Pitchfork Day 3: From Backstage

By Jacob Ganz

Fans wait for The Walkmen's set to begin on Sunday afternoon (photo by Rachel Goldbrenner)

Something about Sunday felt livelier than the day before, even for the bookish crowd that gathers at Pitchfork. Maybe the backstage technical prep for The Flaming Lips' set fueled anticipation, or maybe it was simply that enough artists stuck around after they played on Saturday that it felt kind of like a convention for moderately famous indie-rock stars. Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy told me after his set on Saturday that he wanted to spend the rest of the festival hanging out with the guys in Grizzly Bear and catching as many of Sunday's acts as he could.

Peter Bauer (left) and Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen (photo by Rachel Goldbrenner)

Pallett was among the large number of musicians and fans who turned out around the Connector stage for sets by The Walkmen and Grizzly Bear, each of which gave the other a shout-out from the stage. I saw members of The National, Beirut, The Thermals and Cymbals Eat Guitars checking out the music or chatting as the sun started to go down while Grizzly Bear played.

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9:29 AM ET | 07-21-2009 | permalink

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Pitchfork Day 3: DJ /Rupture Interview

By Jacob Ganz

DJ /rupture at the Pitchfork Music Festival (photo by Jacob Ganz)

Last year, Pitchfork called Jace Clayton's newest mix under the name DJ /rupture one of the 10 best records of 2008. Uproot is a dark and throbbing mix of alien sounds; hardly the kind of thing you'd expect to hear at an outdoor dance party in front of thousands.

The Brooklyn-based DJ/blogger/journalist knows how to make unfamiliar sounds alluring, but Clayton told me he felt like the odd man out at the festival. We talked behind one of the festival's main stages after The Walkmen played and as M83 was warming up, and he told me he wasn't familiar with either group. After our interview, he bolted the festival grounds to track down some of Chicago's cumbia record shops.

You told me earlier that you've played a bunch of festivals abroad, but that this was your first in the U.S. Did you change anything from your usual festival set?

JC: I'm the only DJ at this festival. Three days of music, I'm the only solo DJ on a stage mixing records. That's never happened to me before. So that's the main difference. The lean here is toward "indie" guitar music and away from electronic or club music, which are the circles I usually play in. I have two types of sets. One is a more dancefloor-oriented, kinetic, "let's get bodies moving," "from the ear to the waist" type of thing. And then I also do experimental sets with a guitarist, Andy Moor from The Ex. That's improvised turntables and guitar.

When you're putting together a set for the radio show, you know you've got a dedicated audience on the radio or web. Do you have to do anything different here to hold the audience's attention?

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1:43 PM ET | 07-20-2009 | permalink

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Pitchfork Day 3: Mike Reed Interview

By Jacob Ganz

Before I left New York for Chicago, Patrick Jarenwattananon -- who writes for A Blog Supreme, NPR's jazz blog -- sent me an email telling me I should track down local drummer Mike Reed while I was here. Not because he was playing a set during the festival, but because he was overseeing the entire thing. Reed is a jazz musician and the director of the Pitchfork Music Festival, in charge of everything from booking the acts to arranging contracts with vendors to meeting with the city to get streets closed off.

When I talked with Reed at 10 a.m. Sunday, he'd already been at the festival grounds for six hours, and said he probably wouldn't leave until the whole thing had been broken down some time on Monday morning. He told me about running up $1,200 phone bills, ordering more toilets at the last minute, and seeing the one group he's made sure to catch in the four years he's been running the show.

After all the planning you do, do things like the weather make you upset?

You can't let the rain freak you out. You just have to deal with it. Because if I get freaked out about it, there's a thousand things that aren't going to happen. And in order for us to deal with the rain, all those thousand things have to happen. None of the people on staff can be freaked out about it.

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7:52 PM ET | 07-19-2009 | permalink

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Pitchfork Day 2: Two Kinds Of Charisma

By Jacob Ganz

DOOM at the Pitchfork Music Festival (photo by Rachel Goldbrenner)

Day two in Union Park may have started off a little slow, but by the end of the night, it had started to feel like a real event, with a few bands that seemed at home playing to large crowds. I learned a couple of things: Wavves' Nathan Williams can play his guitar even with a cast on his left arm, and Doom can somehow drink water without taking that mask off.

Two sets will stick in my memory. And they came from two bands with very different styles.

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9:06 AM ET | 07-19-2009 | permalink

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Pitchfork Day 2: Ponytail Interview

By Jacob Ganz

Ponytail is not jaded. (photo by Rachel Goldbrenner)

Ponytail put out one of my favorite records of 2008, the irrepressibly spazzy Ice Cream Spiritual, and has had a reputation for being one of Baltimore's best live bands for the past couple of years. The group's set Saturday afternoon combined loping swirls of guitar with the ultra-caffeinated nonsense vocals and pogo-stick stage presence of lead singer Molly Siegel. You may not be able to understand anything that Siegel sings, but it's clear that she's having a ball, and the energy is infectious.

I talked with Siegel, guitarists Ken Seeno and Dustin Wong, and drummer Jeremy Hyman after they came down from their set. They were as enthusiastic sitting on a dirt infield behind the stage where Beirut serenaded the crowd as they had been while they played, but I managed to keep them in their seats long enough to answer a few questions.

You played on a stage today that's bigger than what you're used to. Tell me what that was like.

Dustin: We're really used to playing at clubs, because that's where we've been touring, but at festivals, it's just a whole other scale. It's just a sea of people. It gave me goosebumps playing in front of all these people. It was a blast.

Ken: We've played almost 300 shows now, and we're really comfortable playing clubs. When there's excitement in the room, you can't deny it. But when there's excitement at a festival, that starts to get us really excited. I'm not saying we're jaded, but after you've been doing it so much, you start to feel the butterflies again. Maybe you haven't felt it in a while and it wakes you up a little bit.

Molly: It's weird, because this is maybe our third show outside with a huge stage and barriers. I was really psyched on the feeling of the crowd. The barrier thing is something I'm still getting used to, because I'm used to being able to touch them and get involved, but it's good to learn this. People are having a good time and in their own space. I thought it was really good. People seemed to be genuinely excited. It wasn't just a party. It wasn't too cool.

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10:09 PM ET | 07-18-2009 | permalink

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Pitchfork Festival Day 2: On The Lawn

By Jacob Ganz

Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett (photo by Rachel Goldbrenner)

Yesterday's shows started at 5 p.m., and the bands were all bigger names, so by the time people got here, they were ready to pay attention to the music. The bands on stage in the earlier part of the day might be lovely groups, like Cymbals Eat Guitars and Disappears, but they're not acts that are going to draw huge crowds into the pit.

Which means a large portion of the audience spent this afternoon camped out on the lawn, drinking beer, sampling the vendors' food and turning their heads from one stage toward the other as the bands switched off.

For your blogger, this means that there are plenty of opportunities to talk to people who won't be mad that you're distracting them or blocking their view with your microphone. I wandered around the lawn while Plants and Animals, ****** ** (French Dip? Fudge Cup?), The Antlers, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Bowerbirds and Final Fantasy played short, mostly sunny sets out over crowds that were, for stretches of the afternoon, bolting toward the trees to get out of the rain.

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6:56 PM ET | 07-18-2009 | permalink

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Pitchfork Day 1: Old But Good

Jacob Ganz

"We have a new record, but we're not going to play anything off it, because you guys only voted for the old [stuff]."

That quote, from Tortoise's John McEntire near the end of his band's set, about sums up the good and bad in a fan-selected setlist. Tortoise, Yo La Tengo, The Jesus Lizard and Built to Spill all played Pitchfork's first night, a.k.a. the so-called "Write the Night" portion of the festival. If you're a fan, this sort of a thing means you know that you'll hear hits, but the chance of getting any curiosities is pretty slim. If you're new to one of the bands, you can always check out the vendors or lounge on the lawn and take in the view from the Jumbotron.

All four bands at the festival's first night could reasonably be called '90s acts, though all but The Jesus Lizard have kept putting out records through this decade. Yo La Tengo's set was drawn pretty equally from the band's career, and they sneaked a new song into a nicely varied set. Tortoise, well, I'm not familiar with most of Tortoise's repertoire, but most of its very long, very lovely songs sounded like a perfect soundtrack for a montage of an indie-rock convention, which it basically was.

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10:59 PM ET | 07-17-2009 | permalink

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Blogging Chicago (a.k.a. Pitchfork Music Festival Preview)

By Jacob Ganz

The last time I attended the Pitchfork Music Festival, it was 2006, and on the plane from D.C. to Chicago, I sat three rows behind a certain junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. Three years later, if the festival hasn't seen the stunningly rapid rise in prominence that Obama has enjoyed, it's maybe for the best. Pitchfork -- the site and the festival -- thrives on an appreciation of the little guy, and on providing an avenue by which that guy can become maybe not so little. A large part of the festival's charm is seeing bands that aren't quite ready for massive outdoor stages try to stretch their sound to fill the space.

Not that the festival is stocked completely with up-and-comers. The National headlines Saturday night, and The Flaming Lips will close out the festival on Sunday. Tonight's lineup features sets -- voted on by fans -- from four bands well beyond their first album: Tortoise, Yo La Tengo, The Jesus Lizard and Built to Spill.

Over the weekend here in Chicago, I'll talk with musicians playing the festival, bloggers, vendors, festival planners, Pitchfork writers and people who actually paid to get through the gates. I'll post bits of these conversations here, and try to figure out how to tweet festival goings-on at the allsongs Twitter page from my ancient cell phone.

But it won't all be work.

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4:37 PM ET | 07-17-2009 | permalink

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