The Adventures in Modern Music Festival, presented by uber hip UK magazine Wire, is a name far better suited to a PBS special than a five day event showcasing experimental and rising stars from home and across the pond. This annual event ran from Wed 9/10 -15 at Chicago’s excellent Empty Bottle, and the whole event was understated, modest, and all about the music, with zero commercial interference.
I arrived Wednesday night, just in time for Minnesotan Paul Metzger‘s set of bizarre, banjo experimentation. A solo Metzger sat on stage with a banjo tweaked out with 20+ strings, the tunings channeling a frequency similar to a sitar. Striking dissonant chords, it was hard to tell if the set was improvisation, but whatever the intention the whole thing ended up sounding like Muzak in an opium bar in Tangiers.
Unfortunately, headliner Keiji Haino had to cancel, but Brooklyn trio These Are Powers entertained with a clever mix of industrial and club beats swirled amidst squalling feedback and shrieked vocals, creating a hypnotic vibe the band calls “ghost punk” which is a pretty apt summation.
Thursday brought a similar mix of the experimental and electronic, the former represented by Carla Bozulich Evangelista. To be fair, I have never checked out an Evangelista album, or Carla’s other musical incarnations, but her performance was an atonal mess of pretension and bad poetics.
I’ve never heard or seen a band try so hard to rip off Lydia Lunch (who would want to?) but after fifteen minutes of drone with no progression, I began to realize how utterly bereft of entertainment the set would be. Once Carla starting barking about big, diseased cocks, the mad lib litany became a parody of someone trying to make bad, self indulgent art-rock.
After what seemed like an eternity, Evangelista’s set came to an end and Black Moth Super Rainbow took the stage just after midnight to bring the proceedings back to life and close the night with their unique brand of summertime psych-pop. The event was marginally crowded, drinks were reasonably priced, and the bill of four bands a night was well worth the cover.
-Drew Fortune
The Wire: www.thewire.co.uk
The Empty Bottle: www.emptybottle.com