Sounding Off: Electric Eclectics Offers Unrivalled Irritainment

Now in its fifth year, Meaford’s Electric Eclectics Festival hones its weirdness and sharpens its profile. The 2010 Electric Eclectics Festival will take place on the weekend of July 31 – August 1. Check their web site to see this year’s lineup.

By Ned Morgan

Every summer in the hills above Meaford, people pay to be irritained. On a 100-acre spread of farmland known as The Funny Farm the Electric Eclectics Festival of Modern Music and Irritainment may be the only event of its kind: a three-day mixed bag of experimental music and art installations whose performers and artists carry high-profile international pedigrees. Now in its fourth year, EE stands in startling contrast to a typical summer’s run of easily digestible folk festivals and art shows.

Where else could you see a man in a rumpled suit – John Kilduff, a.k.a., Mr. Let’s Paint TV – running on a musical treadmill singing, or shouting, a free interpretation of “Hey Jude”: “Hey Jude, who are you? Where were you when I brought the peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” While in the background a ragged chorus of backup singers, or maybe it’s the audience, chime in with “na-na-na-naa” and Kilduff swipes paint on a large canvas?

Or Austrian thereminist Dorit Chrysler, drawing invisible ciphers in the air over her electronic instrument – which is played by manipulating radio frequencies between two antennas – broadcasting an eerily beautiful version of Saint-Saens’ Aquarium?

Where else could you see a pale, leather-jacketed sound artist named Lary Seven hunched over his midi keyboard, remote-control-channeling the sound of 32 antique truck horns hanging from strings in a nearby grain silo, which is lit up like a ghostly beacon by reel-to-reel film projections?

The Funny Farm may be the only place to hear and see these and many other sonic and visual oddities. It’s certainly one of the few venues offering a weekend of irritainment. “Irritainment is just what it sounds like – irritating entertainment,” explains EE Director Gordon Monahan. “A lot of the noise bands are not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s ironic because some of the local people will come up to me to say ‘the festival is amazing!’ and then: ‘but the music is really annoying!’ I ask them if they plan to come back next year and they say ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be back.’” Monahan adds, “But most of our audience loves the experimental noise music. To them it’s not irritainment.”

Festival founder-organizers Monahan and partner Laura Kikauka, who live at the Funny Farm half the year and spend the other half in Berlin, form an avant-garde power-couple. No less an experimental giant than American composer John Cage praised Monahan’s early work as a pianist. A few of Monahan’s far-ranging sonic creations over the last few decades include a string installation activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88) and by water (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990). Installation artist and electro-mechanical sculptor Laura Kikauka, who recently exhibited at the Spacex Gallery in England, appeared at the 2007 Festival in a dress made of old flashbulbs. The Funny Farm is a large Kikauka installation: the buildings and surroundings are filled with her sculptures and tableaux of obsolete technology, kitsch and vintage consumer oddments.

According to Monahan, EE started out as a series of weekend camping parties where artist friends began performing. “This is how we got experience in programming. Since a lot of our friends are artists, they were willing to come up and play for a cheap price.”

“Starting a festival is a bit of a risk because you have no idea how big your audience will be,” Monahan continues. “But over the last three years we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t work, and expanded the festival while keeping it low budget.” The homespun, money-saving ethos includes on-site accommodation for performers either in the farmhouse and outbuildings, or in free camping areas also open to everyone at the Festival.

With more accessible (ie, non-experimental-noise) headliners electro-rock band Holy Fuck, and Damo Suzuki (formerly vocalist with Can, the massively influential German band) this year’s lineup is the highest-profile yet. New this year, the final night of the Festival will feature exclusively local performers.

The EE mandate includes programming throughout the community in the weeks leading up to the big event, with music workshops at the Meaford and Thornbury libraries, a sound installation at the Meaford Museum and Music For Toilets, the ultimate captive-audience installation in the bathrooms of Earth Harvest café in Meaford and The Bean Cellar in Owen Sound.

The earthy humour implied by Music For Toilets is a fitting symbol for a festival that is anything but highbrow or exclusive. With a board of directors including local farmers and politicians as well as Toronto art-world luminaries, EE promises to irritain and enlighten a broad array of ears.