Wampire at the Willamette Valley Music Festival. Photo courtesy of Jordan Malik
The long-awaited 44th Annual Willamette Valley Music Festival took the UO campus on Saturday, transforming scholarly areas into art-centric entertainment. A full stage took over the Lillis façade while kids hula-hooped on the lawn. People strolled the street faire and stopped to dance. The student-organized festival, which was also entirely free, provided campus with the perfect summer segue. Missed it? Here’s what happened.
UO acapella groups Mind the Gap and On The Rocks kicked off the KWVA Stage with performances not far removed from their usual Friday sets in the same spot. There were no fancy accoutrements, just clear voices ringing through the air.
After the acapella groups came local band The Zendeavors, who braved weather extremes and a cold on the part of vocalist Andrew Rogers to deliver a sprawling yet solid set of funky garage-soul. Ted Schera’s smoky clouds of saxophone settled over the Zany Zoo petting zoo on the other side of University Street, which featured all manner of creatures from bunnies to reticulated pythons.
The petting zoo event went awry when a lemur unexpectedly escaped out of its leash and freely roamed University Street. Zany Zoo employees eventually caught the primate, but not before the event was heavily documented on Snapchat.
The first act at the Buzz was Burnin’ Moonlight, a solid old-timey bluegrass band whose lonely, deceptively technical music was far removed from today’s hoedown crossover acts. The guitar-bass interplay gave the band a solid rhythmic foundation that made them tighter than a lot of bands with drummers and electric instruments.
Pluto The Planet likewise tested the limits of what a trio could accomplish. The three multi-instrumentalists in Pluto the Planet created a strong enough rhythmic foundation that it was hard to believe only three guys were making so much sound. The group was lucky to miss the rainclouds, as their Afrobeat- and house-inflected indie pop was perfect for hot weather.
Wampire did not experience such circumstantial luck. After 20 minutes of technical difficulties, the group played a short set that never quite got off the ground. Their music was great, and I was happy to see them play their signature cover of Kraftwerk’s “Das Modell.” But the lack of attendees in tandem with the spaciousness of the amphitheater severely reduced the music’s potential to create energy. Going right after the much more energetic Goldfoot may have also contributed to their set’s relative failure.
Meanwhile, the Craft Center hosted screen printing, where attendees could come away with a white t-shirt decorated with a dark purple or black WVMF compass. The event provided a free souvenir and an escape from the rain, which came in sunlit waves throughout the day.
San Franciscans Hungry Skinny played ’60s throwback pop that might have been decent if not for singer Garrett Riley’s caterwauling, which sounded like an attempt at emulating an “untrained” or “unhinged” vocal style but came off more like bad karaoke.
The end of Hungry Skinny’s set coincided with the motherly embrace of night, which perhaps counterintuitively made the festival a much more interesting place to be. Perhaps I’m biased as a student here, but I was able to enjoy the music far more when I could forget I was on campus and sink into the neon lights rather than looking awkwardly around at the familiar buildings.
The first nighttime act was Eugene quartet Martian Manhunter, who made adorably heartsick power pop given an extra edge by frontman Thor Slaughter’s formidable guitar skills. Slaughter embraced the frontman role, cracking Pokemon jokes while making regular forays into the crowd (taking his pedals with him, no less). This, in tandem with a bright collective decision by the audience to storm the steps of the stage, led to by far the most engaging show of the night and more than a worthy substitute for the absent Black Pistol Fire.
Night Beats had a tougher job than they perhaps anticipated in following up Martian Manhunter, but they did it by being the loudest and nastiest band at the festival. Their rock n’ roll fashion style and scuzzy garage punk contrasted with the immaculate campus architecture enough to make them seem a little incongruous at first. But the crowd ate their music up–particularly Lee Blackwell’s noisy guitar solos, which triggered similar responses in the crowd to those received by dubstep drops.
Immediately next came the biggest, loudest and wildest party of the festival–the Campus DJ competition, which had previously been scheduled for February but cancelled due to snow. The winner, predictably, was Sokko & Lyons, a University of Oregon duo who had made the finals the previous year. But the competition was fierce, with Oregon State’s DJ Caraya putting on a formidable set that would have been better received had the venue not been his school’s arch rival.
Overall, the festival impressively pulled off an intimidating goal: three stages, twelve bands and 13 hours of diverse entertainment.