Anti-jam band Zilla serves Mother Nature a dose of electronica.

wordplay: Orangepeelmoses.com
image courtesy Zilla

      Jamie Janover used to bad mouth electronic music.  As an accomplished hammered dulcimer player busking on the street for dead Presidents (the only good kind;), Janover used to be an acoustic music purist to the bone.  Zeroing in on his non-electronic axe of choice paid off too, netting him “Hammered Dulcimer Champion” honors a few years ago.  The days of Janover’s acoustic music purism are long gone though.  Sonic Bloom, one of the most digital music-dominated festivals ever founded by a so-called “jam band,” was his brainchild.  In its third year, this summer’s staggering lineup features some of the finest knob twiddlers on the planet, including Bassnectar, The Glitch Mob, Lotus, Vibesquad, Bluetech, Ana Sia, Eskmo, Heavyweight Dub Champion, Anahata Sound, Jantsen and Janover’s own band Zilla and his “pyrocussion” rig Mothtrap, as well as visual and performing artists such as The Kaivalya Hoop Dancers and Cosmic Fire, among others, and Sh!+s and Giggles. 

            “Electronic music used to be really peripheral for me, something that I almost frowned upon.  There was a time when I thought drum machines were cheating.  And certainly back in the early days of drum machines, the sounds weren’t very good.  They hadn’t figured out the real subtle aspects of quantizing and incorporating a certain percentage of random variation so that it sounded more like a human playing it and less like a machine.  The beauty of life and music is that everything evolves, including your own musical tastes.”

            If Janover’s tastes were single-celled organisms before, they are full-fledged androids now.  Bassnectar, one of Sonic Bloom’s heftiest headliners (after Zilla and STS9), is about as anti-acoustic as you can get.  The debut of Elastic Mystic, a collaboration between Bassnectar  and String Cheese’s Michael Kang, at a Fillmore after hours was Janover’s first conscious exposure to the ‘Nectar.  At the moment, though, he was too busy with a debut of his own, that of Crop Circle Brain Factory (Zilla’s verbose original handle), to devote much attention.  It wasn’t until a sardine fest at Burning Man’s El Circo dome that he truly experienced his deflowering “bassgasm.”

            “I went to Burning Man in 1999.  At Burning Man, it’s not very easy to set up a band to play through a PA system, especially using strings and rack gear and expensive stuff like that.  It’s mostly DJs using computers and CDJs and turntables to get music through huge sound systems, because it’s a lot easier and that’s the culture out there.  That’s when I realized that there’s a lot of different kinds of electronica, it’s not just all bad.  There’s this really bad fast trance and then there’s this really amazingly beautiful, organic, mid-tempo electronica.  Bassnectar at the El Circo dome is a perfect example.  You can hardly believe the energy and who shows up and what they do when that place happens.  What we’re doing with Zilla is taking some of the better aspects and elements of jam bands and combining them with our love of the West coast electronica that we’re exposed to at Burning Man--Bassnectar, Tipper, The Glitch Mob and other San Francisco and LA-based breakbeat, glitch, downtempo, IDM and dub step.  We’re taking ‘Jambandlandia’ and we’re getting rid of the solos.”        

            A jam band with no solos?  Heresy;)  According to Janover, there are only a handful of “axe tappers” in the entire lineup.  No artist/promoter exists in a vacuum, though, even an event as original as Sonic Bloom was inspired by its predecessors.

            “The Full Moon Dream Dance, which was the original Horning’s Hideout, where String Cheese and Peak Experience Productions first came together to do large scale music with large scale performance art, because we’re going to do something similar to that Saturday night.  Oregon Country Fair, High Sierra Music Festival and Shambhala, in terms of the electronica aspect.  Also, very impressed and really, really loved and would love to be anything similar at all to Lightning in a Bottle.  The Do Lab did a fabulous job, I highly recommend that festival.”

June 19th-21st @ Winter Park

SonicBloomFestival.com

ConsciousAlliance.org

ZillaMusic.com