Earth Comes to Quilcene Music Festival
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Earth’s iconic album Hex, which they will be playing in full on Sunday at the Quilcene Lantern. [/caption]
Arts news by Nigel O’Shea
A monolithic barn dominates the sepia toned album cover of Earth’s 2005 album Hex; or Printing In The Infernal Method. On Sunday, August 31, Earth will be playing that very album live in a large barn in Quilcene, otherwise known as the Quilcene Lantern.
Earth is doing a “Little PNW Hex run” for the album’s 20th anniversary. The 2005 album marked the rebirth of a band whose first three albums had an outsized influence on heavy metal. Drone metal, as dubbed by Dylan Carson, the founder of Earth, was a distorted, instrumental, slow, ambient sound that captured the imaginations of future metal bands. Indeed, it could be argued that without the early work of Earth, albums like Sleep’s famous opus Dopesmoker might never have come to be.
Hex; or Printing In The Infernal Method, their fourth album, was more Morricone than Melvins; more spaghetti western than Slayer. It was still very slow and plodding and repetitious, but with lots more reverb, slide guitar and country western instrumentation as well as the addition of a drummer, Adrienne Davies. In its twenty years, it has become an iconic emblem of the American West, a stark landscape that borrows its song titles from the 1985 Cormac McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian.
We are fortunate enough that the Lantern is one of the stops chosen to play Hex in its entirety. Earth will perform as the Sunday headliner during Live Life Loud 2 Days at the Quilcene Lantern, a festival featuring bands and bucolic camping Saturday and Sunday.
Living on our isolated little peninsula, it seems like a natural reaction to wonder how such a storied band would come to Quilcene.
“As many things in the music world do [it] kinda came about through a personal connection,” says Willem De Koch, who runs the Lantern with his brother and parents, adding, “and we’re really stoked to have them.” De Koch’s connection was with Steve Moore, who goes by Stebmo. “[He] is a long time music friend of mine, and he plays in the band, at least with this iteration of it,” De Koch says. Stebmo will also be performing their own set on Sunday.
Mystery solved as to why Earth would come to Quilcene, but what about the rest of the two-day festival? That lineup is the work of Erik Kingfisher, a diehard Earth fan, who curated the Lantern festival under the moniker Live Life Loud.
Kingfisher noticed a dearth of punk and metal shows when he moved here eighteen years ago. Named for his long-ago pirate radio show in Arcata, California, Live Life Loud Presents was co-founded by Kingfisher and his friend and In Droves bandmate Dean Brittain, who put on a series of shows once a month in the winter of 2023-2024 at the Keg and I in Chimacum. Several shows under the same name have been featured at the Lantern since.
“The owners of the Quilcene Lantern were coming to some of these shows [we] were putting on at the Keg and I around the same time they were buying the place . . . and they’re like: ‘Hey, would you put on shows at the Lantern?, we’re really going to make this thing a venue and I was like, ‘well totally, I mean let's talk . . .’”
Three shows later, and Kingfisher is putting together a powerhouse of an underground rock festival for Labor Day weekend.
Over the series of Live Life Loud events, Kingfisher has featured a handful of area bands that he is now throwing into the festival pot to fill out the two days.
“Since I curated all of this, I love all of these bands,” Kingfisher says.
Male Gaze and Key Party are two bands from Kitsap that have graced the LLL stage before. Describing Key Party, Kingfisher says, “it’s a really great performance, it’s intense and it's driving and it's heavy and it's really head nodding, engaging music. I think people who go to those shows and see Key Party, they want to go again, you know?”
Trashfecta are the local ambassadors of punk. “Trashfecta is a sort of a long time kind of like a post hardcore punk band here,” Kingfisher says, “[A]ll four of those musicians are really talented and it’s great, it’s intense and people who have been around here a while and have gone to punk shows, like everybody knows and loves Trashfecta.”
Seattle act Benzo hasn’t played here before, but Kingfisher booked another band from artist Mike Stubbs, Future Tense, at Manresa Castle in the summer of 2023 and loves everything Stubbs has been involved in. Kingfisher enthused, “I really like their songs, and I think people will love them.”
Filth Is Eternal, also from Seattle, will headline Saturday’s showcase. Rounding out his summary of Saturday, Kingfisher says, “And then Filth Is Eternal is really like one of the best punk/metal bands in the Northwest. I’m stoked that they’re able to come.”
After a high-energy, up-tempo Saturday, Sunday’s line-up follows the mood of its headliner with a more down-tempo, experimental and drone-based arrangement of bands.
Stebmo, one of the key musical connections to all of this and a key figure in the sludgy metal scene, will begin Sunday’s music. “He’s recorded with Sunn O))), another drone metal band that would have never existed without Earth,” Kingfisher reports.
Von Wildenhaus played the Lantern in June of 2024 at a previous LLL event with Dead and Thrones. Kingfisher describes them as being avant-garde, psychedelic, and enchanting, providing something a little different as the festival builds into the evening.
“And then Earth being Earth . . .I mean, you know they’re, they’re uh, I don’t even know if I have the right quotes for it, but they’re legendary. It’s a beautiful album and I think it’s going to be like the perfect Earth songs to play in a barn, you know what I mean?”
— Erik Kingfisher, creator of Live Life Loud
Serial Hawk is the penultimate band playing on Sunday, a return to the Lantern after performing in March with Old Iron and Key Party.
“Serial Hawk, man,” Kingfisher raves, ”They make these beautiful kind of slow metal songs that are big and powerful, and they’re like steamroller kind of metal, it’s so good. I’m so stoked they can play.”
Bringing us to the main event on Sunday, Earth.
“And then Earth being Earth . . .I mean, you know they’re, they’re uh, I don’t even know if I have the right quotes for it, but they’re legendary. It’s a beautiful album and I think it’s going to be like the perfect Earth songs to play in a barn, you know what I mean?”
I think we do know what Kingfisher means. An album that is so evocative of Western space is being performed in a barn, and the setting shouldn’t be undersold. Willem De Koch and his family work seven days a week to run and maintain one of the only venues in the area that is exclusively for live performance.
“In comparison to a typical rock club you’d find in the city, the physical space itself is totally unique,” De Koch says, “It’s original wood construction, vaulted ceilings on this 90-year-old barn, and in addition to that, just creating a cool aesthetic and vibe, it means the acoustics are exceptional. ”
The Quilcene Lantern has all the ingredients of a relaxing getaway, but does its remote location make it too difficult to book artists?
“Less so than we thought,” DeKoch responded, “Part of what is cool about the space is that we can put artists up on site, which I think really greases the wheels because there’s not a ton of accommodations options in the area and that’s usually the biggest barrier, but that’s something we’re trying to do more and more is kinda present ourselves as a stopping point between Portland and Seattle.”
The Lantern makes itself accessible to traveling concertgoers by offering space for camping and RV sites. De Koch describes the accommodations: ”It’s an alder grove and it’s surrounded by these beautiful trees.”
Gates open for Live Life Loud at 1 pm, and the music starts at 5. Campers should have plenty of time to loll around the property and soak in the beauty and calm before the music starts. De Koch says, “We're not doing a tremendous amount of extracurricular activities this go round . . . but Erik is going to lead a nature walk both days in the early afternoon. And then people can hang out in the venue, and we’ll have the cafe open, and sip coffee and enjoy the view. We’ll be spinning vinyl in the cafe, we’ve got a new record player in there set up so folks can dig through the crate. . .mostly it’ll just be a relaxing getaway framed by long evenings of good music.”
Live Life Loud 2 Days at the Lantern is an all ages event and the organizers want to emphasize and spread the word that kids under 17 are free!
Prices and details for tickets, parking and camping are here.
