Hey, Carl. Turn That Suck Knob Down! - Solovox 10-Year Anniversary

"You ever heard of Woo Woo Feild?", my therapist asked. "Nope, I didn't know that there were any other Portland Burners", I replied. "Look this guy up and he'll tell you all about it", he said grinning. "Uh, Ok...".

Way back in 2002, my now ex-wife and I were feeling like seasoned vets heading into our third Burning Man event. A San Francisco crew had adopted us as one of their own, so we didn't really socialize that much with the locals. Basically, there weren't many of us in Portland at the time. Little did we know that the festival's popularity was on the verge of exploding around these parts.

We'd been told that there was a guy named Carl who camped with a large Portland organization out there and that we should look him up. Always keen to explore new Playa connections, we tracked him at the festival that year. The encounter was brief, as he was strapped into a monster parachute making some futile attempt to get his camp set up in a brewing sand storm. We made quick introductions and suggested a rally at some point down the line. In true Burner fleeting fashion, the hang with Carl never came to pass.

It was roughly a full year before I saw him again. In 2003, I ended up across the street from Woonami Village, a Woo Woo Field-style camp on steroids with close to 500 campers. My own freshly minted camp, Monkey Puzzle, got our request honored by the Org for close Woo theme camp placement . As it turned out, my long time friends Dan Cohen and Marcea Wiggins and a few others were Woo refugees looking to exercise what I like to refer as "polycamperous tendencies", so I went along with their site plan to go for an autonomous experience that was deliberately guarded from the Woonami wave.

Late in the week, we'd been up late and were sitting next to our dome across the street from the Woo. Carl suddenly came rolling up on the infamous Woonami bus, playing on top with a live band that had been raging full tilt with hard rock all week. It was deathly quiet at 5 o'clock in the morning and just as the bus was docking, he played some beautiful aria alone on a synth. GORGEOUS! In that moment, I realized the POWER of peaceful classical music played live in the electronica-crazed Black Rock City. I also realized that this was the Solovox personality I'd been hearing about...

Fast forward, Solovox has since played all the major music events that I've produced or co-produced (roughly 10), including most of the little gatherings of what has become a wonderful creative non-entity of post-Burning Man tribes affiliated with MarchFourth Marching Band, the Mobile Groove Bomb project, Water in the Desert and the PDX Bridge Festival to name a few. The Solovox 10-year anniversary Diggable Monkey video will feature Carl as an embedded character in this historical evolution of vibrant Portland counter culture. Since I've been tracking Solovox with a video camera at my shows, kaosmosis events, Howl and others, we've developed quite an impressive 8-year archive of footage.

As we've now assembled the media in preparation for a short retrospective piece, I believe he is the perfect protagonist to illustrate how far we've all come - and how gently our batch of grapes have aged. Don't worry, Carl. We're here to further indulge you on your 10-year anniversary. I'll be sure to keep that Suck Knob turned way down... Looking forward to the show next Friday - and you telling us all about it!

More info on the anniversary show here:
http://www.solovox.com/

Oregon News Article here:
http://oregonmusicnews.com/blog/2011/05/06/qa-pdx-electro-pioneer-turns-10-celebrate-with-solovox/