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Terrastock
State of the art
BY CARLY CARIOLI

Not long ago, an advance team from the fifth Terrastock festival, which will be held at the Middle East nightclub in October, arrived in Cambridge to inspect the amenities. The first Terrastock festival was held in a warehouse in Providence in 1997. It was a bit of an accident: conceived as two bands performing in a small room, it bloomed into an international affair with 30 groups spread over two days. Subsequent editions appeared in cities as far afield as San Francisco (1998), London (1999), and Seattle (2000). Sponsored and inspired by the inscrutably eclectic English fanzine Ptolemaic Terrascope, these multi-day marathons have brought together an array of groups with very little in common except for their obscurity and inventiveness — a mish-mash of avant-garde noisemakers, ’60s pop fetishists, acid-damaged hippies, iconoclast psych-punks, and mad folkies. And yet the contour of Terrastock’s variedness is so distinctive that were you referring to the participants in a context removed from the festival, you’d probably call them "one of those Terrastock bands."

After a brief tour of the Middle East, Phil McMullen, Terrascope’s mercurial editor/publisher, sits down alongside Joe Turner, a member of the Boston psych-rock group Abunai! who is responsible for much of the day-to-day planning of this year’s festival. "I’ve planned five now, and they’re all unique," McMullen says. "I need somewhere that can accommodate two stages, where one band can be playing while another is setting up, so you’ve got almost simultaneous music. But almost as important to the Terrastock vibe is to have somewhere that people can hang, chill out, relax, and talk. Because it’s a really grueling three days of music."

Terrastock is an odd bird. It has no geographical home base — this year’s performers come from six countries and a dozen US states — and it represents no signature musical style. Instead, the festival’s identity arises from the forging of spontaneous connections among divergent genres, audiences, and performers. It occurs on no regular timetable, and each edition has been organized by a different group of overseers. There is a firm "no guest list" policy: this year, even McMullen bought a ticket. (Ordinarily he wouldn’t, but he wanted to test the festival’s new on-line ticketing system.) The festival is ostensibly a benefit for the magazine, but in practice there is almost never a profit; one year, the organizers passed a hat on the last day to make the rent on the hall. (This year’s admission is $5 less than it was in Seattle.) The line-up announced beforehand is more of a suggestion than a script: one stage is usually designated for whoever shows up and feels like playing, whether it be an audience member with a guitar or an impromptu collaboration or — as has happened — a band whose members are attending as spectators and then scrape together enough borrowed equipment to belt out a few songs.

The festival takes an almost perverse pleasure in its counter-intuitiveness. Far and away the best-known outfit at this year’s Terrastock is Sonic Youth, and it would be natural to assume that either the band or the organizers had their eye on the Saturday-night headlining slot. The band, however, were ambivalent when they played: "Saturday night, Sunday afternoon, whatever," they told Turner, and so, he says, "we’re having brunch with Sonic Youth on Sunday at 2:30. It reinforces the whole idea that there is no headliner, there is no opener. It’s just, here’s the bands you’d probably want to see."

And if the difference between headliner and opener is played down, so is the difference between audience and performer. "One of my favorite descriptions of Terrastock," says McMullen, "was someone who said that as everyone sat there watching, every once in a while a few people would walk up on stage, and eventually you would realize that they were the next band."

Terrastock 5 runs October 11 through 13 at the Middle East, 472-480 Mass Ave in Central Square. Tickets are $70; call (617) 864-EAST, or visit www.terrascope.org for more info.

Issue Date: May 23 - 30, 2002
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