A band is setting up on stage. The night's lecturer is nursing a beer, going over his notes and readying himself for his impending interactive dissertation on the Mayan calendar. A local independent filmmaker is deconstructing a projector after screening his latest experimental short film.
It's not a happening at Max's Kansas City nightclub, New York City, 1968. It is, rather, a typical lineup for the Montague Phantom Brain Exchange at the Rendezvous, Turners Falls, 2008. The event is billed as a place for both bodied and disembodied brains to gather and "deconstruct solutions and create problems" while enjoying a variety of media and entertainment.
Every last Wednesday of the month, people pack their brains into their cars and head to the Rendezvous to exchange ideas, experimental music, art and film. MPBE curator and Yeay! Cassettes (a local CDR and tape imprint with over 30 releases under its belt) founder Neil Young got our synapses going.
Valley Advocate: Describe the Montague Phantom Brain Exchange concept.
Neil Young: My friend Andrew pointed this article out to me in the New York Times about some kooky cosmological debate where one theory has this great image of disembodied ghost brains floating in space, imagining our physical reality and fabricating everything we experience. It seemed like the perfect mascot for an "experimental" arts happening—phantom brains—a type of fake intelligence or maybe the ghost imprint of intellect-removed, like "phantom limb syndrome" or maybe just inter-dimensional soul-muscles bobbing omnisciently in a cosmological soup.
How did the idea for MPBE come about? Whose brainstorm was it?
This past fall, my band played at De Player, a weird collective venue in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. They had this very specific yet laid back formula for putting on monthly shows where they carefully selected a variety of artists, kept the door really cheap and tried to saturate you with food, drink and stimulating art. This wacky guy emceed the whole event in a sleazy, slowed-down Dutch-English drawl while his hands were in constant motion, gesticulating his every clumsily delivered thought while introducing the acts. Events like that are not all that uncommon in Europe, where arts spaces frequently get grant money to hold festivals. These are non-academic venues in which art is approached both viscerally and intellectually.
Later on in that tour, my bandmate Donny and I were getting really amped up about the idea of trying to put on our own festival back in Western Mass., where maybe, along with cool art, there could be more formal room for feedback with the audience or even lectures by artists or thinkers on topics of relevance. The Phantom Brain Exchange is a clumsy attempt to try to fuse these ideas in a semi-rigid monthly variety show event with a little nugget of nerdy reflection. It's all an experiment, and even though each night will be two to three performers, a 15-minute lecture and a DJ—I bet every night will be pretty different from the last.
How did the Rendezvous become its home?
The Rendezvous encouraged me to do it, and I can't think of any place where it would be so easy! It helps that I'm friends with the owners and I live up the street, but I really also think that they recognize the importance of supporting something that is unusual.
Could you tell me about the arts and music community right now in Turners Falls?
We moved up here about a year and a half ago, and I'll admit it was a little jarring to come from sleepy Easthampton to even sleepier Turners Falls, but we very quickly were pulled into the folds of a few different and inevitably intersecting scenes. The Brickhouse Community Resource Center is an inspiring center of gravity for the village. They own and occupy this old firehouse with a big old garage that's now a performance space. In the back, they have a shack filled with a junky drum set, various musical instruments and some simple recording gear. The place is open in the afternoons and early evenings for youth to come get creative and make a mess. They have monthly open mics and small local shows with a pretty weird variety of townie talent, like crude metal bands, gutter punk jug band folk and my favorite Turners Falls band, the brilliantly incoherent Flaming Dragon of Middle Earth—a hodge-podge of musicians and non-musicians arbitrarily improvising atonal rock music while this wild kid in a wheelchair sings apocalyptic lyrics and bosses the band around.
My neighborhood, which is halfway up the hill, seems to be crawling with painters and poets, and most of them seem to have been living here for the past 10-20 years raising their kids and making work in a supportive community. I appreciate the fact that the artists I've met here are rooted, and committed to more than just their own scene, to what else is going on in the greater community. In a lot of ways, the vibe in Turners Falls is similar to what it was in Easthampton eight or so years ago, when Flywheel was just starting out and there was this big jumble of optimism about the arts in the town.
