Birds of a Feather

Dustin Hurt's Bowerbird unites the experimental music scene.

by Shaun Brady

experimental

BIG HURT: Bowerbird ringleader Dustin Hurt : Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Considering that you could easily watch your social life disappear trying to keep up with Bowerbird's relentlessly busy schedule of experimental music events, the idea of heaping an eight-day festival on top of everything else may reek slightly of overkill. That fact is not lost on Bowerbird director Dustin Hurt, who christened the festival Something Else More.

"The naming of it has a lot to do with what it's about for us," Hurt explains, laughing about the sheer excess of the endeavor. "There's a tongue-in-cheek component, but there's also a sincere element," he says, pointing out that the term "something else" can be used as " an idiomatic reference to something being exceptional."

The festival certainly fulfills both criteria: the exceptional and the excessive. At four acts per night, the event hosts a combination of local and out-of-town musicians, with the local contingency � despite so many names familiar to Bowerbird habitués � largely in new combinations so that the lineup can boast about 70 percent world or Philadelphia premieres.

Highlights include Period, the New York-based duo of guitarist Charlie Looker and drummer Mike Pride; EKG, an electro-acoustic duo composed of Kyle Bruckman and Ernst Karel, who will perform Morton Feldman's 1976 composition "Oboe and Orchestra," with Bruckman performing the oboe part and Karel realizing the orchestral component electronically in real time; Thus, with Baltimore's Neil Feather and Jon Berndt performing on their own invented instruments; and Los Angeles sound artist Tom Grimley, who, Hurt describes, "makes self-automated sound contraptions, puts them around the room and sits and drinks beer for 20 minutes while they do their thing."

While the first four nights take place at the Rotunda, the latter half of the festival highlights the geographic diversity that has become another of Bowerbird's hallmarks, with shows dispersed within South Philly, Society Hill and Germantown. With Tonic, a home for creative music in the seemingly more supportive environment of New York, recently shut down, the presenter-centered model shared by Bowerbird, Mark Christman's Ars Nova Workshop and Gene Coleman's Soundfield, may prove the key to sustainability. As Hurt points out, the overhead of keeping a permanent space financially viable can tend to dilute its effectiveness.

"I find it hard to believe that there's 30 nights a month worth of good music anywhere, consistently," he points out. "What happens is that economic necessity overrides curatorial vision. I think with Bowerbird, people can see themselves going to every show. The same thing with Ars Nova � you know if Mark's doing it, it's important. With a place like Tonic, if you've never heard of the artist, what's there to compel you to get out of your house and go?"

By combining so many of the organization's strengths into one marathon stretch, Something Else More could be seen as a Bowerbird primer. "If someone hadn't ever come to any of our events before," says Hurt, "we've actually made sure that you could come to any single one of these nights and get a great idea of what Bowerbird is like. You're going to get a very serious listening environment with no distractions, but you're going to get friendly interaction with not only the musicians but the audience, a very informal environment without a lot of barriers between the listener and the music. And every night's going to have more than one sensibility, everything from minimal electronics to heavy aggro-noise, to brand-new composed music."

That's not the royal "we" that Hurt is using; Something Else More is also an official coming-out party for Bowerbird as a collective. Over the past several months, the presenting organization that Hurt started nearly a year and a half ago has snowballed, and is now run by a 10-person core, chiefly composed of many of the musicians who frequent its bills: Tim Albro, Alban Bailly, Jon Barrios, Dan Blacksberg, Katt Hernandez, Jesse Kudler, Evan Lipson, Dave Smolen and Michael Anton Parker (the "token non-musician," though he's been known to play a mean bicycle wheel and is as enthusiastic an advocate as any scene can hope for).

"What's important about these 10 is that not only are we all involved in a variety of different things," says Hurt, "but every musician on that list also has a common sphere of interest. We have disagreements all the time, but if you map all of our interests on a Venn diagram, the common area is what Bowerbird's about. It seems like there's a broad range on the programming, but there's a lot of things that aren't there, and I think those choices are representations of the collective."

That common ground can be somewhat hard to define or label, and Hurt expresses a distaste for the term "experimental," though he allows that it is at least useful in culling an audience open to the music that the collective performs and presents.

"We don't have any kind of aesthetic agenda," he says. "We're not trying to push the boundaries. There's small internal discourses within our music where we're trying to expand what we do, but we're not trying to deconstruct something or shock people."

Since Bowerbird's first show last February, crammed between aisles at West Philly's Marvelous record store, the idea and the scene have grown apace. Most significant, perhaps, was Bowerbird's partnership with the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, which opened historic Society Hill houses as venues, adding the gloss of legitimacy and attracting a whole new audience. And just last month, Bowerbird presented a discussion and performance by AMM co-founder Keith Rowe, the highest-profile name yet to appear under their banner. Hurt hopes that soon, some of the city's larger and more influential entities begin to see the value in cooperating, as well.

"The next step for Philly is having larger institutional support for things that deserve it. Keith Rowe's not a 22-year-old kid whacking his double-bass with a spoon. He's an important historical figure. When the larger galleries and museums and cultural institutions understand that this isn't some fringe esoteric thing that mad scientists are concocting in basements, that this is something that's vital, I think that's when things are going to have the potential to make Philadelphia a capitol for contemporary culture."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Something Else More Festival, Thu., May 3 through Thu., May 10, various venues, www.bowerbird.org.