Nathaniel Rasmussen

This past April (21-23, to be precise), the fine city of Providence, RI, USA played host to the sixth Terrastock music festival (cleverly titled Terrastock 6), which gathered some 35 of the finest artists in the contemporary psychedelic rock / folk / avant / whatever scene for what surely rates as the underground musical event of the year. Luckily, several members of our Deep Water team were able to attend the festival, and with a little bit of editorial arm-twisting we managed to convince them to reflect on their T-stock experiences in a round-robin conversational fashion via the magic of email. So, without any further ado, your editor will get out of the way and turn the floor over to: Mats Gustafsson (MG), Lee Jackson (LJ), Nathaniel Rasmussen (NR), and Heraclitus Franklin (HF). Take it away lads!

HF: I think we definitely need to start by giving major kudos to the folks behind the festival, especially Phil McMullen (longtime visionary behind the Ptolemaic Terrascope publication and the Terrastock festivals) and Jeffrey Alexander (of the excellent group Black Forest/Black Sea, the Secret Eye label, and the AS220 club). It’s probably totally oversimplifying things to see it as Phil providing the inspiration and Jeffrey providing the organization, especially since they both chose the roster of artists that appeared over the weekend. In fact, I know that some folks wondered in advance if that might not lead to a somewhat schizoid fest—Phil and his mates over here, Jeffrey and his gang over there... But I think the scheduling of the groups helped mitigate against that, and one thing that really worked for me was the diversity of sounds on hand, as you could walk from a set of solo acoustic guitar instrumentals to a noise-rock maelstrom to catchy pop to avant experimentation without ever losing a sense of flow.