A Giant Umbrella: Bumbershoot Music N Arts Festival 2008

-Bumbershoot takes place at the Seattle Center over the three days of Labor Day Weekend.

This Bumbershoot (Seattle’s Music N Arts Festival to End All Festivals) was a weird one. I took the train up from Portland so I wouldn’t be late or miss anything interesting. I have to wonder who schedules this thing, considering the headlining acts. On one hand, we had Beck, an idiosyncratic musical anomaly of a man with lose connections to the church of scientology (one of the most bizarre and frightening cults on earth.) On the other hand, we had The Stone Temple Pilots (Boring 90’s grunge leftovers) and Death Cab for Cutie (boring modern emotional nothings.) I like Beck, but have issues with scientology and so solved the problem by compromising with a friend of mine and going to see !!! instead (more on that later.) I briefly considered bring a huge bag of fruit to throw at Stone Temple Pilots, but instead went to see Final Fantasy (Yes. That is in fact the dumbest name in the world.) Death Cab for Cutie? Don’t make me laugh. Anyways, on to the good stuff.

I saw several bands on Saturday, but none paralleled the brilliance of Saul Williams. For those of you who don’t know, Saul Williams is a Slam Poet turned Hip-Hop artist who recently teamed up with Industrial Music’s Bruce Springsteen (Trent Reznor) to release his most recent album online, in the style of Radiohead. His performance blew me away. The man is thoroughly captivating in voice and movement. I’m not sure how to describe his music though. Industrial World? Underground Hip-Hopket Ball? Whatever it was, it rumbled and shook my spine in the best way possible. His backing band was stellar, a guitarist, synth player and keyboardist all in top form. The best moments though, came from Williams’s Spoken Word. A friend of mine has described seeing him speak as “being like seeing Barack Obama.” A high compliment that Williams is certainly worthy of. He is a poet of exceptional intelligence and I could not be happier for having seen him.

For complicated reasons, I was in an extremely foul mood during most of the first day of Bumbershoot. Fortunately, none of my friends indulged my moping anger and instead I hoped for a serious mosh pit. I didn’t get any such mosh pit until !!!’s (pronounced, Chk Chk Chk) performance the evening of the first night. I’m not a big fan of Dance Punk (kind of a ridiculous term.) But I’ll say this; their show was high energy and full of rambunctious people who gave me my serious mosh pit. Maybe it was a dance pit but there was enough smashing about to take my mind off my problems. So thank you !!!, for taking my mind off of my problems if only for an hour.

Skipping ahead to the next evening, in much better spirits, I accompanied my friend Sasha to Final Fantasy, a contender for the worst name in musical history. Actually, that honor goes to Anal Cunt, but this a close second. “This better be good” I thought as I stood out in the cold, patiently waiting for the performance to begin. Final Fantasy is a one man band who performs symphonic music with the aide of a violin, a keyboard and some extremely elaborate loops. What he does is play one part of the song on his violin, record it and loop it back as he plays the other parts. More and more layers are added and eventually it sounded like a full on orchestra. I was very pleased to discover that, in this case, you really can’t judge a book by its cover. Final Fantasy is a very talented and captivating artist, even if a little silly at times (his debut albums title is “He Poos Clouds.”) It looks simple but keeping track of all those loops has got to be difficult. My hats off to him.

Monday, the third and final day, was possibly the strangest day yet. It started out with Vince Mira, who, at fifteen, sings just like Johnny Cash. It’s spooky actually, because when he sings he really seems to channel Cash. It was actually funny that when he wasn’t singing, he was kind of awkward, didn’t look at the crowed and seemed very nervous, which I suppose he was. Whatever, it was cool show; I give Vince Mira thumbs up.

After that, our little group trucked over to the exhibition hall to see Monotonix, an Israeli Garage Rock Trio of known pyromaniacs. Famous for lighting everything they can get their hands on aflame, I was excited to see them, and disappointed when I couldn’t. It’s not that I couldn’t get in or anything, it’s just that they performed on the floor of the exhibition hall and therefore were obscured by the crowd. I couldn’t see but I could hear and what I heard rocked my socks off. At one point their front man, a man called Gat, climbed onto the stage and mooned the crowd. Aside from that, the most of the show I saw was when occasionally a leg or guitar neck would surface from the crowd, thrash about for a moment and then re-submerge. And then, fifteen minutes in, the show abruptly ended, leaving me going “Huh?” Considering that I couldn’t see, I have no idea why the show ended so suddenly. My theory is that security shut Monotonix down after one of their members tried to light something on fire but that’s only a theory. All I know is that the lights went on and the promoter said “that’s all folks.” Weird.

Hours later, I stood in front of the Broad Street stage and witnessed the insanity that is Battles. Battles are a Math Rock band and anomaly from the future coming to kill us all. They are comprised of several well known musicians, including the son of Anthony Braxton and the former drummer of Helmet and now Tomahawk Drummer John Stanier. It is difficult in the best of circumstances to describe their sound, a marching, bouncing looping thing which starts in pieces and builds up like a giant tower of legos. When fully formed, this tower sprouts legs and jumps up and down on you, trouncing you into a stupor at the sheer brilliance of the machine. Really, what is there to say about this band besides that they are amazing! Their music being as intricate and complicated as it is, it was a trip to go back and listen to their recordings and realize that they can play their work note for note with dead on accuracy. This is no mean feat; this is tight and precise music where one slight screw up could foil the whole plot. But that just didn’t happen. It was a killer show. All of the members save the drummer played multiple instruments, albeit at separate times, except for Tyondai Braxton who played both the guitar neck and synth at the same time on numerous occasions. It was something to behold.

All in all, this was a good Bumbershoot. I saw lots of good acts and had two elephant ears. I hope I can go again next year.