The summer festival season doesn’t truly end with summer. It keeps going, on a kind of cultural autopilot, like a marathon runner so zonked out with exhaustion that he runs through the finish line without realizing until someone catches up to him with a cup of Gatorade and a silver blanket and tells him it’s finally over.
With the weather cooling and the leaves turning, the two-day Fuzzstival at the Armory last weekend was the gentle reminder that, ready or not, the page is turning to a season that, fairly or not, many regard as less amenable to large-scale music gatherings. I hope you got your kicks in, because presumably we’re all holiday shopping or cozying on the couch with warm bevvies and cuffing partners for the next six months.
Fuzzstival, now in its 12th edition, marked the transition with its usual sense of DIY decorum. The volunteer-run festival booked a mix of local and regional talent and handed back the profits to the performers.
The mood of the lineup felt more withdrawn than in past years. Lyrics were at a premium – in their place were long passages of guitar-led sturm und drang brooding. Pew Pew, Gollylagging, Main Era and Warmachine use the spoken word as a kind of gnomic spur to the instrumental component of the music, which in live performance drowns out vocals to the extent that they serve as a private incantation for the benefit of the singer alone. Nobody else can hear them.
Moshing, which has been in a long cultural dormancy, enjoyed a few select opportunities during the sets of Main Era, Jean Mignon and Pinklids. Fuzzstival isn’t a hardcore show, and it wasn’t clear that the entire crowd was ready for the fits of athleticism involved with cannonballing your body off the bodies of your neighbors. But these moments came and went without anyone getting sent to the emergency room on account of a Doc Marten to the face. Acts such as Spirit Ghost, Winkler, Dino Gala and Montreal’s Hélène Barbier offered more relaxed indie rock experiences.
Major Stars and North Adams’ Animal Piss, It’s Everywhere were two of the more veteran acts at the festival, and – counterintuitively to some, but not to this writer – got some of the most spontaneous and appreciative crowd response. With a lineup that skews toward performers in their 20s and 30s, there’s something liberating about being older and maybe a little removed from the mainstream of the local music scene, freeing them to perform with less self-consciousness. Major Stars let it rip with a set that was seconded by the phrase written across their T-shirts at the merch table, “Defend the guitar solo.”
And for a change of pace, Intac, the music outfit pretending to be a corporation pretending to be a music outfit, delivered a short play, performed by musicians pretending to be actors pretending to be musicians trying to “make it” in the music industry.
What becomes clear after attending a few Fuzzstivals is that the festival is not booking individual bands so much as one big amorphous mass of artists with interconnections and musical sympathies that can surprise you. The same guitarist who appears on the first night in an alt country act might reappear the second night in an aggro noise metal band. It’s a grand game of musical chairs.
As with previous years, there was no obvious focal point on the bill and the nights didn’t build up to a big name closer. The approach reduces overhead costs by not paying through the nose for headliners, and you see the result in the ticket price. Compare the two-day pass at Fuzzstival ($30 to $40 on a sliding scale) to the two-day pass that went on sale for Something In The Way (Feb. 5-6, Roadrunner), featuring legacy acts such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, new blue-chips such as Wednesday and other trendy properties: $200.
The booking outfit behind Fuzzstival, Illegally Blind, has thus far not elected to grow its festival beyond a recognizable DIY show-going experience. What is niche about Fuzzstival remains niche. Wizard security is on the job (Jeff Freedman’s bronze statue GoFundMe campaign is still stuck at $2,836), there’s a guy working the door who keeps telling you “it’s [his] first day,” and a quarter of the guests are out front smoking cigarettes at any given moment. There’s something to all this understated magic – not much money, but something.
