PHOTOS: Environmental Film Festival Opening Party

Ben DrozMarch 12, 2012ArtFilm & TVPhotos

all photos: Ben Droz

This year the Environmental Film Festival, which officially kicks off tomorrow, celebrates a major milestone: 20 years of advancing environmental understanding through the power of film. As the first film festival devoted to the full range of environmental topics, the Environmental Film Festival was a novel idea when Flo Stone founded it in 1993. While 1,200 people attended the inaugural Festival, today the Festival has expanded to become the nation’s largest showcase of environmental film, attracting an audience of over 30,000.

The 20th anniversary Festival, is the largest and most ambitious yet, will showcase 180 films, including 93 Washington, D.C., United States and World premieres, from 42 countries. A centerpiece of our 20th anniversary year is a retrospective of the work of Academy Award-nominated director Lucy Walker, who will screen her latest film, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, and receive the Festival’s Polly Krakora Award for artistry in film.

Ben stopped by the opening party this past weekend and caught a bunch of environmentally aware folks excited about the next 12 days of film ahead of them:

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24apr7:00 pmSTEVEN WILSON7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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“Once we’ve made sense of our world, we want to go and fuck up everybody else’s, because his or her truth doesn’t match mine…”

To The Bone, opening dialogue

Twenty something years ago – around the time that the first records bearing Steven Wilson’s name began attracting critical interest – the big message in rock’n’roll was that modern life was rubbish. Soundtracking a politically grey country stuck in a technological rut, popular music seemed to echo the underlying thought of the time. Something’s got to change.

Fast-forward to the second decade of the 21st century. Politics are in a state of self-inflicted turmoil; the connective technology that was meant to free us has become weaponized. It’s like everybody’s got the start of the millennium psychosis blues and modern life is out of control.

With that in mind, how should music in 2017 react to the flux and uncertainty of the here and now? If you’re Steven Wilson – now unarguably the UK’s biggest underground artist – the response is less about trying to make a state of the nation address and more about holding up a well-polished mirror to reflect back the chaos.

Lyrically, the eleven tracks on Steven Wilson’s fifth album To The Bone tackle such era-defining themes as everyday fanaticism; self-loathing caused by the pressures of online life; displacement by war and the hope that we try to pass on to future generations. Musically, the whole thing sparks and flashes in arcs of glorious colour, fusing driving futurist rock and spectral electronics to elegiac hyperspace ambience and dizzying squalling guitars.

Co-produced by Paul Stacey (Oasis, the Black Crowes), To The Bone is a bold, forward-thinking rock record. From the thunderous swampy rhythms of the album’s titular opener and the glimmering, stratospheric climb of Nowhere Now through the album’s two tales of unstinting home grown fundamentalism (People Who Eat Darkness, Detonation) via the gorgeous, acoustic break-up narrative of Blank Tapes and Pariah’s volcanic coda, the record presents eleven of Steven’s most concise, tightly melodic songs to date.

“This album has a much stronger pop sensibility than anything I’ve done before,” says Steven. “But I wanted to make a pop record that you could still engage with on a deeper level, whether that’s though the lyrics, the musicianship, or the layers in the production. I don’t hear too many records like that these days.”

For anyone who’s followed Steven’s career since the early ’90s – four times Grammy nominated, the founder and front man of adored outsider rock band Porcupine Tree; as a remixer for acts like Roxy Music, Simple Minds and XTC or as a self-sufficient solo artist, hugely respected for a series of visionary LPs starting with 2008’s Insurgentes – To The Bone might sound like a departure. In fact, it’s a lovingly crafted paean to the progressive pop records that heavily influenced the formative years of his youth.

“People generally think my music is rooted in the ‘70s but really I came of age in the ’80s, and grew up with post punk, new wave and Trevor Horn’s productions. Recently I found myself going back to listen to albums like So by Peter Gabriel, Hounds of Love by Kate Bush, Tears for Fear’s Seeds of Love and Talk Talk’s Colour of Spring. They were mainly made by musicians who’d come out of the crucible of innovative, experimental ’70s music but still wanted to write great songs that people could hum on the bus. They’re unapologetically accessible but with not even the slightest sense of dumbing down, they have a huge sense of ambition. And for me the more ambitious they were, the more I loved them.”

While 2015’s masterful Hand. Cannot. Erase. immersed the listener in a singular theme (the bleak true story of Joyce Carole Vincent), To The Bone takes multiple different paths to reach one central conclusion.

“If there’s an over riding theme to the record, it’s, ‘what a fucked up world we live in’. That said, in a broader sense I think pretty much everyone is writing about that these days. If you’re someone that thinks even slightly about the state of the world you’re living in, it’s impossible not be affected by what’s going on right now.”

With lyrics by one of Steven’s cornerstone inspirations – XTC’s Andy Partridge – the album’s opener and title track takes its inspiration from the Oxford Dictionary’s word of 2016: post-truth.

“To The Bone touches on the nature of truth, about how it recent times it has become a flexible concept. That should be an oxymoron – it’s absurd to suggest that it can be open to interpretation, truth should be an absolute. But that’s exactly what has happened, so the song talks about trying to get to the core of what actual truth is – and when you get there, what are you going to find? The spirit of that track sets the tone for the whole record.”

Elsewhere, the horrifying spectre of terrorism in everyday situations hangs over two of the album’s most ferocious tracks.

“People Who Eat Darkness is about living next door to a terrorist – someone who you pass on the stairs, on the school run, or while they’re taking out the bins, but then you’ll find yourself on the news after that same person has perpetrated a gun or terrorist attack, saying ‘He always seemed so pleasant, quiet and ordinary.’ From the flip side, Detonation is about someone justifying hate crime through religion. The opening line, ‘Great God, I don’t believe in you; but still I will do what you want me to’ is about that guy that walked into a gay club in Orlando with an automatic weapon last summer. Even though he shouted ‘Allah Akbar’ (‘God is Great’) while he was killing people, it transpired he’d had no contact with any fundamentalist group, so religion was just an excuse for him to justify his own deep-rooted irrational prejudice and hatred. Those two songs connect back to that idea of truth being a flexible concept too – those people have engineered their own reality to support their skewed logic.”

To The Bone’s rays of light come from Nowhere Now and Permanating (where each track looks back at the Earth from outside the exosphere, “seeing the beauty with all the depressing shit removed, seeing the great in the small”) and the album’s closing track, Song of Unborn.

“I wanted to write something from the perspective of an unborn child who’s looking out from the womb at the wreckage of modern civilization and thinking to itself; why would I want to be born into this place? And the answer is, “You have the chance to do something extraordinary, the arc of your life can be profound, it’s all about how you use the gift of your life. I think these songs stop it being a really depressing record!”

Far from being a desolate experience, To The Bone is a hugely exhilarating collection of songs. Like those inspirational records of the ’80s, it loses none of the scope of the artist’s previous records. Instead, like them, it hones myriad ideas into a collection of perfectly formed modernist pop songs, finding order, hope and melody in the chaos of the present.

Time

(Tuesday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$40

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25apr10:30 am5:00 pmThe Barmecide Feast Exhibit10:30 am - 5:00 pm National Air and Space Museum

25apr7:00 pmThe Cadillac Threew/ Sam Grow7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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It may be a ballsy move for The Cadillac Three to name their new album LEGACY, but if any country band has the shared history to lay claim to such a weighty title, it’s the longhaired trio of Nashville natives.

Singer-guitarist Jaren Johnston, drummer Neil Mason and lap-steel player Kelby Ray have known one another
since they were teens and have been sharing stages together for nearly 15 years. This summer, they’ll headline
their hometown’s most famous venue, the Ryman Auditorium, just a few blocks from where Johnston and Ray sat in high-school math class daydreaming about one day playing the legendary hall. Johnston’s connection to the Ryman goes back even further: his father has been a drummer at the Grand Ole Opry since Jaren was a child. And now he has a son of his own, who, like his old man, will be well-versed in all the sounds that make up both Music City and The Cadillac Three, from country and blues to rock & roll.

So, yeah, “legacy” looks good on this band.

“We’re trying to build something and do it our way, which is always harder,” says Johnston. “If you’re going to leave something that people are actually going to remember, you can’t take the easy way. So we took all of our history, mixed it with the energy of The Cadillac Three and put it into a record that makes sense of where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

After nearly a full year on the road in support of 2016’s BURY ME IN MY BOOTS, their first full-length album recorded for Big Machine Records, the group returns with a more mature perspective. Johnston, Mason and Ray have experienced a lot on tour, whether opening arenas across the country on Florida Georgia Line’s Dig Your Roots Tour or headlining their own consistently sold-out string of sweaty club and theater shows in the U.K. and Europe. As they prepare to head back in November for another big run, for The Cadillac Three, the old saying
really is true: this band is huge overseas.

“Europe showed us that we should bet on ourselves. It was a big gamble the first time we went over there,” says Mason, “but the shows and the fans have continued to grow.”

“And going overseas reinforced that we wanted to get more music out more quickly,” adds Ray. “They go through singles really quickly over there. They want more, more, more and that encouraged us to go into the studio, knock this album out and keep going.”

All that travel, from city to state, country to continent, could decimate a lesser band, but it only served to creatively inspire the mighty TC3. They wrote many of the 11 songs that make up LEGACY on the road, cut the tracks on rare days off in Nashville and then recorded all of Johnston’s vocals – one of the most “country” voices in the genre – in the back lounge of their bus in between shows, adding a crackling sense of vitality to LEGACY.
They also produced the album themselves.

“We knew what we wanted to do with this record. Instead of putting it together in bits and pieces, we started with
a batch of songs and then picked a single,” Johnston says. “That’s how this shit should be done.”

That back-to-basics approach to making music yielded the band’s most infectious single to date: the woozy sing-
along “Dang If We Didn’t.” Written, as is most of the album, by Johnston and Mason (here, with Jonathan Singleton; other times with songwriters like Laura Veltz and Angelo Petraglia), “Dang If We Didn’t” teases fans with its ambiguous title, before revealing what the guys actually did in the chorus: get drunk last night.

“When you’re a songwriter, you can be critical of song titles,” says Johnston. “But with ‘Dang If We Didn’t,’ I thought it was a little bit mysterious. It makes you wonder, ‘Dang if we didn’t do what?'”

“Eat pizza last night,” quips Mason. “It could be anything.”

“American Slang” rivals “Dang If We Didn’t” in its grandeur. It’s a huge song, akin to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” or The Cadillac Three’s own “Graffiti,” off BURY ME IN MY BOOTS. Lori McKenna (Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush”) began writing the tune with the intention of having The Cadillac Three finish it. “We are vampires on Hollywood Boulevard / angels and sinners of our hometown streets,” go the lyrics, painting a picture of life’s rebels, before a
massive country-radio chorus kicks in: “We are the back roads, dirty water shore banks…we are born and raised on American slang.”

The constant throughout LEGACY, however, lies in the players: as on all three of The Cadillac Three’s albums, only Johnston, Mason and Ray are the musicians. There’s no guest keyboard player, no second percussionist and certainly no bassist. Ray holds down the low end on his lap steel.

Especially on the standout LEGACY track “Take Me to the Bottom,” which features Johnston reaching high for a
breathtaking falsetto. “‘Take Me to the Bottom’ has the best bass sound of anything I’ve ever done,” says Ray, who also keeps things greasy on the intense “Tennessee.” A thrashing love song, it evokes the stomp of ZZ Top – a favorite of TC3 – and features a lyrical shout-out to progressive country hero Sturgill Simpson, a kindred spirit of the band.

No matter the influence, though, the trio stays faithful to their own unique sound throughout LEGACY. “Hank & Jesus” glides along with Tennessee twang; “Demolition Man” is distinguished by the space between the notes; and the swaggering “Cadillacin'” is a band anthem. “We don’t put anything on our albums that we can’t re-create live,” says Mason. “If there is a TC3 rule, it’s that: keep it honest.”

Honesty, or authenticity, is a favorite buzzword around Nashville. But few artists come to it as naturally as The
Cadillac Three. These guys couldn’t fake it if they tried. In the album’s title track, they offer a heart-on-the-sleeve testimony to what’s really important at the end of one’s days: love and a family tree.

When Mason and Ray heard “Legacy,” co-written by Johnston, they flipped, and pushed for it to be the title of the record. “We’re far enough along in our careers where doing an album called LEGACY doesn’t feel presumptuous to me,” says Mason.

Not when you run through The Cadillac Three’s milestones. It’s all there, from boundary-pushing albums, Grammy-nominated No. 1 songwriting across genres and fan-favorite singles to sold-out club shows and massive festival gigs alongside Aerosmith.

“With this album, we’re continuing to build this thing we’ve created. We’re touring nonstop, headlining shows in the U.K., playing the Ryman, and putting out a new record,” says Johnston. “Shit, that’s a pretty good legacy so far.”

Time

(Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$20

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26apr10:30 am5:00 pmThe Barmecide Feast Exhibit10:30 am - 5:00 pm National Air and Space Museum

PHOTOS: Environmental Film Festival Opening Party

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