CELEBRATING MUSICAL COMMUNITY: Hinds Plaza hosted the second annual edition of the Unruly Sounds Festival Sunday. Excelsis Percussion, seen here, was among the groups performing. (Photo by Emily Reeves)

Despite a chilly drizzle Sunday afternoon, the audience sat in rapt attention as the genre-defying group Bonjour played in Princeton’s Hinds Plaza. A pair of double bassists flanked Florent Ghys’s “low string” band as it wound its way through a selection of pieces corresponding to days of the week. Their instruments’ bowed tones were sweet and thick as honey, tempered by the clarity of an electric guitar and a cello, and propelled by the drive of their set’s intermittent drum parts. At times, the musicians broke into wordless song. 

This was the second annual edition of Unruly Sounds, a local music festival that is a joint effort of the Princeton Public Library, Princeton University’s Music Department, and the Princeton Record Exchange. Last year’s festival was a two-day affair, but this year the event was a single day, dense with a rich variety of performers and genres. This year’s lineup included Damsel, The Miz’ries, Excelsis Percussion, Anna Pidgorna, Llama/Lama, Leila Adu, Owen Lake & the Tragic Loves, arx duo, Bonjour, Bitter Bloom, Annika Socolofsky, and Krush. The intention of the festival’s organizers is to host an event that will expose people to new and experimental music, and to shed light on some of the compositional talent affiliated with the University’s graduate program in music.

“Entrancing Rhythmic Complexity”

The festival’s name is apt. Early in the afternoon, The Miz’ries set included crunchy electronic percussion, otherworldly sounds from analog synthesizers buried in a tangled nest of colored wires, and vocals from Leila Adu, processed and made massive. “Your muse is a robot,” she sang, sounding fairly cybernetic herself. Later, arx duo played an intensely collaborative composition, sharing a vibraphone covered in all manner of gongs, bowls, and soup cans, which they tapped, struck, and coaxed into entrancing rhythmic complexity. Bitter Bloom’s foot-stomping acoustic numbers featured soaring harmonies over an innovative take on Appalachian and Celtic-style folk music. Owen Lake promised “electro-country,” and, through some combination of synthesizers and slide guitar, delivered exactly that.

For all the wide-ranging sounds and genres that appeared on Unruly Sounds’ three stages, the festival had a sense of cohesiveness from the overlap in personnel between ensembles. Nearly every group included a performer or composer also playing with one of the other groups during the day—an arrangement that organizer Mika Godbole said was more of an organic development than a design. Planned or not, this had the welcome effect of making Unruly Sounds seem like a celebration of a musical community, beyond just a celebration of new music.

Hinds Plaza Serendipity

Janie Hermann, Public Programming Librarian for the Princeton Public Library, said the event’s location at Hinds Plaza was key in making it accessible and “providing serendipity.” And throughout the afternoon and evening, passersby did indeed come to investigate the commotion by the library, and often ended up staying to hear something new and unusual. Princeton residents Tom and Amy Onder were out for an afternoon walk with their 7-month old daughter Stella, but stayed to hear several acts. The event was a first for Stella, and after observing her reactions to Owen Lake & the Tragic Loves, Tom seemed to think it would not be the last: “I think she likes it,” he judged.

Zena Kesselman, a senior at Princeton University, said she was glad for the opportunity to see “the intellectual musings happening on campus” out in the open, where they might more readily find an audience.

Shaking Things Up

Mika Godbole, the festival’s principal organizer, is a member of Mobius Percussion, and a freelance musician and teacher. Her earliest musical experiences were as a timpanist in an orchestra, and she said that her own exposure to new and experimental music inspired her to start up Unruly Sounds. She hopes that some of the festival’s performances will prove to be as revelatory to audience members as encountering the music of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was for her, an experience she compared to tasting “sushi or Indian food for the first time” after “dining on just mac and cheese and chicken nuggets.”

  Ms. Godbole knew Princeton had both the talent and the resources to pull together a festival like this, citing the annual Jazz Feast in Palmer Square, as well as the classical programming at the McCarter Theater and Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium. She simply saw an opportunity to do something slightly different: “Princeton needs a little bit more noise rock, a little more stuff that’s not classical, so I kind of want to shake things up a little bit.”

Outreach to Schools

The festival also had an outreach component. In the week preceding the event, some of the composers visited Community Park Elementary School to talk with and play for students. “A lot of the time, kids think that composition is done by dead people,” Ms. Godbole explained, wanting them to know that, in fact, “it’s a living, breathing art form.”

Ms. Godbole said she was pleased with this year’s event, and hopes it will continue to grow in the years to come. “People can be pulled in a slightly more adventurous direction,” she said, “The town is ripe for a sonic transformation.”