Hats in North Carolina truck stops say the dardnest things, but the expression "Truckin' ain't for sissies" trumps them all. Three weeks ago, at an exit just off of southbound I-85, I pulled the thin cardboard support from one such black hat, which boasted its masculinity with thick white thread and big, block letters. I gave the bill a quick crease with my palms and slid it down tight, just onto my forehead.
For 10 minutes, I doffed it up and down, conforming to the stereotypical local headgear customs. But, just before leaving, I took the hat off, restored its flat brim, and slid the cardboard back inside. I didn't need this, at least not on this trip. After all, I was only driving six hours to Atlanta-- in a Prius, no less. This wasn't a 12-hour day over 18 wheels, and such ironic posturing just isn't my thing.
But, really, I didn't need to prove I was tough. I was heading to Atlanta for five days of music from Table of the Elements, the archival and experimental label formed in 1993 with the intent of releasing Zeena Parkins' Nightmare Alley. In the decade since, TOTE has released works by Tony Conrad, John Cale, their controversial collaboration with LaMonte Young called The Dream Syndicate, Rhys Chatham, Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Gate, Pauline Oliveros, John Fahey, Gastr del Sol, Faust, and several dozen more avant heavyweights. This fourth massive convocation of TOTE artists-- The Bohrium Festival, named for its placement in the 107th block in the label's periodic scheme borrowed from every chemistry textbook-- wasn't intended, if you will, for sissies. Perhaps the hat would be euphemistic. At the very least, it would be redundant.
This trip would serve as a discipleship study of bravery: The supremacy of Table of the Elements for the past decade as an unwavering outpost of ultra-experimental strains can be attributed to its concomitant adherence to valiance. Most of the Table of the Elements catalogue has no broad commercial appeal, and many of its projects-- scores for films directed by early-60s Conrad associate Jack Smith or a 3xCD box set by an unknown two-guitars-and-drums trio from Atlanta-- are risky ventures, even with respect to the experimental marketplace. Yet, this philosophy of risk works because everyone associated with the label feels like they're doing important work releasing important records, and they're willing to go for broke to make it happen.
The Bohrium Festival was no exception. Everything about the festival spoke, rightfully, of label self-importance. For the first three days, a Table of the Elements mixtape compiled for the label's Dubnium event in Texas in March played between every set. Videos of Charlemagne Palestine somehow segued into a Jonathan Kane piece. For five days, the label's vanguard artists and friends hunkered down in the Eyedrum, a massive art gallery and performance space minutes away from downtown Atlanta and 500 yards from the gravestone of Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell. People weren't sold tickets; they were sold passes, thick, ten-inch-long paper slabs illustrated by a green picture of two goats holding the festival's banner in their mouths. Each pass, numbered in the sequence sold, came labeled with the name of its holder. Like a Bonnaroo laminate, it was something intended to be kept long after Conrad had put down his bow, a token of remembrance for a festival that could be very important.
In fact, the use of the word Bonnaroo isn't as anathema as it may seem. Make no mistake: Bohrium was a major festival on a microscopic scale. From Thursday until Labor Day, dozens showed up every night, passes in hand, on time. Over five days, strangers became friends by talking about their obscure record collections. Two men over 50, both Atlanta suburbanites, swapped Jim O'Rourke stories (O'Rourke met Sonic Youth and Tony Conrad at the first TOTE festival in 1994) and asked each other if they were into Boris. People camped outside of the gallery to hear Leif Inge's 24-hour granular distension of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony played on an iPod during the fourth night. On Labor Day, people came early for smoking slabs of grilled goat and steaming vegetables from label owner Jeff Hunt's traditional low-country boil. Some of the international visitors-- Ruins' Yoshida Tatsuya and Acid Mothers Temple's Tsuyama Atsushi and Kawabata Makoto, playing together as the three-piece, seven-band bill The Japanese New Music Festival-- weren't even label associates. They were just stopping by to play. More Bonnaroo than Manchester 2006, right?
And, as with all multi-day music festivals, it was challenging, though making real-time considerations on Conrad's solo violin abrasion is admittedly more trying than ogling some rock band's pentatonic purity at some big outdoor shindig. Festivals like Bohrium aren't built to satisfy every one all the time, either: They build and vacillate, some nights holding more at stake for some attendees than others.
Technical difficulties prevented the premiere of rare Elizabeth Cotten and John Fahey videos on the first night; instead, Loren Connors offered his real-time score to Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. During the 110-minute film, a sequence of loops registered through the house, while Connors-- seated just in front of the stage, staring at the film being projected overhead-- played along, laying a Fender across his lap and pulling, slapping, hitting and bending the strings as the onscreen action dictated. Moments were uncannily peaceful and gentle, but-- by the end of the film, as Joan of Arc burns on a stake and a riot ensues for the validation of her martyrdom-- the grimace on Connors' face matched the agony of his playing, with thunderous, disorienting sheets of sound professing empathetic pain from a frail American icon.
Keenan Lawler, a Kentucky-born guitarist and composer who had an excellent debut on Table of the Elements earlier this year, had the tough task of following Connors' obvious influence, but he proved highly capable: Using a resonator guitar, a series of pedals, and a set of finger picks, long bows and four hand-held bows curled inside of his palm, Lawler rolled seamlessly between a distorted low-country blues and a free-strung improvisation and balanced challenging technique with higher considerations in the way that has made Table of the Elements such a powerful stable for innovation.
Another tenet of TOTE's strength, though, has been its willingness to trust its artists: The second night was entirely a manifestation of that faith, as Tony Conrad curated a night of films gathered from his roots in New York in the 1960s. Conrad-- who was in an early version of the Velvet Underground known as the Primitives and who even named the Velvets after a piece of pulp fiction he saw in the streets of the city-- told stories about those acquaintances, his friends with names like Lou Reed, John Cale, and Terry Riley. Standing in front of the crowd, telling jokes about his past and the proclivities of that creative class, Conrad seemed avuncular as he directed an evening of Serious Art in red jogging pants while asserting three times it was 2007.
Andy Ditzler, an Atlanta film scholar and musician, played Conrad's academic counterpart to a T, putting the films in historical context and explaining why Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures-- which, in 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren said was "not within the protections of the First Amendment"-- was so important. It was a dazzling look at the emergence of queer cinema, 40 years later still confounding a supposedly jaded generation in an art gallery in the Deep South.
Equally important, though, was the outside-of-New York premiere of Piero Heliczer's Joan of Arc, a ten-minute short shot in two parts, featuring appearances by original Velvet Underground drummer Angus MacLise (who also scored Ira Cohen's The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, which made its expanded-form world premiere at the festival) and members of the Fugs. The score for Heliczer's Joan of Arc was an excerpt of a broken pump-organ drone recorded by Conrad in 1968. The release of the full drone has been a pet project of Conrad's for nearly a decade, and-- as the film was unveiled-- so, too, was the album. Conrad's Joan of Arc is one of the most fascinating "ambient" records to be released in years, a harrowing glimpse down an ice-cold, dark hallway full of persistent, pregnant silence stilted by specters that actualize from air.
Just as he did with the label itself, Conrad emerged as an obvious early star. But he wasn't alone. The third night represented a tidal shift in the festival, and David Daniell, who has only one official release with Table of the Elements, was at the center of the swing. Daniell-- a member of two Rhys Chatham bands, Jonathan Kane's February, his own San Agustin, and a nascent duo with Tortoise's Doug McCombs-- is on track to become one of the label's leading lights, a rarified new torch for an old flame. Like most TOTE artists, he's wildly gifted with his instrument, a player capable in multiple styles. But, like the best of his labelmates, he's not content with evincing his chops or demonstrating that his tone with an E-bowed Gibson SG is one of the cleanest sounds you'll ever hear. He's blessed and cursed with an inherent self-challenge.
On the first night, with guitarist Andrew Burnes and drummer Bryan Fielden as San Agustin, Daniell's trio was a gathering tide, water chasing itself in seeming circles that suddenly gave way to a finally discernible motion, there all along. By the end of their 30-minute set, the trio-- who had started so mild, so mellow, so fluid-- was storming and swelling, cresting guitars meeting the breaking line of Fielden's heavy attack.
For the third night, Daniell and Burnes joined a six-guitar take on Chatham's 1977 landmark "Guitar Trio". Daniell played first guitar behind Chatham's lead and helped to guide four other players through two consecutive, ultimately disparate versions of the piece. The first was minimal and staid: guitars crawled in and elevated slowly; sharp cymbal doublets pulsed beneath a rising E, taunted with, celebrated by, and bathed in a series of its overtones.
But the second version-- played beneath a series of projected prints by Robert Longo for the first time in over two decades-- delineated the sort of artistic unrest that makes Table of the Elements-- and its prime players, from Daniell to Conrad to new recruits like Lawler-- so special: Making his debut with the piece, drummer Joe Stickney threatened to collapse the screeching, saturated wall built by the six guitars. Ex-Swan Jonathan Kane has been Chatham's primary drummer for years, but Chatham challenged his own notions by incorporating new ones. Stickney helped reinvent both Chatham and his most famous piece with massive tom fills and heavy, clanging hits ricocheting off of the concrete floor. Tony Conrad literally jumped up and down, danced on his tip toes, lifted his arms, and clapped his hands every time Stickney put the band further at risk.
His smile was but a reflection of the room's atmosphere, which had morphed as early as the night's first performance: One Umbrella-- the Austin duo of Sarah Lipstate and Carlos Villarreal who plan to release future work on TOTE-- crept into its set and then leaped into it, barely coming back for air in 30 minutes. The moment instantly raised the bar for the label's old guard, most of which stood in the wings and watched as Villarreal stood stage left, bent over a table full of knobs and diodes and strings. He and Lipstate had coordinated the set and its changes perfectly, but it seemed guided by a spontaneity that the festival had lacked hitherto.
That mood carried the festival through the rest of the weekend: Even Deerhunter, an Atlanta five-piece that recently signed to Kranky Records, was more tolerable than usual. They seem like a band that spends its time practicing how to sound sloppy, but, at Bohrium, their slow crawls and sudden spirals worked.
Chatham capitalized on the mood shift, too, smiling and bouncing off the stage, and turned his back to stare at this excellent band of players he had assembled for the first time as the Guitar Army. He wanted to hear and see his music become their music and bounce through the room.
Chatham headlined Sunday night, too, and premiered his new project, Essentialist, a heavy metal band that arose out of his fascination with stoner and doom bands like Sleep, Sunn 0))), and Boris, which he spent hours listening to in a van with Daniell on their way to South by Southwest in March. Over five days, Chatham, Daniell, and the rest of Essentialist composed a full repertoire, and brought Chatham's classically-fired ideas through a filter of Maiden party metal and alternating languid drones. Onstage, Chatham, now 54, looked like an ecstatic child with a new toy, and helped breathe new life into a label that did the same for him not long ago.
But he hit the stage only after Conrad shocked and mesmerized the crowd. Conrad has been employing just intonation for solo violin for more than four decades, but-- on Labor Day weekend in 2006, 42 years after his seminal Four Violins was recorded-- the sound seemed more urgent and relevant than ever, a razor-sharp wrecking ball slicing through the space. Conrad began the set by bowing a fifth string hanging free from the neck of his violin and looped the violently craggy creak under a building sweep of slow-motion bows. He switched violins once and employed the second instrument's alternate resonating filter to push the sound into overdrive. Everyone that could take it-- no sissies, of course-- stood dumbfounded as Uncle Tony cleared cavities and took names.
Conrad climbed off stage to a crowd that refused to stop cheering: Keenan Lawler, who had been watching from the front row, wouldn't stop smiling, and the 100 people in the hall wouldn't stop thanking Conrad for being, simply put, so fearless. He seemed genuinely touched, overwhelmed by an audience that had been affected to the core by music they thought they knew. After finally walking offstage amid eventually waning applause, Conrad just smiled and deferred it all: "Oh, I had a good time, but just wait until you see this next thing."
He was talking about Chatham's Essentialist, of course, but it seemed like he was restating and recharging the dogma of a 13-year-old national treasure. And, four days into the weekend, it barely needed restating at all.
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