“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” You’ve heard that. It’s wise.
Also, occasionally wrong.
Desert Bloom, and all its sights and sounds, plans to show you just how wrong by setting things right. Friday, the event that seeks to meld music and art heats up for Round 2. It’s free.
“It’s not a music festival,” says organizer Brandon Franklin. “It’s a hybrid.”
Beats and Brushes: Desert Bloom 2, brings together eight artists Gabe Velez, Heather Kozan, Jamie Mulhern, Nicholas DiBiase, Shannon Elizabeth Harden, Tony Deschiney, Victor Moreno and Dumperfoo. They and the public will paint with oils, watercolor, spackle – anything sanitary – with a background setting of seven sound-shifting DJs: [forced future], offering electro, industrial, cyberpunk sounds; Consumer (jungle / d&b); Halfacat (dubstep, d&b); Matt X (downbeat); Molotrash (60s Soul, RnB, 80s dance); RayRay (house, breaks); and William Reed (punk, new wave, Britpop) In the mix is a Jay McGavren light show.
Anyone who walks through the front door will suddenly have to decide what to do with the paintbrush smacked down in their palm. The goal by the end of the evening is to have four complete, large scale murals to likely be auctioned, painted by the artists and the audience.
The venue is free. The venue is Gangplank, a space rapidly gaining attention to the connected or those connected to them. Starting out as a shared work area for tech companies to share costs, and just as importantly ideas. It continues to grow into something bigger — and striving not to be too good to be true.
“No one get’s a free lunch.”
You’ve heard that, too. Gangplank won’t give you lunch, but they’re big on free. Free form. Free association. Freedom of thought. And increasingly, free space for different communities to find new ways to collaborate and eat lunch. Or dinner. Or 3 am burritos.
Branching out into music is new for Gangplank founder Derek Neighbors and his crew. Gangplank recently hosted its first Open Mic night for musicians, July 9, with Kenny Bump and Morgan Benavidez setting the tone before the spontaneous took over.
“Virtually every culture around the world has some form of music regardless of how remote or isolated,” Neighbors wrote to SoundLust. “It is at the very core of our DNA.
“For us music is one of the bases to express creativity. Which makes it a cornerstone of bringing in a culture of collaboration/ innovation. People looking to create are inspired and driven by other creators. It only makes sense to have a building block like music supported to fuel creation.”
For Neighbors, support for growing Phoenix’s new economy comes about by “providing resources and outlets for all types of creatives.”
It’s within this freedom of space that Franklin, Brandon Mason, Greg Taylor and DiBaise started to believe their loose ideas for a hybrid clash of the arts could actually happen. Given a tour several months ago of Gangplank’s new digs in downtown Chandler (260 S. Arizona Ave.) Franklin said a planned recording studio, open to any style, and small-venue, high-end sound system seemed, well, too … perfect. But it set in motion Desert Bloom.
“I get teary-eyed just thinking about what they’re offering,” Franklin tells SoundLust. “It’s just ridiculous, ridiculous to even think of a free recording space. It’s unheard of but it’s going to happen.”
“[We] had one meeting with them and they ran with it,” Neighbors wrote. “Pretty much all planning and heavy lifting [was] done by them and volunteers. Amazing to see community passion in action.”
Desert Bloom happened for the first time in May to instant social media chatter and general acclaim. The plan is to hold the event several times a year, with each event offering a new sound, a new atmosphere. Always involving music and some other type of art.
Live music played at the first Desert Bloom. DJs, with no live singing or instruments will perform Friday, starting 7 pm. They’re behind the decks through “someone knowing someone,” Franklin says, adding that with the success of the first, it was easier to get people to step up this time.
“We put a call out for people wanting to change the face of music,” Neighbors said.
DiBiase is a Desert Bloom volunteer and one of the artists who’ll join in. He’s not at all used to painting with others.
“My usual process is to paint alone in the middle of the night, and generally without music as I get absorbed in the “story” of the painting as I create,” he responded in an email. “… I’ve collaborated with a single other painter before, but never with seven at once, and then a whole audience pitching in! It’s going to be much faster, more electric, and more athletic than my normal experience, by far.”
Who’ll play off the other more is difficult to figure out, but Franklin thinks the images in the music can’t help but find their way into the art. “They’ll supply a texture,” Franklin says. “I don’t want to get too esoteric, but that’s how it goes sometimes.”
photo by nooccar/Flickr, Creative Commons
• Edited to correct Gangplank address – 11:29, July 15.
