Regarding music festivals: there are a lot of them. Forgetting, for a moment, any of your personal concerns with corporate sponsorship, many festivals actually seem to be quite good. Bonnaroo, since graduating from its strictly hippie roots, puts on a show that features an excellent and varied cast of musicians. Coachella, deep in southern California’s desert, provides two – actually, now three – days of some of the best indie, hip-hop, and electronica acts. And, of course, there’s Pitchfork in Chicago with its taste-making collection of indie artists bringing the noise for three warm summer afternoons. The list goes on: Bumbershoot, Austin City Limits, etc… There seems to be no shortage of destination festivals that bring the best music to one place for eager fans, but there’s also another type of music and arts festival emerging across various cities and regions of the United States.

It’s a smaller type of festival, where at first glance, you won’t recognize many of the bands on the roster. The headlining act at one of these smaller gatherings might be a noon opener – or might not even make the bill – at a larger gig like Coachella and the opening acts are certainly new names to most indie ears. Yet these unrecognizable bills don’t mean the events are any less fun. You might go to the Pitchfork Festival to decide which of their new favorite bands you like the most, but at these smaller fests you’re going to find your own new favorite act, a band to call your own in the age of ultra-fast information exchange. One such gathering is the Pygmalion Festival.

Taking place in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois – the home of the University of Illinois – the Pygmalion Festival is the brainchild of booking agent and promoter Seth Fein. It is a four-day affair, running from Wednesday through Saturday that takes over the music venues and performing arts spaces of neighboring towns, Champaign and Urbana (they’re so close: you can walk from one to the other in fifteen minutes). This year’s festival, which featured headliners Andrew Bird, Okkervil River, Catfish Haven, and Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s took place in late September. Aside from a few other indies, most of the acts were relatively unknown outside of their local scenes.

Pygmalion isn’t so concerned with attracting scores of fans from out-of-town. Instead, its focus is on bolstering its own music and arts scene. Music fans have a chance to see some choice headliners and absorb the sounds of up-and-coming acts from different parts of the country. Likewise local bands get to play with bigger bands on solid bills and also network with smaller bands from cities across the nation. This dual focus both ignites the passion of locals about their scene as well as those who are playing in it.

At its core Pygmalion positions itself as an important community-building event. It reminds both bands and fans that music and art are always worth rallying for. So don’t worry about the corporate-sponsored festivals making headlines all over the country: at a local level, someone’s still keeping it real.

Pygmalion Log#1: Friday, September 21st 2007
I attended Pygmalion for the last two days with a close friend from Iowa City in tow. The first show took us to Urbana’s Krannert Performing Arts Center to see Andrew Bird. An audience filled with eager college students and a handful of older folks (that would be me) packed it in early for the openers, Dianogah who themselves were U of I graduates. The self-deprecating and humorous banter of Dionogah spokesman, Jay Ryan, lightened up the atmosphere of an otherwise dark and heady set. With two bass guitars and drums, the band painted a mostly lyric-less and methodical post-rock soundscape that burst with periodic fits of bass guitar distortion. If each song wasn’t a classic in of itself, the entire set certainly cast a pleasant and dreamy mood over the audience. Their last song was the climax: a full-on rocker that cranked up the otherwise languid tempo and pushed the volume to the edges of the theater’s decibel limit. It was their most striking moment, waking us up a bit before Andrew Bird took the stage.

Thinking about an Andrew Bird performance is difficult, especially in his solo context (he performed alone at Pygmalion). It’s impossible to focus completely on the songs since so much of the spectacle is figuring out how the guy can pull off such an exciting array of instrumental and vocal loops without losing his hat. Like a magician he moved from violin to guitar to microphone and back, creating a hypnotic swirl of interlocking melodies and arrangements with the aide of his trusty loop pedal.

There were moments of awe – an exquisite cover of Handsome Family’s “The Giant of Illinois” and set closer “Scythian Empire” from Armchair Apocrypha (2007). Dionagah also joined him for two songs. Their strong rhythmic attack gave the music a dynamic fullness that had been absent from other parts of the set. The drawback of Bird’s set was the limiting structuring of his songs. Almost all began with the tasteful layering of violin parts. Then Bird would pull back the wall of sound as he fell into a verse accompanied by a single violin or spare guitar. He would resurrect the loops for the choruses and end most songs with a wave of slowly delayed sounds. The formula was stunning but as the show matured the structure became more familiar and eventually redundant. Nonetheless, Bird pulled it off in earnest, enjoyed a warm if limited interaction with the audience, and, repetitive or not, succeeded in making some beautiful music.

Opting out of cab or bus rides to the late shows in Champaign, many folks migrated to the nearby Canopy Club to catch the latter half of an impressive bill featuring Noah Harris (of the Elanors), the Unwed Sailor, Baby Teeth, the Wandering Sons, and Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s.

Chicago’s relatively unknown Baby Teeth – unfazed by a few engineering hitches at the beginning of their set – continues to grow as a stunning live band, combining elements of glam, soul, and classic rock into an explosive and danceable sound. Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces, who dubbed them as indie-rock’s descendants of Queen, might be onto something: Baby Teeth rides the line between immediately catchy hooks and complex strokes of music-school influenced arrangements.

There was a modest and quiet crowd lounging around the Canopy when Baby Teeth started. By the end of their set the room had filled-in a bit and folks were dancing, clapping, and cheering. The set’s highlights, which drew from the band’s debut album, The Simp (2007), included “Snake Eyes” with its ferocious synth riff and the foot-stomping rave-up “Swim Team”.

The Wandering Sons, from Appleton, Wisconsin, took the stage after Baby Teeth, an air of confidence and ease gracing bandleader, Cory Chisel’s handsome mug. The Wandering Sons (AKA the band most likely to support Norah Jones on tour and still have you like them) play an adult contemporary-leaning blend of 60s soul, New Orleans swagger, and good old rock n’ roll. It’s possible that the references to adult contemporary and Norah Jones might be enough to damn them in some circles, but somehow, some way, the Wandering Sons play with the kind of heart that’ll woo any crowd.

By this time the club was filling up, mostly with kids in skinny jeans and vintage t-shirts. Nonetheless the Wandering Sons gripped us tightly, rocking with more edge than the evening’s closers, Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. For one, Cory Chisel, looking like a modern-day beatnik with his Fedora and scarf, has remarkable pipes. Furthermore he writes songs that carry both the staying power of standards and a touch of gritty soul. With each song, more and more people were shouting and grooving along to the Wandering Sons. Although they’re still building a following in the Midwest it won’t be surprising to see them getting more attention when their next album drops on RCA’s promo budget (who they recently signed with) in 2008.

On paper it made absolute sense for Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s to headline. They took the stage, eight-members deep, looking like rock stars but didn’t quite pull it off. As a live band they proved to be inessential – not incompetent or sloppy, for indeed they were tight – but rather “just another rock band”, bereft of compelling hooks, and striking instrumental dynamics. Ultimately, they brought nothing new to the indie rock table.

The sheer number of musicians onstage – a guy with face paint doing little else than smiling maniacally and banging on a snare drum seemed kind of gratuitous – tended to bloat rather than flesh out the songs. A four-piece could have made as much noise while achieving some notion of nuance. While I was unimpressed, most of the crowd loved it so I will definitely reconsider them the next time around.

Pygmalion Festival Log #2: September 22nd, 2007
After a day of soaking in the sunshine and relaxing in the comfy, revitalized surroundings of downtown Champaign, we returned to the clubs. We started it off mellow with the acoustic guitar songs of Iowa City’s Caleb Engstrom. Playing in a coffee house, filled to capacity, Engstrom, whose songs capture elements of alt. country and intelligent 60’s pop song craft, culled together a quiet but demanding set. His pointed lyrics and delicate finger picking commanded the room. Aside from the occasional hiss of the espresso machine no other sounds could be heard as he played.

Slipping out of the coffee-shop and over to the ever-busy Canopy Club we came across another packed bill featuring sets from Foundry Field Recordings, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Bound Stems, Yeasayer, Headlights, Shapes and Sizes, and Le Loup.

First things first: no one should be fooled by Le Loup’s subdued debut album – The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly (2007) – as the band’s live show is more akin to a psychedelic firing squad than a bedroom recording. Possessing what Margot lacked – killer songs and a tasteful knack for arrangement – Washington, DC’s Le Loup incinerated the room to the point that people were running from the bar to see what was happening. Onlookers were met with a full-bodied ensemble consisting of three guitars, drums, bass, banjo, keyboards, and horns. In the spirit of Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Le Loup channels a dance-inducing energy through songs that steadily build up to climaxes before methodically descending to exquisite halts. Le Loup was definitely the biggest surprise of the festival.

At some point, Chicago’s Bound Stems, after facing one sound problem after another, just collectively said, “To hell with caring!” and threw a party onstage, fraternally bumping into each other, singing into other members’ mics, playing the drums standing up, and literally shouting for joy. Courting the fervor of Modest Mouse with a math-like approach to their song structures, Bound Stems’ energy spread into the crowd as folks smiled and danced along with them. The set featured several songs from last year’s schizophrenically awesome debut, Appreciation Night, but the best song was a new anthem, apparently about the French Revolution. This is truly a sign of good things to come for their new album, due next year.

Yeasayer’s stadium-ready gospel-influenced rock was something else. Their songs boasted patchwork pastiches of a multitude of sounds, reminiscent of fellow New Yorkers TV on the Radio, pumping out amplified anthems for a small club. As they twisted knobs on synths and machines and came crashing down on their guitars and drums it almost felt overwhelming for the space but it was a welcome spectacle, “spectacle” apparently becoming a theme for the evening’s performances.

For the sake of venue variety, we cut out of Shape and Sizes’ set to catch a bus (that never came) to Champaign but from what I saw they were a rad post-punk-with-pop-influences outfit. Instead, we crossed over to Champaign, via foot, to Mike n’ Molly’s to see the festival-closing set by locals, Mit’n. This sometimes goofy and experimental band had a knack for quirky pop, abstract noises via turntable, and smart-alec lyrics. They proved, after two days of bands and beer, to be – if not the biggest – the most offbeat surprise of the festival. Their music sunk into deep washes of conceptual, almost inaccessible sounds and then it would switch gears to a minimalist dance-punk rave-up just when you thought they’d lost you. We went up to congratulate them after their set and they ended up bringing us back to their house for a late-nite party and a killer hip-hop DJ set. It was a wonderful way to end the festival and the evening.

Midwesterners will only do themselves right by checking out next years Pygmalion Festival or better yet by starting a similar event in their hometown.