The very first Eaux Claires (pronounced O’Clare) Music and Arts Festival was held, July 17 and 18, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Eaux Claires is the brainchild of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who grew up in Eau Claire and now owns a recording studio in the city, with co-creator Aaron Dessner of The National.
You call this art?
The festival was set in the gorgeous Chippewa River Valley. On the east side of the grounds, which you reached by walking through a forest, there were three small performance art tents, named the Mouth, the Banks, and the Channel of the St. Coix. In the Mouth, you could confess your sins to a whiskey-drunk young “pastor” with grilles and a penchant for swearing, while a loop of recorded confessions played aloud and a digital screen called out the number of the next sinner to enter.
Next was the Banks, where you received a big pair of headphones and entered the next experiential art exhibit. The Banks was a collaborative effort between PANASONIC and SENNHEISER where various bands played sets behind translucent screens displaying video imagery, and their live performance was transmitted directly via closed wireless audio transmissions to each watchers’ headphones.
And finally, in the Channel of the St. Coix was a collaboration between brownshoesonly (Chicago visual artists), Radioedit, and Eau Claire-based Dwarfcraft Devices. The audience was invited to listen to performances and interact in the minimalist space to create video art through audio reactions. Other experimental art at the festival included Aaron and Bryce Dessner collaborating on a performance with Iceland’s Rajnar Kjartansson called Forever Love: Trees and Longing, and a suspended yarn bomb near the entrance to the grounds by artist Eric Rieger (also known as HOTTEA).
Day one: sweet sounds and a drunk Dessner
Friday’s musical performances included folky Field Report, The Penny Serfs at the Mouth, ethereal trio of sisters The Staves, folk duo Hiss Golden Messenger, hip hop collective Doomtree, country artist Sturgill Simpson, indie band The Lone Bellow, rock and rollers Spoon, The Tallest Man on Earth (alias of Kristian Mattson, who performed with a full band for the first time), and The National. The festival grounds were small enough that one could wander or sit in the shade for a while, and still be able to see/hear/experience various artists.
Frontman Bryce Dessner showed up onstage for The National’s set with a bottle of wine in hand and promptly messed up the lyrics of the first song. In spite of this, the Dessner brothers & co. put on an incredible and beautiful show. Bringing up special superstar guests Sufjan Stevens and Justin Vernon to perform with them, their set was magical, and ended with Bryce Dessner singing one of their final songs while wandering amongst the crowd, then a haunting, glorious stripped-down sing-along of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.”
Day two: music to one’s ears
Saturday started with sets from feel-good folk artist Phil Cook (with his new band The Guitar Heels and special guest Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls), moody and danceable electronic music from Elliot Moss, and soulful, transcendent saxophonist Colin Stetson. (Check out our interviews with these three!)
There was an enthralling if somewhat terrifying children’s performer Grandma Sparrow, a bearded man in a bird mask and crocheted sweater singing cultish folk-electronic ditties to a group of confused but entertained kids in the Piddletractor Family Tent. Saturday’s music also included soulful woman-led acts like Phox, Sylvan Esso, and Haley Bonar, as well as funky Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires, indie pop group Givers, punky Japanese noise rock band Melt-Banana, super attractive and talented singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens (whose set included confessions of nervousness and touching stories) and of course, Justin Vernon’s own Bon Iver. During his set he was joined by The Staves, yMusic, the No BS! Brass Band, and Colin Stetson. Bon Iver’s show opened with “Heavenly Father,” included the debut of two beautiful new songs, and closed with their classic “Skinny Love.”
What a nice, well-organized trip it’s been
Particularly impressive was the organization of the festival’s inaugural year. The creators of Eaux Claires were clearly focused on the safety and convenience of each attendee, and wanted to make their time as easy and fun as possible. The layout was easy to understand, security officers and curators were everywhere you looked, ready to answer questions or offer assistance, and food, drink, and bathroom areas were never more than a three minute walk away. The only suggestion I would make to improve the festival was the have more water bottle filling stations – 90 degrees is not the weather to be dehydrated in, and the typically high price of festivals’ bottled water isn’t the most appealing option.
Justin Vernon’s touching words during his set at the very end of the festival epitomized the vibes of the whole weekend. “There are a lot of things in the world that are hard to understand,” he began, going on to say that without friendship, we have nothing, and that the festival weekend embodied that in a way that was joyous to behold. His emotional words hold very true; Eaux Claires was the experience of a lifetime.
Elliot Moss
Madeleine Toerne: My question was how did you start out? Did you play at house shows, did you play at bars, what was the beginning like?
Elliot Moss: It was a lot of…I mean, I recorded the record and put it out, and then it was sort of when people started responding to “Slip” [Moss’ most popular track, featured on Sonic Breakfast’s Top 10 Songs of 2014] that I signed with an agent and we started getting an act together and I played some shows around New York. […] And then hopped on tour with Cold War Kids soon after. Which was cool, that was this winter.
MT: So you recorded your album before you played out and about?
EM: Yea it was out before I had ever played a show [laughing]. It’s funny cause I made it thinking, ‘Oh mean, yea if something happens, maybe I’ll throw a show together and play around a bit,’ but I didn’t ever expect it to be so quick.
Mara Kalinoski: So you wrote and recorded and mixed that all by yourself, so you got to do the creative and emotional stuff, all the way through the technical. So did your views and feelings about your music change throughout that process?
EM: I think each song is a different animal, but once there’s a vision for something that can spawn a number of ways, it’s like I can tell where to take it and what it needs to be finished. But at times you can be recording while you’re writing, it’s like ‘This is pretty cool, I’m gonna paste that over there, pitch it down, sing over it’ and then that inspires something else.
MK: You just performed at the very first Eaux Claires Music Festival. Can you describe how that was?
EM: It’s been amazing so far. It feels like Justin’s [Vernon] been putting these on for years and years because it’s so pro. Everything about it seems like it’s been thought about so clearly and I’m amazed that this is the first year.
Phil Cook
Mara Kalinoski: You are a successful musician – how did you decide that this was the path you wanted to take?
Phil Cook: I still don’t feel like I’ve decided that. I’m just waking up to what makes me happy and what bums me out, and every day it still makes me happy, so I guess I’m making a choice. I think it’s just been something that’s brought me joy ever since I was a kid, so there wasn’t really a choice to make. But at the same time, it’s funny, choosing a career path is funny. You have to align yourself with something, saying, “I’m this.”
Madeleine Toerne: What do you feel like when you were standing on the stage today, and you looked out at the crowd of people, and the flanking trees? What were you thinking in your mind?
PC: When I look out at the people? Oh, well, today was the kind of thing where from my vantage point, being above everybody and looking out and it was the afternoon, I very clearly could see my parents, I could very clearly see…all my cousins are here, all my aunts and uncles are here, all my oldest, oldest friends, I could see where they were standing in little pockets. I could see everyone. So there was, mostly it was just, it felt good to just look at this little group and sing a little something. It was cool. It was really special.
MK: So you grew up around here [Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin]. How did that influence your music? And have you ever lived or traveled anywhere that’s influenced you as much or more?
PC: Growing up in Chippewa Falls was remarkable only in that it’s just big enough to give you a hunger for something bigger, but it’s just small enough that my brother and I were the only people that were into music the way that we were, in our entire town. So we very much had an awareness that there were other things going on somewhere else, but at the same time, we knew that we had to get there and find those connections and broaden ours.
MK: How was performing at the first Eaux Claires Festival? What did you think of it?
PC: It was great. This is a positive atmosphere. And it’s a positive festival, and it’s a beautiful festival, and it’s built on the right things. It feels like a family reunion and a wedding at the same time. I only relate it to that because it feels like the kind of place where I feel like I’m visiting, and reconnecting, and maintaining all these beautiful, old friendships I’ve had with people for so many years. It’s inspiring to walk around and see how much people are trying to express their being in an honest way. […]
Colin Stetson
MK: You were born in Ann Arbor, and you studied at the University of Michigan. [….] So how did growing up there and attending school at U of M influence your music and your decision to become a musician?
Colin Stetson: I don’t know specifically, but when I was a kid I was very focused on two things. One was artistic pursuit, both visual art and music, but also natural, naturalistic pursuit. My mom loved music, so did my father, so they definitely stewarded that in me […] But I think the key was that my dad had a very limited record collection, and most of it was Jimi Hendrix. And when he drove me to my soccer games, when he drove me to my wrestling matches, he drove me to my football games, we’d just listen to Jimi Hendrix 8-tracks and shit. I think that’s where the real inspiration to play music, was from that time.
MK: You’ve worked with Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, The National, David Byrne, Tom Waits, a ton of other people. And they all have such different sounds. How did your sound evolve, or stay the same, or how was that experience?
CS: It was all different eras of my life. Playing with Tom Waits was the single most important thing that I’ve ever done. Important in that as we live we look back and immediately start to assign meaning to the things that happened to us and because I was such a huge fan of him, obsessively so, I mean his music crafted me in a large way when I was in my late teens and all through college. […] So meeting him and then having that meeting go well, and then getting to work with him, and then having that go well, and having the music that we made be so beautiful, it was one of those things that just immediately became kind of a grand justification of a life’s path. Like if you ever feel like maybe you’re doubting, now you have a reason never to doubt.
MK: I read an article that said New History Warfare Volume II [Stetson’s second solo album] you did in totally live, single takes. So how was that, what with collaborating with different artists, how was that different from the traditional recording process you do?
CS: Well, when I do stuff by myself, the idea has always been to use a lot of different microphones to capture every different sound that’s happening in real time, so then you have as much of the physical space, the air around the instrument, all of that minutia, so when you’re mixing it you have decisions. You actually have some freedom to recreate a surrealistic, like another reality for all those sounds to be in. I’ve never really wanted to recreate the live thing for the record, because you can never do it. Recording is a different medium than live. It just has to be its own animal. And so when I’m doing stuff solo, there’s a lot of things involved. […]
MT: Do you have anything that you do beforehand, before your shows? Like what if you’re not really in the mood to play? I mean it’s strenuous.
CS: […] Everybody has to come and bring it for every show no matter what they’re feeling[…] you just have to compartmentalize all this shit and just get out there and physically, and mentally, and emotionally be in the moment. […] I rely a lot on certain mechanical entry points. One of them is a really regimental warm up routine. Just very, very basic, getting me into the instrument and like, rebooting? Reconfiguring everything so it feels like one. And also yoga. I do a yoga practice about an hour before every set, I’ll do a yoga practice.
MK: What is the ideal way to listen to your music, in your opinion?
CS: I like the idea of people listening to it in the dark, very very loud, on some sort of a setup that they have, in a space where they’re all by themselves. They can just inhabit that space. […] That when you take the visual out, you take light out of the equation, and take the cognitive drain of seeing out of it, so that your brain is now completely lit up with just the sound, that’s the best.
