Fun, experimentation part of Devens event
By Julia Kacmarek, jkacmarek@nashobapub.com
Updated: 08/11/2013 08:01:01 AM EDT
DEVENS -- As music played and comedians joked on three stages, and the smell of hot dogs and burgers lingered, art vendors from across the state spoke of a reason to reuse during the Nines Festival.
The new arts-and-music-based festival was performed at Devens, at Willard Field from 1-11 p.m. on Saturday.
The festival is a collaboration of Ayer-based 3Rivers Arts and Great Northeast Productions, which is known for producing all the festivals for the jam-band Phish from 1996 through 2004, as well as the annual Mountain Jam, a four-day music festival held in upstate New York each June.
The Nines features a broad range of musical artists, including Explosions in the Sky, Dr. Dog, Delta Spirit, Shuggie Otis, Matt Pond, Walk
Off the Earth, Kid Koala, K. Flay, Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys and Air Traffic Controller.
There was also a comedy tent featuring six comics chosen by the Comedy Studio's Rick Jenkins, as well as a 21-plus beer garden.
Dan Balter, co-founder and artist at Fire Seed Arts, wore a shirt saying "Art with a re-purpose" and explained his process of creating art with recycled material from landfills, like his guitar made out of an old kitchen counter.
Balter came to the Nines Festival this year to change the way people see art.
Using only recycled material, Balter's band, "Johnny FireSeed and the Junkyard Dogs," uses instruments that were made from scrap material from landfills.
"I want to change the way people see their community," Balter said as he presented his "Seed-D." Instead of selling his music on plastic CDs, Balter and his band has teamed up with seed gatherers to create a plantable piece of paper, shaped like a CD, containing seeds from endangered plants. The band then provides a code for a downloadable version of their music upon purchase.
Balter explained how many grocery stores only want to buy the most common produce, leaving many plants no longer available to the public.
Balter uses these endangered seeds in his Seed-Ds to make sure this won't happen.
He compared the lack of variety of produce in stores today to the lack of variety in art and music.
"Just as stores no longer want certain fruits or vegetables, many artists and musicians are experiencing similar things as they are increasingly asked to conform," he said.
"Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys" was the first act on the main stage, and although described by others as a "rock cabaret group," Jojo Lazar, the "burlesque poetess" of the band, describes their genre as "Steam Crunk."
"Steam Crunk is made up. We play at a lot of Steam Punk festivals, but we like to push it a little bit farther," Lazar said.
Many
other artists also described their work as a little bit different than the norm.
UMass Lowell music teacher Dr. Tom Malone teamed up with Balter to create the world's longest xylophone made out of recycled wood.
"The wood really comes from anywhere, my neighborhood, landfills, fences..." Malone said.
Malone's students helped make the xylophone and spoke about their work.
"Nobody tells you, 'Hey, you might have to use a table saw in this music class,' but if you teach kids how to build their instruments, you're giving them a whole other level of pride," said Savannah Marshall, a recent UMass Lowell music education graduate.
Marshall explained how teaching music and art to be hands-on could be an interdisciplinary
course in many curriculums.
"For a project like this, you could get the wood-shop kids cutting and nailing the wood, the art students painting the instrument, and the music kids playing it," she said.
The xylophone will be broken up into several different xylophones and donated to needy schools.
The Nines Festival is new this year and was inspired by another festival from Austin called South by Southwest, or SXSW, which is an art and music festival, but hosts other mediums like film.
"We hope in years to come to include other forms of art like dance and film," said Julie Pampinella, publicity director for 3 Rivers Art.
Mauricio Cordero, creative-projects director for 3 Rivers Art, worked to gather artists who had something in common, and highlighting eco sustainable work was his main focus.
"For me, it was about finding artists that I really wanted to do work with who also have a compelling story to tell," Cordero said.%
Follow Julia on Twitter or Tout @JuliaEKacmarek.
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