If you want to go to a music festival and spend the weekend kicked back in a lawn chair, koozie in hand and a few thousand of your closest Crocs-with-socks-wearing friends doing the firefly-catching dance to the jam band of the moment, it’s (as they say) all good.
If, on the other hand, you like a little intellectual stimulation along with your wristband and weekend-long music program, that festival is a bit harder to come by.
It’s also just the sort of event Stephanie’s Id front woman Stephanie Morgan is hoping to pull off.
“I go to these shows like Mute Math and Imogen Heap,” the local pop singer says. “Thinking-man’s shows. And I see all these people who must be from [Asheville], but then I don’t see them out anywhere else.” That’s the crowd—the under-served indie-pop fan base—she had in mind when organizing this year’s IdFest.
“MerleFest is the same weekend,” says the intrepid coordinator. “But there are a lot of bands here who play music that’s not in the roots category.”
And now there’s a place for them, too.
A festiv[al] for the rest of us
Like the Freud-charged word “id” implies, Morgan’s event is about celebrating the part of the psyche (in this case creative arts) not given as much face time as more ego-oriented rock bands.
Case in point: “We’re kind of more of a recording project,” muses Night’s Bright Colors’ mastermind Jason Smith. “We don’t play out much.”
But Smith’s ambient pop group (a collaboration with various local musicians, including engineer Matthew Mauney, multi-instrumentalist Mike Alexander and singer/songwriter James Richards) is slated to take the Wedge Gallery stage on Saturday night.
Twenty-seven other bands, many of them based in Asheville, will play over the course of the two-day festival, now in its third year.
“This is the first year it’s this big,” Morgan points out. Last year’s IdFest was a one-night, five-band show at the Grey Eagle.
“I started talking with a bunch of musicians in town about challenges indie musicians face,” she continues. “There’s not much of a music-business structure [here], so I decided a mini South By Southwest would be helpful.”
SXSW, based in Austin, Texas, is a 10-day conference featuring hundreds of musical acts, 50 stages, panel discussions, and pretty much everything a band needs to network. IdFest, though smaller, hopes to provide similar services. Fans and performers can check out a recording session at Collapseable Studio or drop by Echo Mountain Recording Studio’s open house. There’s a scheduled screening of new TV pilot Studio South (think: an Austin City Limits for the Southeast) featuring Stephanie’s Id, and a panel discussion on team building. And, of course, the two nights and three stages of bands.
While the musical lineup features many of the usual suspects (Hollywood Red, the divineMAGgees and Seepeoples’ Will Bradford), opportunities abound to check out lesser-known acts like the eccentric one-man band Shake it Like a Caveman, experimental-funk group Ho-Se-Fo’s Gnome Dance Party and steel drummer Jonathan Scales’ Fourchestra.
“What we do is not really party music,” admits Smith, who is about to release the double album The Patient’s Notebook. “There are a lot of bands who put on a great show, and that’s a huge part of what they do. For me, most of the fun is coming up with a counterpart to a melody, or the overdubs.”
Perhaps it’s his shoe-gazing inclinations that have kept Smith out of the spotlight. Or maybe it’s just his penchant for logging studio hours rather than tour-bus miles. Still, the delicate melodic strains of Night’s Bright Colors finds a place at IdFest.
“It took Stephanie’s Id a long time to find our fan base [in Asheville],” Morgan reveals. And that’s part of the inspiration for IdFest. “There are [a lot of] bands out there that are really doing a great job, but they just don’t have the publicity machine.”
While a few roots-oriented acts have crept onto the bill, it’s the indie-pop acts who most need a place to call home. Says Morgan: “I wanted to carve out a festival with that emphasis.”
IdFest runs Friday, April 27 and Saturday, April 28 at the Grey Eagle (185 Clingman Ave.) and at Wedge Gallery in the River District, 8 p.m.-2 a.m. nightly. $25 covers all events. Performers include: divineMAGgees, Will Bradford, Ho-Se-Fo’s Gnome Dance Party, Ruby Slippers, Brianna Lane, Bandazian, Jen and the Juice, Sean Kagalis, CX-1, Hope and Anchor, Arizona, Paperboy, Andy Lehman, Kellin Watson, Dave Turner Trio, Eliza Lynn and the Blue Laws, William F. Gibbs, Hollywood Red, Shake it Like a Caveman, Suttree, Jonathan Scales’ Fourchestra, Night’s Bright Colors, Nevada, Through the Sparks, Warm in the Wake, Hellblinki Sextet, Ahleuchatistas, and Stephanie’s Id. For info, 232-5800 or StephaniesId.com
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