Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
Wham City threw the fifth and final Whartscape this past weekend. Final because they say it’s getting too large and they’d like to stop before it gets co-opted or somehow is perverted into something other than what it was initially intended to be, which, as I understand it, was a response to the musical programming of Artscape which supports local visual artists but not so much the local musicians.
This year’s festival was a beautiful if arduous event. Arduous not just because of the extreme heat (Saturday was a heat index of 110 degrees) but also because of the sheer volume of work to be consumed over those four days. Several times during the day I had to leave to refresh myself with a coffee or a whiskey, and not once did I make it over to the H&H to watch the evening gigs.
In addition to showcasing over 100 artists, Whartscape ZOIO was intelligible as a work in itself. At this point I am feeling the want of some solid research into the history of the area around Howard and Franklin. The buildings are grand and abandoned– gaping holes where there were once windows, vegetation– sometimes entire trees!– growing out sideways from between the mortar. The Current gallery recently reopened in this area, at 405 N. Howard Street, and Wham City erected two stages in the parking lot behind it so that one band set up while another played its set.
It’s hard to imagine Whartscape successfully co-opted so long as the program remains as radical as it is. In many cases the acts didn’t seem like bands with a list of singles. They were more like labs for noise. Bands like Child Bite and Arab on Radar played loud, frenzied, paroxysmal sets where the songs were not so much discrete numbers as successive compositions dealing with the same concept, like the way some painters work, producing scores of canvases of water lilies, say, each time in slightly different hues, in slightly varying compositions. In this venue–Downtown Baltimore–some of the acts took on the poignancy of site-specific work.
We understand our city as post-industrial, and we use this diagnosis to explain its economic and social problems. Whartscape ZOIO was held amidst the desiccated residue of the prosperity that industry brought our town. In this setting, the music became a something like a satire on the inevitable ramifications of how industrialism, in a relatively short time, consumed this land’s resources, both natural and human, as well as the optimism for the future that industry brought with it. Watching the lead singer of Child Bite Shawn Knight scream until he turned red, jugular and eyes bulging, I thought about a chemical reaction that burns brighter the faster the reagent is consumed, I thought about crack cocaine and its vertiginous high.
For a long time I didn’t like music festivals. I felt too old to get wasted and stand out in the sun all day. Approaching a band’s set like a novel, or like a theatrical piece, with the same kind of patience and fortitude, music shows have once again become an awesome, if arduous, experience.
(recordings available through Wham City and are highly recommended—ED)
I’m impressed! You’ve managed the almost impossible.
April 29, 2011 7:39 pm