Review of:
ELECTRIC ECLECTICS FESTIVAL 6
July 29 – 31, 2011
A CAROUSEL
OF THE UNEXPECTED
What epitomizes cultural cool these days? How about camping on 100 acres of lush Ontario farmland, meeting musicians and artistic beacons from around the world? Open-air concerts of avant-garde music & multi media. Art & sound installations in a silo, a tent, a dome. In industrial sized trailers. A field.
Electric Eclectics is an experiential art junkie’s bonanza percolating in the rolling sweep of Meaford. Two hours north of Toronto. Three nights of live music. Starting early in the evening, tripping through sunsets and fleeing into the night where it slings forward under a sultan’s tent of DJ’s until dawn. Six years successful.
A taste of the eclectic in the electric?
Hilltop:
The Dead Are Those Who Have Died. Self-described by this one-man electric guitar cannibal as “shamanic gnosis”. We’re assailed by his dedicated channeling of the dead. Sounds like malarkey on the page. Live? Like Dr. Kevorkian lovingly interpreting the anguish of the murdered, the suicides, the lost in limbo.
Danielle De Picciotto. American multi-media artist De Picciotto transported to Berlin in ’87, instrumental in the post-punk, techno, party palace & fashion miasma of the pre & post Wall hybrid. Shifting gears, she and her German born husband, multi-disciplinary artist & electroclash musician Alexander Hacke, mesmerize with a noir fairy tale mix. De Picciotto melodically reading from her newly published memoir of those revolutionary Berlin years, layered with her film and his live music.
Myths. Feminine pop star expectations crushed in a duet of emotional, vocal, electro gymnastics. Dance music meets politics. Harmonies howl with generations of the feminist/social wound. Hope trots in the velocity of this exacting, thrilling, disciplined girls-as-eruption performance.
In the valley of trees? DJ’s span decades. Punk. Dub. House. Techno. Disco/Italo. Juke. Drum & Bass. Fusion. Trance. Analogue. Digital. Midi. Orchestrated by talents who cross-dress as radio personalities, musicians, lighting technicians, tech directors, industrial designers.
Electric Eclectics? Motorcycles as synthesizers, drummers as dervishes, cameras as musical instruments. Flutes. Soldering irons. Zithers. Choral music. Noise. The intangible made visible. Sound as physical. Light as mystical. Finland. California. Vancouver. New York. Toronto. Kentucky. Ottawa. Alaska. Detroit. Meaford. Juxtaposition an art in itself.
Electric Eclectic’s Director Gordon Monahan and Assistant Director Chris Worden curate an international mashup of fiercely talented, intelligent, forward thinkers in a setting of time-soaked, natural beauty. EE 7 will run from August 3 – 5, 2012.
Copyright judithcockman©2011