A mysterious masked Dead Air Freshener rises above the crowd and into the skylight above the Olympia World News coffeehouse. Could it be festival co-founder Jim McAdams?
Photo by Eric Hausmann.

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Experimental Fest Links

But the town, much like the region it occupies, wasn’t particularly renowned for being a hotbed of experimental action. Jim McAdams took matters into his own hands over seven years ago and started a festival for music that might be considered weird, strange, sideways, or otherwise inaccessible. "Not that I don't like indie rock, but it is hardly the only music worth listening to," he says, "and I'll maintain that even the best indie rock bands are usually really experimental."

Arrington de Dionyso, founder of the Olympia Strange Music Society, helped organize the festival in its early years. "Mostly it was an excuse to promote my band, Old Time Relijun, because we were playing outside the specific punk rock genre that was most prevalent in the early ’90s here," admits Dionyso. But he also wanted to network: "I found there to be a lot of people in the area who made all kinds of experiments in private, but had never even considered that an audience might be interested in hearing such things, even people in more well-known bands." Over the years, McAdams and Dionyso have abdicated most responsibilities associated with organizing the festival, and turned them over to an operative known as Agent Duckhugger.

Hi, We’re Superchunk.

Soon the stage is strewn with toys, office equipment, electrical gee-gaws, and small acoustic instruments. Like many acts at the festival, Gang Wizard opts for random silliness and noise much of the time. This is the fearless, fun chaos of a particular kind of "experimental music" – the kind that’s self-indulgently hilarious live, but that may not cross over to recorded media. The kind that’s hard to picture headlining at the Knitting Factory, or even opening for a Sonic Youth side project at Tonic, but easy to imagine cavorting through Northwestern basements and strange cafés.

An electronic ball glides down the aisle, through the seating area. Someone in the audience kicks it back onstage. A small girl in bare feet, hairwraps, and a bright red Chinoise dress, jumps up from her seat in the front row. Delighted, she grabs the ball and hugs it to her chest, takes it captive and dashes down the aisle.

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