View from the backstage area of the barn at Wuhnurth
Friday at the Wuhnurth Music Festival just outside of Spencer, Indiana was a wonderful day. The weather was great and the energy was boundless. Buzz surrounding Papadosio’s set was humming all day, so when the time finally came, the main stage was packed with better than 90% of the attendees of the festival. I arrived to find an artist named Andy Reed setting up for a live painting session during the show. Papadosio is a huge advocate for festivals being an outlet for more than just music and they made sure their set was the trendsetter for this concept. Reed waited to lay his brush to the canvas until the band played the first note of a song I was unfamiliar with but nonetheless got my blood flowing. “Geoglyph” left the stage like a bullet and hit the ground at an elevated energy level— much higher than the show 10 days earlier. The next song, “Take What You Know” upped the ante even more and pushed the energy further with an outstanding effort from Synthesizer Sorcerer Billy Brouse. This jam assumed a serious electronic bent and sent the heaving crowd into a dance frenzy. They wisely took a step back from the ledge with the next song, otherwise the audience might have just exploded right then and there. At first I questioned the choice of “All I Knew” because it felt like too much of an energy drop-off. However, when Thogmartin dialed up that stratosphere-piercing guitar section, my concerns were washed away. Even though the song was considerably mellower than the previous two, the powerful guitar work kept the show at a preposterous level of elevation.
Andy Reed laying down the paint with Thogmartin throwing down the heat
From previous experience I knew that the halfway mark meant the endangered nature of anything that could be considered mellow. This concept was once again confirmed when they threw down a natural linkage from latter half of Observations. “Smile & Nod” then “Night Colors” is a dastardly combination on the album and they conjured up the same spirit in the barn. “S & N” was a sneakily intense song as it wound through a mysteriously spacey section before it opened up into a breakneck jam. The rhythm section of Healy and McConnell really stood out to me in this song and it seemed as if they were pushing Brouse and Thogmartin to a higher plane. The conclusion of this song was far more intense than the album cut and a powerfully engineered extended jam section made all the difference. “Night Colors” once again proved to be a crowd mover and continued the climb up the musical intensity ladder. The machine gun barrage of electronic drums from Healy laid the foundation and a powerful synthesized bassline drove the message home. Another strategic lull in intensity was a sagacious tactic and “Find Your Cloud” really put me in a trance. It starts off with an energy like a digital blizzard only to find its way to a breakneck pace that somehow manages to possess a dreamy & spaced-out feeling. This song is an excellent choice to put immediately before a finale song and with it they sets a dangerous table of destruction. Like I mentioned earlier, Papadosio has a few songs in their catalog that are absolutely destined to be set-closers from now until the end of time. But I can’t think of a better example than “Polygons.” This song is the monster hiding under your bed. It will wake you at 5 am in a cold sweat from dancing in your sleep. It will dominate your dreams and put you in the middle of that crowd, unable to stop thrashing, unable to do anything but keep… on… moving. And the version on this night was like something right out of my wildest dreams. It was an epic, 12-minute plus version like I had never heard before. The bonfire in the barn was raging through some of the most turbulent musical peaks & valleys I’ve ever heard. They must have brought back the hook two or three times to allow yet another ascension up the Mountain of the Jam Gods. When it finally ended I found myself out of breath and weak in the legs. I must have been jumping the entire song because I was pooped and in desperate need of a stop at my campsite for re-fueling. I turned my back to the barn feeling like I had just seen one of the most impressive festival sets of the year. It was like the feeling after Thanksgiving dinner, except it was my second stomach—the one for music— that was filled to the brim.
Billy Brouse was in the zone
Looking back on these two shows I feel like they were complimentary in as many ways as they were different. The setlists shook out very similarly, even having some songs in almost exactly the same spot. The energy of each show was obviously very high but the festival set definitely pushed the boundaries of my experience. A good indication of how the approach differed between the two settings was the number of songs they squeezed in the allotted time. They performed 13 songs in around 150 minutes in Chicago, but only 9 songs in around 125 minutes at Wuhnurth. This confirmed what I had already suspected; Papadosio meandered way off course during a few of the songs and ladled on a heaping pile of jams. As a music festival junkie, this is what I like to see from bands. I love to see that they take the festival experience and turn it into something that you likely won’t see in an indoor venue. They take great efforts to create a one-off, completely unexplored musical journey. Papadosio is charging up the live music ladder with this goal in mind and a style that is unabashedly intense & fiendishly unique. I think the summer of 2011 is going to be another big one for this rising beast of sound.
View from the control tower
No Comments comments associated with this post