While most were sleeping, surreality took over Santa Fe.
At some point you have to cover your ears. Experimental music, like that explored at the High Mayhem festival each fall, is emotionally and intellectually exhausting. There are no simple beats or sing-alongs to carry an audience through the experience. Instead there is a disjointed array of jazz, noise, poetry and performance, carefully pulled together to overwhelm and stimulate the audience and the artists involved. Everyone feeds off each other, working toward a critical
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mass of expression that reverberates in the mind as you desperately try to understand what is going on around you.
In its fifth year now, the High Mayhem festival has begun to attract a crowd that reaches beyond the established experimental scene and its artists. The walls of Wise Fool's performance space seemed, at times, about to burst with a crowd almost too big for its confines. High school and college students sat, mouths agape, as Simulate Sensual pushed its vintage keyboards to capacity, and a little smile crossed Betty Payne's face as she watched bandmate Ultraviolet's sound blend perfectly with hers. A 3½-year-old exclaimed, "That was a beautiful show!" after watching Gaspard Cabanes and Alex Farris make metal sing and screech in agony. The little girl wasn't hindered by the idea that rubbing dry ice across bare metal to make music was out of the ordinary; she liked the sound, even as many adults stepped outside to stop their eardrums from rattling in beautiful pain.
With 23 scheduled acts and a few unplanned artistic events taking place, a festival like High Mayhem isn't about perfection. It's about the Out of Context orchestra moving the crowd so much with its perfectly timed improvisational set that, 27 hours and nine performances later, Gary Mex Glazner was still raving to the audience as he made the conduction style of Out of Context's JA Deane part of his own electronic poetry reading. The shared experiences made artists like Brian Mayhall and Mindy McGovern comfortable enough to debut a new project-get down on your knees and pray, motherfucker-to what, on day three, felt like a close-knit family. The core audience, which stuck out almost every hour of the festival's performances, setting up and cleaning up, offered feedback during the set, patiently waiting during technical difficulty and providing support to a new electroacoustic project that is still in formation as an idea and a concept.
In this atmosphere of support, artists were given the chance to explore not only their musical creativity but also their emotional imaginations. The Masnavi Dance Collective brought the weekend's only female-dominated crowd almost to the point of tears. Their multimedia "Presenté" protested corporate greed and the School of the Americas and brought the Veterans for Peace along to educate the audience. Nox (0) also pushed the political, but in a much more avant-garde style that was met with mixed reactions from the audience. Their destruction of mirrors, a 30-year-old cactus and a flaming cow skull confronted the audience with ideas of nature and ritual, provoking uncomfortable laughter from many.
The Hall Monitors, Rrake and Out of Context balanced out the noise and electronic work of alchemical burn, the Late Severa Wires and DERAIL (which is changing its name to Drawn by Lightning), with improvisational jazz sets that included multiple drummers, saxophonists and nontraditional jazz instruments. Laptop computers peppered the musical landscape, at times looping the brass and strings into an otherworldly background, making the jazz ensembles twice as big and the electronica minimalistically hectic.
By the third day of the festival, the distinction between audience and performer fell away. The quick changeovers, which have been problematic for past High Mayhem events, lent just enough time for a cigarette, another beer and a quick conversation. A group of rogue performance artists, flying under the moniker of Bull Seal, set up outside and kept the art coming. Eventually alchemical burn, the electronic project of Albuquerque's Kenneth A Cornell, invited Bull Seal to drum and dance with his solo electronic ambient sound manipulations, acknowledging their part in the atmosphere of the festival.
Now that High Mayhem has made it not only onto the cultural radar of Santa Fe, but has developed a scene all its own, the festival runs the risk of outgrowing itself. Wise Fool's space, which matches the event aesthetically, grew too small in the evenings as audiences swelled and will probably be too small if next year's event has the same attendance. The number of performers was cut back from previous years, but the quality of performances eclipsed those of the past, sometimes even from returning bands, such as DERAIL, whose set sounded like nothing they'd done before, to the pleasure of those familiar with their sound. Changeovers and technical difficulties didn't rear their head until the final day, when the schedule fell a bit behind, but kept everyone dancing late into the night.
The event is a unique one on the Santa Fe scene and is supplemented throughout the year by monthly High Mayhem shows and touches of experimentalism around town by groups such as Wise Fool, Theater Grottesco, Santa Fe New Music and occasionally even the Desert Chorale, but nothing embodies the nature of experimentalism quite like the three-day marathon of noise.
