 by ANDREA MYERS
 As independent music venues and cinemas struggle to keep their doors open this summer in Minneapolis, Gretchen Williams and her small staff of Sound Unseen music-and-movie patriots want you to know one thing—they are not afraid.
“What sets our festival apart from all the big ones—it seems like bigger is so much better to everybody—is that ours is so much more intimate,” says Williams, who has been involved with the festival for six of its seven years. “You have a unique experience. It feels personal. It doesn’t feel like you’re just one of 50,000 people in the joint, and it feels like you’re going to see some familiar faces and make relationships happen ... it just feels authentic to me.”
Since 2000, Sound Unseen has given Minneapolitans the chance to view rare and mostly unreleased independent music films in conjunction with performances by local bands. For this year’s festival, the films and related local bands have been scheduled into one shared venue—most nights the Bryant-Lake Bowl—so that the live music and film screenings flow together into one continuous experience.
 Steve
Yasgar, who was responsible for booking bands for this year’s festival,
initially became involved because he loved “the fact that they give props
to local music,” he says. “They take a documentary about a certain
band and type of music, and then they give a nod to a local band that fits with
that. I think that’s cool.” Fans of the Pixies can catch a screening
of new indie film “loudQUIETloud:
A Film About the Pixies” alongside a set by local Pixies cover band
Be Lonna, for example, while rock history scavengers will appreciate “Wasted
Orient,” a documentary about Chinese punk band Joyside and an evening
of music with local punk rockers The Haves Have It.
“Minneapolis is pretty well-cultured, and this is one of the hot things
you can do all year where you can just dive into all that culture,” Yasgar
explains. “You can watch a movie about one of your favorite bands, or
something more obscure, and at the same time get to go see some of the best
local music we have, to show that that spirit is alive and well here in the
Twin Cities.”
Other local bands performing at the festival include folk-rock favorite Robert
Skoro, piano-driven songstress Jenny
Dalton and the eerily Neil Young-inspired vintage songwriter Nick
Robin. Many of the bands, despite their musical differences, seem to be
drawn from the same pool of local talent. “It seems like now, all of a
sudden, there’s a lot of second generation bands,” Yasgar observes,
ruminating on the state of the local music scene while looking over the bands
scheduled to play this year’s festival. Yasgar has been a longtime participant
in local music happenings, drumming for bands like the Swiss
Army and Askeleton,
and coordinating local music festival Eyes
+ Hands. Specifically, in this year’s lineup, he notes that, “National
Bird, that used to be Tin Horns; and Mystery Palace, that’s James Buckley
from Rob Skoro’s band [and Ryan Olcott from 12Rods]; and Roma di Luna,
that’s Crescent Moon from Kill the Vultures ... We live in the land of
ten thousand million bands, and everybody is in everybody’s band.”
 For
music fans who are less avid in attending local shows, the festival is a chance
to see several new or recently re-formed bands that have been hand-picked to
represent the next wave of the Minneapolis music scene.
“The idea is to introduce people to stuff that they might not find otherwise,
and that they might really like,” agrees Emily Condon, program director
for the festival. “There’s a whole range of experiences for people
to have.” She also stresses the importance of catching the rare screenings
and performances. “For anybody who’s a music fan, both the shows
and the films are things you can’t find anywhere else.” Especially
with the films, the festival is “a lot of times your only shot to see
them,” she says.
Aside from the actual content of the festival events, however, there is something
else brewing under the surface, which I picked up on during interviews with
the different staff members—a feeling of community pride, of passion for
their work and of urgency. “In this time where you see less and less efforts
that aren’t being bankrolled by corporations who are doing it as a big
marketing opportunity, I’m happy that we can still exist,” says
Condon.
“The thing I love about Sound Unseen,” Condon says, “and the
reason I feel so privileged to work on it, is that there are only five of us,
and this isn’t our full-time job, and we have this really dedicated group
of people who participate and help—and they’re all doing this as
this kind of labor of love.”
“I put it to the audience as a call to action. If you want to support
independent efforts that aren’t just trying to peg you as a demographic,
this is your festival,” she says. ||
A full schedule of events is available at soundunseen.com
|
