More than lights in Marfa

1. Marfa Myths

Marfa Myths is an annual music festival and multidisciplinary cultural program founded in 2014 by nonprofit contemporary arts foundation Ballroom Marfa and Brooklyn-based music label Mexican Summer.

This year’s event is scheduled April 12-15. The website details that the organizations bring together a diversity of emerging and established artists and musicians to work creatively and collaboratively across music, film and visual arts contexts. Some of the groups scheduled this year:

• Amen Dunes: After releasing an album under his own name, Damon McMahon spent the fall of 2006 in a secluded trailer in the Catskills, recording songs he would share with a few friends and shelve for three years. These recordings were unearthed and released in 2009, launching the folk project Amen Dunes.
• Equiknoxx is the Jamaican music collective of Gavsborg, Time Cow, Shanique Marie, Bobby Blackbird, Kemikal Splash and other contributors. Colón Man, their breakthrough 2017 album, acknowledges “the vital groundwork of previous generations of producers, whilst soundly contextualizing their mutant new advancements of Jamaican dancehall.” Marfa Myths marks one of the first US appearances for Equiknoxx.
• Jessica Pratt is a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter who marries folk, psychedelic, and electronic music with her voice. Her most recent album, On Your Own Love Again, straddles fantasy and reality, creating a world of sound all her own.
• The songwriter, composer and instrumentalist Tom Zé was integral to the Tropicália movement in the 1960s, and is highly regarded as an innovator of Brazilian music and beyond. >>With lyrics that flow between English and Spanish, Robert Carlos Lange’s American upbringing and Ecuadorian heritage resonate through his music. Adding aspects of the avant-garde and pop to his rhythms, loops and melodies. For Marfa Myths, Lange will be joined by a full ensemble to perform songs from Private Energy, Helado Negro’s breakthrough album 2016 / 2017 album.
• Gravity Hill is a film and music collective comprised of Jem Cohen, Guy Picciotto, Jim White, George Xylouris, and Jessica Moss. Established by Cohen in 2014, Gravity Hill is a forum for exploring film punctuated by live soundtracks. The collective’s Marfa Myths 2018 appearance will incorporate all new footage filmed in Far West Texas, and a score inspired by the alien terrain.