They bring up to 20 different instruments on stage. Anything from traditional instruments like guitar and bass, to the nontraditional, like the jaw harp, kalimba, which is a thumb piano or a fujara, and an overtone flute.
The San Francisco-based Dirtwire likes to dabble in different sounds and will not be put in a box; a band dropping samples and programmed beats like an electronic music act, and over those beats playing psychedelic roots music to world-beat or traditional West African rhythms. It’s a cocktail of world groove and psychedelic folk delivered by an experimental trio in the habit of collecting instruments from around the world and incorporating those instruments into their live set.
Dirtwire, who are multi-instrumentalists David Satori, Evan Fraser and Mark Reveley, will perform Saturday as part of the Four Corners Jam Festival, the jam band-heavy concert happening thrugh Sunday at Tico Time River Resort south of Durango.
Dirtwire formed in the California Bay Area by Fraser and Satori as a duo that would exist and make music in the recording studio only. The two dropped a record, Reveley joined the band four years back and as a trio, they have been hitting it hard since, dialing in their electronic rhythm mixed with live instrumentation hybrid sound. With so many different instruments on stage, they are a group with no dedicated front man and no one member sticking to one instrument – it’s a visually stimulating performance of musicians putting down and picking up different instruments, and a challenge for the venue’s soundperson.
If you go
What: Tico Time Four Corners Jam Festival with Dirtwire, Shakedown Street, Liver Down the River, Red Eyed Djinn and more.
When: Through Sunday.
Where: Tico Time Resort, 20 Road 2050, Aztec.
Tickets: 4-Day Pass with camping $140; individual day passes range $40 Thursday/Sunday, $55 Friday/Saturday.
More information: Call 903-0681 or visit ticotimeresort.com.
“We do a lot of instrument changing, playing a lot of different instruments from all around the world, and we sing, we’re playing drums, we’re playing flutes, we’re playing bass, playing guitar, banjos, violins, ngonis, harmonica, and all these instruments have different characteristics and different needs level-wise,” Reveley said.
Reveley describes the sounds of live instrumentation and programmed rhythms fitting together like a “Rubik’s Cube puzzle,” a mash-up of rock ’n’ roll, folk, psychedelic blues, West African funk and world-trance that remains high energy and can pack a dance floor. The genres they cover and the instruments they bring on stage will forever grow.
“The sky’s definitely the limit,” Reveley said. “We each have our core instruments that we gravitate to for the show, and we try to find something complimentary to the other two guys. Whatever they’re doing, you want to find something that will add to that but not step on their toes. Like if somebody is on a melody instrument, then someone else is on a rhythm instrument or a bass, to support whatever is going on there, but the roles switch between all three of us.”
Dirtwire is a trio of open-minded, genre-experimenting instrument collectors. Bowed banjos or Kamala ngonis, Siberian Ghost Catchers, the Brazilian hand-drum called a pandeiro or a Latin percussion instrument called a guiro, or all three of the musicians playing jaw harps for their “psychedelic hoedown” are all part of the scene. It’s a scene created by lots of listening, lots of global movement and lots of instrument collecting from wherever they roam.
“We’ve had a lot of travels and soaked up a lot along the way,” Reveley said. “A lot of different instruments and traditions and such, so we have a bit of a kid in the candy store energy sometimes, with what kind of stuff we’ve been inspired by that we can channel into the music, and work into the beat context, the context of making beats out of these influences.”
Dirtwire’s set will close out the Saturday main stage performances.
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
