The Red76 Art Collective 's 11-hour festival of music, photography, painting and sundry cooking displays and miniature parachute races crept toward its end, and only a few dozen people remained, scattered around the old dance palace's sprawl. Art of varying but provocative quality beggared judgment, beer demanded drinking and some of Portland's most intriguing musicians were due on stage. And so the band responsible for one of the year's most beguiling and maddening albums droned and wailed to a few knots of sleepy people. If, in 20 years, anyone pauses to remember the State of Portland Music, ca. These groups earn the supremely vague e-word by mixing and matching instruments as though forced to patch together camp bands in the wake of a sweeping apocalypse, gleefully raiding jazz, folk, punk, electronic and ethnic music for whichever spare parts fit the moment's call.
Boys marks a particularly rich turn in the massive mutations taking shape.
400 Boys , while still alien-strange, relies on traditional instruments to a greater degree. A guitar echoes through a warped blues vamp, a violin scrapes mournfully, a muscular bass rumbles. Two members of Hochenkeit, Jeff Fuccillo and John Vassallo , have written about Asian music for this newspaper, and their devotion to the continent shows in this album's evocation of a phantasmic Near East. Music always suggests places to me, but nothing lately has called up imagined locales quite as fearsome as those prompted by 400 Boys . These instrumentals proceed with obsessive pace from trance-inducing opening themes into progressively more complex quiet storms of chaos.