NEARFest Day 2

NEARFest Day 2
Zoellner Arts Center
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA
Sunday, June 24, 2007 11:00AM
Section Orchestra, Row A, Seat 33

When NEARFest is in Bethlehem, we never stay at the official band hotel. It sells out too quickly. Usually we stay at one of the cheaper motels by the highway. Last time, we stayed at a really nice place, the Hotel Bethlehem, right on Main Street. Unfortunately, it was sold out for the weekend, but we treated ourselves to a nice breakfast there on Sunday morning.

This time, we stayed at the same hotel as Linda and Jeff, but we barely saw them there. We did bump into them before we left for our fancy breakfast. Linda's first words were that we made the right decision to skip Hawkwind. She hated them! She made this "chugga chugga" guitar sound and said they sounded like a biker band all night. During the day, I polled a few people. Several hated them passionately, and a few liked them.

The first band on Sunday was Indukti from Poland. They were labeled as "melodic metal", with a distinctive mid-70s King Crimson influence. In fact, they sounded like a little bit of Larks' Tongues in Aspic Part I played over and over again. On every song. I could only stay for three songs before I had enough. They need more dynamics and more variation. And melody. The violin helped with the sound color - otherwise I would have left immediately. It was a nice day, not too hot yet, so I sat outside on the grass and read for a while.

After Indukti, I went to look for Roy. I found Tina and her friend Mark in the Indukti autograph line. We talked for a bit. Tina has been bringing her daughters to some festivals and other concerts. We joked about "The seven phases in the life of a hard-core prog fan" article in the festival program written by Rob LaDuca. Stage 2, fandom seemed to be written about me. "Your love of King Crimson is topped only by your obsession with Yes... Why do you need 55 different recordings of Roundabout?" Rob walked by, and I asked him about it. Nope, not anyone in particular, just that there are a lot of Yes fans. Roy's made it all the way to the final stage, Phase 7: Maturity.

I had high hopes for the next band. Back at my very first prog festival, I was familiar with all the big prog bands and a few local ones. My introduction to the Italian symphonic style was the legendary concert by Finisterre at ProgDay '97. (OK, legendary to an extremely small number of people, but we all remember it fondly.) Finisterre's bass player and singer Fabio Zuffanti is also a member of a number of different projects: one is one of my favorite recent albums Hostsonaten's Springsong and another is the band playing this year at Nearfest - La Maschera di Cera.

La Maschera are a full-blown Italian symph band, very influenced by the classics. Lots of analog synthesizers with a warm feeling, lots of melodies, lots of atmosphere. Not as pretty-sounding as Finisterre. They also had a singer with a great stage presence. I didn't like his voice all that much, but he sang with so much energy that I got into his performance anyway. Fabio would have been a better vocalist, but he stuck to playing bass.

I thoroughly enjoyed their performance, but a lot of people compared them to Finisterre. Someone asked if we were all jaded now - why weren't we blown away like we were in 1997? What did Finisterre have that La Maschera didn't? Was it just the newness of seeing a young band playing like this? The covers they threw in? How excited and charming the musicians were? I think Finisterre had better songs, even though La Maschera sounded great. Linda couldn't get into them because of the vocalist.

We got our time with Peter and Dan this day. The solo spotlight today was Robert Rich, an ambient musician. I have no interest in sitting in a dark theater watching ambient performed live. So we had a nice relaxed talk, just like I wanted the day before. They had a table in the same vending room as Roger Dean. Dan isn't really into this scene and wasn't a fan of Roger's, but told us "That Roger guy bought me lunch today." The two ate together during the last band. Lucky!

The next band was getting a lot of buzz. Pure Reason Revolution. They were described as Pink Floyd with Beach Boys harmonies. Sounded promising! I think they suffered from a poor mix - the vocals were low in the mix and indistinguishable. The rest of the sound, well, everything sounded bassy and no one was playing a melody line. Also, the band had recently lost a few members, so they played to some prerecorded sounds - drum machines and other samples. Maybe the vocals would have carried the melodies, if they stood out better. I left partway through. I heard later on from Jeff that they sounded very different from the albums. NEARFest had a lot of problems with sound at the larger venue in Trenton a few years back, I'm sad it's still the case in Bethlehem.

I bumped into Chris Richards and Tina's friend Mark in the upstairs lobby. Chris hated Pure Reason Revolution and lumped them in with 90's alternative rock. We all chatted for a while and Stella Vander from Magma walked by. Chris just beamed and called out "Bonjour!" and said he was looking forward to their set tonight. Stella thanked him. She looks so normal, it doesn't fit with Magma's live image.

Linda, Jeff, Roy, and I went out for dinner. I prefer small groups like this, where we can all have a single conversation with each other. They found an Italian place near the hotel. Our waiter was a hoot. Roy asked for a description of Italian Wedding soup, and the waiter struggled to say "It's like chicken noodle soup, with meatballs, but without the chicken and without the noodles." I asked what the vegetable of the day was, and he replied "I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a cake." Alright, it turned out to be a veggie quiche. The chicken noodle soup without the chicken and noodles just cracked me up. The waiter got into it too, and asked me how my cake was later on.

And then it was time for the last band, Magma. They've been around for 30 some years and are best known for recording a string of concept albums. The albums tell a scifi story about the planet Kobaia in a made-up language called Kobian. The music, while very repetitive, constantly builds in tension. The vocals are done by 4 singers and sound more like a chant. Everything is very dramatic and theatrical, even how the singers move about on stage. I never listen to their music at home, but I love seeing them live. It all sounds weird, but I get sucked in by the intensity of it. It's like opera.

The first time I saw Magma was at a club in Chicago. We stood in front of the vocalists. They were all dressed in black and wearing the Magma logo necklaces. They look so dour in publicity photos. But they all looked so middle aged and normal and happy doing these chants. An alternate universe Polyphonic Spree maybe? I liked it a lot better than I thought I would.

The next time I saw them was at NEARFest four years ago. The vocals were low in the mix. We were sitting six rows back. It lost something. But Chris is such a big Magma fan - the seats next to us were empty so I ran back and got him to join us. He still thanks us about that.

This time, I was worried about the sound. I was worried about sitting versus standing up packed at the Chicago club. And when we got back to the auditorium and saw how the stage was set up, I was worried our far left seats wouldn't give us a full view. Thankfully, Magma is a polarizing band and lots of people don't like them. There were some empty seats in the orchestra pit in front of us. We moved to the third row. I would have hated to sit so close in with everyone all weekend, but being this close to the stage and picking up the energy of the people around us really helped with Magma.

They are the real deal. Stage presence, professionalism, enthusiasm, good use of sound, dynamics, memorable music. They were captivating the whole time they were on stage. So many bands recently play with low frequencies, everything sounds bassy, and I have trouble discerning the individual sounds in the mix. It all sounds like a low rumbly mush to me. I notice even bands in the prog genre doing this. Not Magma. When the singers weren't chanting away, there was a keyboard high in the mix doing a solo or playing a melody line. I can't sing along to it and I can't dance to it, but it never lost my interest.

The first song was album-length, around 45 minutes long. We gave it a long standing ovation. I told Roy they were already my favorite band of the fest. Their second song was an unreleased song they started writing in the 70s but only recently started playing live. Those two songs were the main set. They came back out and did two encores, covering another half hour. By the end, I decided Magma was the best band of the whole weekend.

We chatted with a couple people on our way out of the theater and had breakfast with Linda the next day before driving back to Philly and catching our flight home. There weren't many traditional prog big name bands playing, polarizing headliners, and no true crowd favorite. But even though I walked out on three bands and skipped another, I was glad I came to the fest this year. It's always good to see my friends and I got to sample a lot of bands. Some were enjoyable and some were truly great.