In the glut of summer music festivals, one festival stands out as a little…different. What the Heck? Fest takes place annually in Anacortes. It features live shows by a slew of local talent, mainly a lot of K Records- and Knw-Yr-Own-associated acts. As the name implies, it’s not your ordinary music festival. Allow us to explain by recounting the Weirdest Moments of What the Heck? 2008, which took place this past weekend.

Lucky Dragons’ Audience-Participation Experiment
Lucky Dragons is Luke Fischbeck, a lanky man with a haircut that’s half-mullet, half-bowl cut. He knelt in the middle of the floor of the City Hall Basement, surrounded by a seated audience. He fiddled with knobs, plugged and unplugged cords, and pressed buttons on an assembly of devices, unleashing variously-distorted strains of electronic music. It sounded like malfunctioning robots playing kotos. There was a projector casting jittery images-white noise fuzz, a ghostly hand over some leaves-on the ceiling. Fischbeck started handing out something-candy? drugs?-to the audience members seated around him. The crowd pulled in tight as everyone leaned in to figure out what was going on. Rocks! Rocks? People grabbed handfuls of them and passed them back. Fishbeck then gave out some apparently touch-sensitive electronic devices to the crowd. As people touched them with their rocks, they triggered different samples. People gathered in clusters, tapping their rocks and passing the devices around, creating a multi-layered wall of sound. It sounded better than it should have.

At some point, the audience-created soundscape ended and Fischbeck got the crowd to start the handclap equivalent of a drum circle. There was sort of one prevailing rhythm and countless other riffs going. The clapping continued as Fischbeck disconnected his equipment and walked out of the circle. Eventually Kevin from the Department of Safety-wearing an orange reflective vest, appropriately-had to get everyone to stop so they could sound check the next band.

Calvin Johnson’s Quasi-Revolutionary Band/Slideshow
When you’re the founder of K Records, you can kind of do whatever you want, especially at What the Heck? Fest. And Calvin Johnson did. His set started off with Johnson on guitar for a band fronted by Ian Svenonius. (Apparently the band was fresh off recording together for a few weeks recently; should be interesting to see what comes of it.) The charmingly brusque Svenonius introduced the band’s performance as “the soundtrack for a film.” Everyone turned to watch a slide projection on the wall opposite the stage of an introductory narrative of sorts. Two female band members provided the voices of two aliens headed towards Earth, contemplating humanity’s primitive capitalist way of life. The dialogue consisted of vaguely-Communist, mostly-comprehensible ruminations on the role of “groups” (as in musical groups) within this primitive society. It was funny and not overly serious, and eventually transitioned into an example of what one of these Earthling “groups” might sound like, which involved Johnson, Svenonius and the band playing some sixties revolutionary-style garage rock anthems. The first song ended in staged confusion, band members arguing with each other that they had played the wrong number of verses or choruses-a jab at some of the conventional expectations of “groups” and their performances. There were more, shorter cut-scenes in between the rest of their songs, and eventually Calvin Johnson performed a couple of his own, backed by a drummer. He kicked things off solo, performing “Sitting Alone at the Movies,” which involves Johnson’s warbling baritone vocals and lots of sashaying around the stage. (This YouTube video should give you an idea of what that’s like if you’ve never seen it.)

Game Day with the Blow
In the official What the Heck? Fest guidebook, there was a mysterious event. “‘GAMES’ at CAUSLAND PARK curated by the Blow/Khaela Maricich.” That’s all it said. We showed up, not sure what to expect. As it turned out, “GAMES” didn’t mean a secret concert by the Blow or some sort of performance art thing; it meant games. Khaela Maricich led a group of maybe thirty people (some elementary-school age kids, a bunch of hip teenagers and college-age youths, and a handful of adults) in a bunch of different games. As people arrived, they had note cards with different nouns (”Lollipop,” “Frankenstein,” “iPod,” “Alfa Romeo”) taped to their foreheads. You had to ask questions to everyone around to figure out what you were. Various other games followed, prompting fond recollections of summer camp. There were cloth flags for different teams. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with my feet and fed it to a girl, with my feet. There was a race involving turning one person into a toilet paper mummy, and throwing Fruit Loops at the shaving cream-coated head of another.

It all culminated in a “Stage-Diving/Crowdsurfing” workshop, conducted next to a picnic table. Khaela Maricich stood atop the table and directed everyone to crowd in tight, then put some Black Sabbath on the boombox. “I was imagining like two hundred people but this will be okay,” she said before diving into the crowd. And we crowd-surfed, for what seemed like a good twenty-five minutes. Everyone went-a lot of the little kids many times. Phil Elverum even got in on the action. “Have you ever done this before?” someone asked. “I tried with some friends, once. It didn’t really work,” he said before leaping into the crowd. Only one person got dropped (but not hurt). It was way fun, if a bit tiring. All those too-cool-to-play-games scenesters sitting on the sidelines during the games watching really missed out.

The preceding is just a small sampling of all the events at this year’s What the Heck? Fest-there was just too much to do, let alone cover. For more information, check out these links: What the Heck Fest, Department of Safety, Knw-Yr-Own Records.