Anti-jam band Zilla to serve Mother Nature a dose of electronica at Sonic Bloom

Wordplay by orange peel moses

Jamie Janover used to bad-mouth electronic music. As an accomplished hammered dulcimer player busking on the street for dead presidents (the only good kind), Janover was an acoustic music purist to the bone. Zeroing in on his non-electronic axe of choice paid off too, netting him “hammered dulcimer champion” honors a few years ago.

But the days of Janover’s acoustic music purism are now long gone. Sonic Bloom, one of the most digital music-dominated, noodle- and wank-free festivals ever founded by a so-called “jam band,” was his brainchild. The event runs June 21-23 at Beaver Meadows Ranch in Red Feather Lakes CO.

In its second year, this summer’s staggering lineup features some of the finest knob twiddlers on the planet, including Anahata, Ana Sia, Bassnectar, Boreta, Brother, Chordata, Danny Corn, DJ Rootz, Edit, E.L.F., Eoto, Ezekiel & The Wicked Won, Geno Cochino, The Glitch Mob, Jantsen, L’vin, MFA, Ooah, Pnuma, Rena Jones, Shakatura, Sporque, SOTEG (Bill Bless), Sound Tribe Sector 9, Vibe Squad, Wazulu the Ill Dravidian and Janover’s own band Zilla and his “pyrocussion” rig Mothtrap, as well as visual and performing artists such as Saxton (STS9), Lunar Fire, Boris (Videolicious), The Kaivalya Hoop Dancers and The Funginears.

[Photo: Zilla, with Jamie Janover at top right, is the host for Sonic Bloom. Image courtesy Madison House.]

“Electronic music used to be really peripheral for me, something that I almost frowned upon. There was a time when I thought drum machines were cheating. And certainly back in the early days of drum machines, the sounds weren’t very good. They hadn’t figured out the real subtle aspects of quantizing and incorporating a certain percentage of random variation so that it sounded more like a human playing it and less like a machine. The beauty of life and music is that everything evolves, including your own musical tastes,” he said.

If Janover’s tastes were single-celled organisms before, they are full-fledged androids now. Bassnectar, one of Sonic Bloom’s heftiest headliners (after Zilla and STS9), is about as anti-acoustic as you can get. The debut of Elastic Mystic, a collaboration between Bassnectar (known then as DJ Lorin) and String Cheese’s Michael Kang, at a Fillmore after-hours was Janover’s first conscious exposure to the ‘Nectar. At the moment, though, he was too busy with a debut of his own, that of Crop Circle Brain Factory (Zilla’s verbose original handle), to devote much attention. It wasn’t until a sardine fest at Burning Man’s El Circo dome that he truly experienced his deflowering “bassgasm.”

“I went to Burning Man in 1999," he recalled. "At Burning Man, it’s not very easy to set up a band to play through a PA system, especially using strings and rack gear and expensive stuff like that. It’s mostly DJs using computers and CDJs and turntables to get music through huge sound systems, because it’s a lot easier and that’s the culture out there. That’s when I realized that there’s a lot of different kinds of electronica, it’s not just all bad. There’s this really bad fast trance and then there’s this really amazingly beautiful, organic, mid-tempo electronica. Bassnectar at the El Circo dome is a perfect example. You can hardly believe the energy and who shows up and what they do when that place happens. What we’re doing with Zilla is taking some of the better aspects and elements of jam bands and combining them with our love of the West coast electronica that we’re exposed to at Burning Man--Bassnectar, Tipper, The Glitch Mob and other San Francisco and LA-based breakbeat, glitch, downtempo, IDM and dub step. We’re taking ‘Jambandlandia’ and we’re getting rid of the solos.”

A jam band with no solos? Heresy. According to Janover, there are only a handful of “axe tappers” in the entire lineup. Such a forward-thinking fest will certainly inspire imitators to follow in its footstep--if they can track them down, that is. Thanks in large part to Kang’s non-profit Our Future Now, Sonic Bloom’s environmental footprint is likely to be relatively light. Festival goers have the option of purchasing special “enviro-tickets,” with proceeds going towards wind energy credits from Boulder-based Renewable Choice and Baseline Ticketing plans to donate a dollar per ticket sold towards off-setting event emissions either way. Generators will run on bio-diesel. Suds and other libations will be served in biodegradable cornstarch plastic cups. And both carpooling and recycling are highly encouraged.

Copycat promoters will be lucky to find bread crumbs in the festival’s wake, let alone blueprints. No artist/promoter exists in a vacuum, though, even an event as original as Sonic Bloom was inspired by its predecessors, which Janover listed.

“The Full Moon Dream Dance, which was the original Horning’s Hideout, where String Cheese and Peak Experience Productions first came together to do large scale music with large scale performance art, because we’re going to do something similar to that Saturday night. Oregon Country Fair, High Sierra Music Festival and Shambhala, in terms of the electronica aspect. Also, very impressed and really, really loved and would love to be anything similar at all to Lightning in a Bottle. The Do Lab did a fabulous job, I highly recommend that festival.”