QUILCENE — The first Live Life Loud music festival will bring a heavy Washington-born sound to Quilcene this weekend.
Trail blazers of expansive sound in metal music, the band Earth, will headline the festival.
Organizer Erik Kingfisher describes the Saturday and Sunday festival as two days of heavy, psych, drone, noise, punk and metal music in a 90-year-old barn on a 100-year-old farm surrounded by forestland.
“I want it to be a welcoming place — not just for metalheads or punk people, but for anyone who’s curious,” he said. “Everyone should be able to feel connected to the music and to the land.”
The weekend will take place at the Quilcene Lantern, 7360 Center Road.
Tickets for one or both days, camping and parking can be purchased at tinyurl.com/58dyujxr. Tickets, including fees, cost $33.94 for Saturday, $55.20 for Sunday and $81.78 for weekend passes.
Kingfisher used to be a part of a pirate radio collective in Arcata, Humboldt County, Calif., he said.
“I had a pirate radio show, and that was the name of my show, Live Life loud,” he said.
Kingfisher said he played loud, heavy punk, metal and hardcore music.
The name returned when Kingfisher began hosting a monthly show for area bands playing those heavier genres at Chimacum’s The Keg and I in 2023-24.
Willem and Bergen de Koch, whose family owns and operates the Quilcene Lantern, came to some of those shows, Kingfisher said.
“This is just after they acquired the property and they’re like, ‘Would you put on shows at The Lantern?’” he said.
The property will open both days at 1 p.m. Kingfisher will lead nature walks around the property at 3 p.m., and music will begin at 5 p.m.
Saturday will bring Seattle heavy rockers Benzo, Kitsap County’s shoegaze-thrash band Male//Gaze, Port Townsend and Port Hadlock hardcore outfit Trashfecta, noise-punk band Key Party from Kitsap County, and Seattle’s punk-metal group Filth Is Eternal.
Kingfisher will DJ a vinyl set under his DJ name E-Rok at 11 p.m.
Kingfisher characterized Sunday’s schedule as expansive and intense. Stebmo, solo project of Steve Moore, who’s also playing in Earth, will open the day followed by Von Wildenhaus, whom Kingfisher called beautiful and complex, followed by the loud and huge music of Serial Hawk and headliners Earth.
Sunday will be Earth’s first of six shows across the Pacific Northwest touring their fourth LP “Hex; Or Printing In The Infernal Method,” which turned 20 this year.
“The idea of having (Earth) play in a barn in Quilcene is just so profound, so surprising and amazing,” Kingfisher said.
Kingfisher said his first concert featured Earth playing between acts at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre when he was 15 years old.
“I was so mesmerized by what they were doing,” he said. “I was so confused, but also so engaged.”
Dylan Carlson, the founder and only unchanging member of Earth through its 36-year history, said that appreciation for slowness in music was innate for him.
By the time Earth formed in Olympia in 1989, Carlson already had been in two bands. He spent a year woodshopping on the guitar and developing a vision for what the band would be before starting it, he said.
Carlson called slow music an antidote to the dominant trend toward acceleration in the world.
“We’ve been trying this whole idea of constant forward motion,” he said. “We’re busier now than ever before, things are faster than ever before. I feel like being slow is like saying, ‘Now hold on, let’s take some time, to be instead of to do.”
Compared to Earth’s first three records, “Hex,” though still weighty and slow, is far less distorted and dense.
“It’s much more open and cleaner,” Carlson said.
The genesis of the record was the idea of a score for a movie based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian,” Carlson said. The idea was inspired by Jack Bruce’s song “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” he added.
“I love this book. It’s an unfilmable book, although Hollywood keeps pretending that they’ll film that someday,” Carlson said. “I was like, ‘What if I did an imaginary soundtrack to to this book?’”
The song’s titles are named after descriptions at the opening of the book’s chapters.
Long, warm, Americana notes echo and desolate wind blows through the recording of “Mirage,” the album’s opening track.
Victorious and open, the sun-drenched middle section of “An Inquest Concerning Teeth” sounds like a more cinematically mixed Grateful Dead, a band Carlson said he admires for its subtly shifting dynamics.
“Raiford (The Felon Wind)” features a minutes-long build of a low growling and sinister riff with howling second and third guitars and drums rising and falling around it.
“‘Tethered to the Pole Star’ (the closing track), really feels like a song that would play while the credits roll,” Carlson said.
Rehearsals have been going well and the music is under the band’s belt, Carlson said.
In April, the band toured the record following the plot of the book, he added.
The tour took the band through some unusual, off-the-beaten-path stops — St. Louis, Memphis, cities across Texas, into Chihuahua and Hermosillo in Mexico, Yuma in Arizona and a handful of California dates.
Kingfisher, director of stewardship and resilience at the Jefferson Land Trust, which holds a conservation easement on the Quilcene Lantern property, will guide nature tours each day at 3 p.m. The walk will cover forest ecology, salmon spawning creeks, birds, insects and indigenous presence on the land.
“Even punk and metal people, they still want to feel connected to the natural world,” Kingfisher said.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
Saturday’s Live Life Loud headliner, Seattle’s Filth is Eternal, will take the stage about 9:40 p.m.
