole "city" was lit on the battery-powered innards of
the toy's "state," as Bianca Pettis, workshop leader and member of Beatrix*JAR
put it.
And how is this pop music, again?
"Circuit-bending brings sound and art to people wouldn't
call themselves musicians," said the other half of the duo, Jacob Roske.
If this is the music of the revolution, you wouldn't know it
from the acts that followed, as the expensive-looking gadgets accompanying the
Frankenstein monster-looking complex of dollar-store novelty items all seemed a
far cry from the jack-in-the-box sounds coming from the amateur circuit
benders.
Rodney Clark, founder of circuit-bending label Tiger Claw
Records here in Madison, started things off under the alias Life As Number 5.
Grounded in a repeating electronic loop, Clark manipulated dials, knobs, and
switches, evoking a drum line playing in a combat zone, the whoosh and rumble
of jet planes flying over-head. Another song added telephone dial tones and
laser zaps to a hiccupping vocal percussion.
Then came Computron, the administrator of GetLoFi.com, a
definitive authority on circuit-bending culture, tips and events around the
country. Though at first shrug it would seem that circuit-bending musicians
would be at home in the brutal sonics of the noise genre, Computron's warm,
organic tones and glitching skips evoked a primitive IDM, electronica stripped
to its bare roots. A malfunctioning flat panel screen affixed to his electronic
deck, Computron created fluid, moving soundscapes, each flam, alarm clock purr,
or down-tempo chime evoking an air of inquisitive wonder. Against this, even
the drawling voice of a Union denizen discussing the terrorist implications of
Iran and a Korean student loudly making a telephone call became part of the
collage of found sounds.
But duo Beatrix*JAR from Minneapolis stole the show with
wide grins as it spun trip and hip-hop instrumentals with canned tracks on a
laptop and record player augmented by a circuit-bent Speak & Spell and other
miscellaneous toys. The resulting sound would not be out of place on a Go! Team
album.
Finally, Roth Mobot took the stage. Composed of Tommy
Stephenson, who has designed electronic instruments for Animal Collective and
Phish, and a bearded, bald ball of energy named Patrick McCarthy, the group
forgoes traditional tonal sounds altogether in a dissonant, musique concrete
cacophony composed of circuit-bent devices alone. While McCarthy held a shining
red apple of uncertain purpose in his right hand and donned a purple helmet of
a no-doubt brutal space dictator, the group composed a nervous and unsettled
mixture of noise. After establishing a theme, like a customer ordering from a
McDonald's drive-thru, they then proceeded to derange it, sending vocals into
warp-speed and adding claustrophobic noises of click and chewing insects.
O Canada, We Tip Our
Collective Hat to Thee
The members of French-Canadian rockers Malajube wore many
hats during their performance — literally, including a top hat, trilby and a
Civil War soldier's hat — and their muscular, driving chameleonic rock kept
switching things too. Lead vocalist and guitarist Julien Mineau provided a
strong head voice akin to Built to Spill's Doug Martsch, tempering keyboardist
Thomas Augustin's midrange staccato as a substantial crowd gathered around the
stage stomped along. Without losing any of its fire, the band began to lean
toward those keyboard, toward full, symphonic sound not unlike fellow
countrymen Arcade Fire. In between was the French-accented stage banter of
Augustin, who asked to turn down the houselights by saying, "Mr.
Who-Does-The-Lights? Can you make them spooky?" The band then shifted into an
atmospheric instrumental with a legato keyboard line. Ending their set with a
wave of wood shedding distortion and a wild, screaming wail more akin to early
Thursday than any indie rock touchstones, Malajube clearly rocked harder than
any other band of the weekend.
Bon Iver, the End of Pop?
Capping off the weekend's performances was Bon Iver, the
solo project of Eau Claire native Justin Vernon that drew a considerably older
crowd familiar with much of his work. Accompanied only by his hollow-body
electric and the occasional beating of a foot-pedal bass drum, Vernon sang in
an angelic, softly enunciating falsetto usually attained only by choirboys and
the late Jeff Buckley. Despite a handful of dead spots and dramatic switches in
volume as he maneuvered through his foot pedals, Vernon commanded a strong
presence on stage, his voice echoing between two microphones as he played a
moody, contemplative set of slowcore made of equal parts Red House Painters and
Cat Power. The set ended with "The Wolves (Act I and II)," the audience softly
repeating the haunting, plaintive refrain "What might have been lost" as
Vernon's voice gradually faded away.
Party tips from experts and schizophrenic critics, make-your-own-keyboards
and a final call-and-response: You can't put this stuff on a Britney Spears
album, but if you can pretend all these things can speak together, Madison
Popfest tells us the "pop" is in the people, not the popular.
