A Story about Electric Eclectics 2013, with pictures by Eileen Wennekers
In anticipation of Electric Eclectics 2014 we're reviewing Eileen Wennekers’ EE 2013 trip to get you excited for this year!
Hello. Welcome. Make yourself at home.
Electric Eclectics happens every August long weekend on the Funny Farm near Meaford, Ontario. There is a tradition of using interesting signs here to indicate that you are near things happening. This l'il bunny marked a path that leads you into a wheat field where you can bask in colour, hear washes of noise echoing back to you from the valley behind the hill that holds the sound stage, and startle/be startled by very large turkeys. If signs are indexes, then this guy here was doing a very good job. The mood Saturday afternoon was of unsettling innocence when it was not of earnest absurdity.
For instance, these guys are hanging out.
Would you like to share our chips? Costumes by Christopher Cunningham.
Watching these guys.
Tranz Defonce. Everyone play whatever you want at the same time and, in that sense, together.
It was still light out when I heard Tranz Defonce from across the valley and it made me have a real teenaged-kicks type reaction. That is, it sent me bounding into the stage-headed gait that exciting and cacophonous howling incites at music festivals. They were great, and their wild-eyed loudly-messing-around quality provoked a very natural-feeling sense of having things in common which stuck with me for the rest of a very fulfilling evening.
There are art installations all around the festival grounds at Electric Eclectics where you can go to crack your brain open to fit more sounds into, but I thought it was a good idea to mostly hang around the stage since I was only there for Saturday night. As a result, I basked in the idiosyncratic art of acts that seemed to be especially picked for the times of day that wafted over the hill.
The Look People's songs schronk around the crowd, who maintain a respectful distance
For instance, The Look People made me think of No Means No, which made me think of BBQ, which was, luckily, available, since it was dinnertime. They performed a crashing, off-filter-disco-flavored derange set of jingles which was vaguely menacing and incisively hilarious. Here they are doing "Short and Intense," which is what hardcore punk rock might sound like if it was composed by Muppets half-pickled in absinthe.
As the sun sank down, Shelley Hirsche intoned a multi-octaved series of prose poems describing childhood incomprehension and other powerful feelings. Her voice arced out past my back towards the planets which were just emerging above the horizon. It was nice.
Mas Aya conjures the stars.
This ceremony was followed by the brilliant Mas Aya, who composed a sonic textile by looping delicate lines of tonal progressions from wind instruments into a complex and bone-deep rhythmic ocean for the enchanted crowd to float on.
I'm pretty sure this is how the ecosystem sounds.
Mas Aya was joined for a time by Petra Glynt, shifting the atmosphere towards her following solo set of crystalline dark wave, which reassured the by now quite possibly inebriated celebrants that the origins of a good dance party are not entirely metaphysically chaste.
Petra Glynt leaves us feeling urgently elegant.
Drainolith set up next, playing some melancholy, deconstructed ballads, which were thoroughly enjoyable even as they reminded me, uncomfortably, that romance is innately unsettling. Although these were absorbing thoughts to have, they aren't the best to go to sleep on. Thankfully, that wasn't necessary, because the night closed out with The Gories.
Sometimes garage rock is so soulful you actually feel your soul burning.
Although I was myself more than a little intoxicated when they took over things, I can state with certainty that this rock and roll was perfect. That is all I really want to say about it.
This robot wants you to be part of a scene from the X-files with it.
To conclude, then: Electric Eclectics is magical. You leave with your ears wide open and your alertness to the sonic sharpened and honed to such precision that the crunching of gravel and the murmurs of people passing you in the dark on the way to the forest seem like the most important thing in the world. Which might be true. Sound might be the most important thing in the world.