Woodstock, Northern Virginia Style

 By Broadside Correspondent Marian McLaughlin

In early August, concertgoers and bands attended the first Old Bridge Festival, two-day event put together by a group of people from the Northern Virginia area.

The venue itself was a neglected winter farmhouse in Amissville, Virginia.  Subjected to vandalism sessions, every window was bashed in and nonsensical graffiti marked every wall.

For convenience, two stages were set up, so there could be smooth transactions from one act to the next.  An outdoor, hand-built stage sat at the foot of the towering stone chimney of the farmhouse. 

This provided an open-air concert atmosphere, where sound permeated the whole property.  Inside, some bands set their equipment up in front of the stone hearth.  

Spectators gathered under the lofty ceilings, and some people listen from the rickety balcony in the back of the room.  

Mystic Flavor, a five-piece funk band from Long Island, NY, kicked off the festival with their original rock songs.  They were by far the friendliest band at the festival.  

Beforehand, as people were pitching their tents, Mystic Flavor claimed a patch of the campsite as Flavor Island, and asked campers to choose a designated flavor.  This icebreaker gave a whole group of campers silly nicknames to reference each other as for the rest of the festival, like “Watermelon,” “Mango,” or “Peanut Butter.”   

The band’s amicable nature radiated off the stage and spread its way through the field as people warmed up for the festival.

At sunset, Dark Sea Dream, a psychedelic, shoe-gaze band from Northern Virginia, created a meditative atmosphere with their enveloping sound.  

The two guitarists worked together to build up the swallowing swells of meshing chords and melodies.  

While one guitarist laid down a droning, rhythmic structure, the other transformed their guitar into a voice lost in layers of noise.  

Their drummer, Kifah Foutah, a recent George Mason University graduate, stitched the two together with his hard-hitting beats.

Gull, a one-man spectacle from Richmond, Va., blew people away with his adroit ability to play guitar and drums simultaneously.  These attributes were much like the band Lighting Bolt, a two-piece drum and bass band known for playing at loud volumes with packed riffs and drum lines.  It was all the more impressive that Gull was pulling off both musical tasks on with strong force and audacity. The masked character also held a semblance to Les Claypool, the well-known bassist and vox of the funk-freak band Primus.  In between hammer-ons, quick pull offs, and popping snares, he would send out snickers through an altered voice controller.

A sudden downpour sent all of the attendees into the farmhouse mid-show, except for a few hippie spinning, rain-dancing girls.  

With almost everyone under one roof, the most appropriate thing to do was to carry on with music.  A dance party ensued, and soon the whole room was covered in mud tracks and pools of rainwater.

Once things settled down, Gay Knowledge took to the stage.  Most of the members are art and music students at Mason, with the exception of one of their drummers, Evan Napala, who goes to school in New York.  The other drummer, Bret Rushia, who helped put on the festival, is a music composition major.  

During their set, he also created processed vocal textures from behind the drum throne.  Drew Haeglin, a film major, gave each song a solid structure with crunchy bass riffs as David Begin, a jazz student, delivered intricate melodies that were almost hidden in the layers of sound.

The pinnacle of the festival was during Brandon Trude’s DJ set.  Under the alias Pretzlcoat, he led the crowd through psychotic glitches, rips, and waves of reverberation.  He constantly created tension by switching from charging, rushed licks to slow tinkering xylophone lines in one song.  

Visual installations by Annapurna Kumar accompanied Pretzlcoat’s set. They varied from animations to home videos that she edited on her own.  

Throughout the whole set, a green laser beam spun around the room, creating the illusion of hundreds of green points, almost resembling a strange, eerie night sky.

One of the last sets sometime in the middle of the night was Rifle Recoil, one-man act Jeff Kessel from Arlington, Va.  Kessel played an intimate round for a small crowd, as many weary attendees had drifted off to sleep in damp tents or dry cars.  

Each song started out simply, with a playful melody on guitar or a vocal lyric.  Then Kessel used a looping station to record a musical phrase, only to layer more on top further on.  

By the end of his songs, it sounded like he had a whole chorus of fellows singing with him.  In some songs, he created rhythms by beat boxing.

The audience lost themselves in his humble songs, especially when smoke from his fog machine encased the whole room, creating a delirious yet delightful effect.

Despite the rain, the festival itself was a huge success.  Approximately of 15 to 20 bands played, some acts calling out last minute as well as others being added on during festivities.  

Over 200 people attended the event, not including bands.  

The festival creators and coordinators, Rushia and Dickie Halverson, as well as many of their friends, are already speaking about making the festival an annual event.