As Weird as Iowa

As you can guess from the name, the Exodus festival started life as an event for filthy hippies, but after losing a step and not happening for the past two or three summers (because I got high?) Exodus came back this year with a decidedly leaner, younger, and quite frankly cooler bent. The highlights of the show were, in ascending order:

Cuticle, which consists of the combined forces of Darren Ho (Drip House/Racoo-oo-oon) and Brendan O’Keefe (NIMBY). The outdoor setting wasn’t quite right for their brand of trippy, tribal, noisy techno – I wish they’d gone on a lot later, in the dark. Also, I can’t believe Brendan got that sweet vocoder out of a dumpster.



Twelve Canons are a band who have played in Iowa City for as long as I’ve lived here, but until last night I’d never seen them. It’s a heartbreaker, too, because their brand of otherworldly roots-inspired music is right up my alley. Their weird funereal wailing, intricate but battered fingerstyle guitar, and brutish, foot-pounding rhythms will make them the darlings of any fans of Clarence Ashley or Roscoe Holcombe. The show was augmented by two things – another local artist, three sheets to the wind, muscling up onstage to sing along, and a local idiot nearly setting himself on fire by carefully pouring lamp oil from the tiki torches into a pile of grass. These, plus someone behind the stage setting off fireworks, lent the set an eerie tension – something was going on, but no one knew just what it was. (For better or for worse, my camera ran out of batteries just as all this nuttiness was going down.)



Then came the indisputable climax of the whole festival:



That’s right, fire breathers. And juggling:


All with, as you can see, a band providing backup. The band played a series of hilariously over-serious Aerosmith covers. There was a sneer built into the gesture – those hard rockers aren’t nearly as hard as us fire-folk.

And that was, in a nutshell, the dichotomy of this year’s Exodus. The programmer/organizer was a young hipstress, and she invited a mix of her underground friends and the previously traditional jam/reggae acts to play. So there was a bit of a split identity going on. That’s inevitable in a festival, I guess – no one wants to see everything. But in this case the split was pretty clear, and the shift of focus (plus the hiatus) seems to have hurt the Festival – I’d say at best a third of the Magger’s farm capacity was used, and by the end of the night our hostess was soliciting donations, so I imagine she took a (relatively small) bath on it. Maybe it’s that pale subterranean hipsters were less inclined than dreadlocked rastas to go out to a farm and see music while worrying about rain and bugs. Hard to say, though – some of these Iowa hipsters are pretty hearty.

Whatever was keeping people away, I do hope the fest happens again next year – it was a great time - though that's partly because it was so sparsely attended. The porta potties were clean almost the whole 24 hours.