SIGNUM: Experimental Festival

A reverent audience sits packed into sofas or lolling across each other’s limbs and backpacks on the floor. Fisk dons headphones and sits calmly in a pool of white light, twiddling with strange knobs and coaxing hypnotic little melodies from the Hammond before him. When he speaks, it is quietly, wryly, with dry jokes and a sense of self-depracation. Sweet warblings and weird tweaks drift around the room, mesmerizing the crowd. When Fisk is ready to go, the crowd shakes off the hypnosis and applauds, then unpacks itself and slowly disperses.

It's been a great night at the Olympia Experimental Music Festival. After tomorrow's afternoon lineup, another year will pass before we gather here again; I know I'll be right here June 28-30th, 2002. Where will it go from here? McAdams has performed at the festival every year, and would like to see it get bigger. "I wouldn't want to dilute the Oly D.I.Y. aesthetic on which we started the thing, but I sure liked getting funding from a grant this past year," he says. "Nice to know that you can pay all the artists well and keep the shows cheap. That's the most important thing, I think, that and of course putting on the best festival imaginable, music-wise."

The little girl in the red Chinoise dress is carried out in her guardian’s arms, asleep with her head on his shoulder. Maybe someday she’ll be telling her grandkids about the good old days, when the Northwest experimental music scene was tiny... in the days before the ECC went platinum, before Steve Fisk was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, before Chuck Swaim started hosting Total Request Live on MTV-E ("The Experimental Music Channel"). But maybe she’ll just have the occasional dream of chasing toys and noise through cafés full of mad scientists. And weirdos, dorks, and crazy folk.

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