Audio Music under the radar (story audio) Listen to 'Glissando' by Dallas Orbiter Listen to 'Every Arrow in the Quiver' by Barlow/Petersen/Wivinus Listen to 'Fervidus' by International Novelty Gamelan Listen to 'Clouds' by Salubrius Invertebrae Listen to 'Well I Won't Be There' by Michael Yonkers Photos Going underground Underground impressarios Underground guitar hero View full slideshow (4 images) Resources Heliotrope Festival Web site Tools E-mail this page Print this page Sponsor

Music under the radar
by Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio
June 17, 2005

Going underground. Heliotrope is a two-day festival dedicated to the Twin Cities' underground music scene. (Image courtesy of Flaneur Productions)

For some people, underground music means anything that's not played on the radio. For others, the definition goes deeper. Now some of the most subterranean music in the Twin Cities will surface at a two-day music festival at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. The festival is called Heliotrope.

Minneapolis, Minn. — The best way to define underground music, according to Heliotrope co-founder Eric Wivinus, is to describe its spirit rather than its sound. In every genre of music, Wivinus says, there are artists pushing the boundaries as far as they can. He says at Heliotrope, nearly every stripe will be represented.

"I mean there's people doing modern, psychedelic rock music," he says. "There's people doing free improvisation, but from the most 'out' end of it. And then there's people with the sort of strange, skewed folk stuff that's kind of going around right now."

In Wivinus's view, underground music isn't a series of happy accidents that arise from blind experimentation. It's deliberate.

"It's almost willfully under the radar," he says. "The ethic is sort of driven almost as a reaction against more prevailing trends."

This is the festival's second year. It came together somewhat unintentionally.

Co-founder Rich Barlow helps run an avant-garde theater company called Flaneur Productions. Flaneur had reserved Franklin Art Works to stage a play, but then canceled its plans. Since Flaneur still had dibs on the space, Barlow and Wivinus, both experimental musicians, decided to throw a party to showcase the local underground music scene.

This year's Heliotrope will feature 26 local acts. On one end of the spectrum is Paul Metzger. Eric Wivinus describes him as a virtuso guitarist who's been in the scene for years, but hasn't gotten his due.

"It's really hard to top what he's doing," Wivinus says. "He's blending folk traditions from Asia and India and America and Eastern Europe on a banjo that has 20 strings on it."

Then there's a group called White Map.

Rich Barlow says the band includes a guitarist who wears his equipment. The setup includes a backpack retrofitted with an amplifier powered by a motorcycle battery, a belt with guitar effects attached. It's all connected to a cone-shaped speaker which rises above his head like a tuba.

The room darkens, a strobe light is turned on, and the guitarist then wanders through the audience.

"Thanks to the directionality of this cone, and the doppler effect or whatever, you never knew where he was," Barlow says. "And with the strobe light, you'd catch a glimpse of him, he'd be over on the other side of the audience, and then the sound would get really quiet, and then it would suddenly get really loud because he was standing next to you and had just turned to face you. And it was fantastic."

Barlow says the underground music scene in the Twin Cities is fertile yet fragmented. He hopes Heliotrope will lend it some cohesion. His main goal is twofold; to give the artists an audience he thinks they richly deserve, and deliver good art to the adventurous listeners who fill the seats.