Gavin's Underground
Kilby Court Experimental Show
Taking a break from the normal music trends, I decided to venture into unmarked territory with a Wednesday show at Kilby Court. With no one falling into a specific type of genre or musical style, I got a chance to interview and take pictures of four local bands who in their own different ways have one foot planted in the musical and the other firmly planted in the explorational. From Salt Lake we have Stag Hare, Bountiful's own Navigator, from Layton the ensemble currently known as Seth Pulver, and the Ogden/Logan connection of Desby Dove.

Seth Pulver (Seth "Mack" Pulver (eating his fist) with Dustin Mirran, Rob Sanderson, Reese Wilson)

http://www.myspace.com/sethpulvermusic

Gavin: What did you think of the crowd tonight?

Seth: It's a good crowd. I think we had kind of a big mixed crowd because of the other bands playing. People who you normally wouldn't find at the concert just because of the wide range of people who are playing.

Gavin: Tell us a little about yourself and how you came together as a group.

Seth: I've been playing music ever since I was young, self taught except for one year of drums, but everything else was done myself. After getting out of high school I was just figuring out what to do musically. I did my own thing and recorded a CD that's done completely by me. And then I wanted to play live so I asked some of my friends if they'd be willing to help me out. They practiced and learned the songs and added their own touches to it, helped them sound a little bit better than they do on the CD. Other then that, I've just been kinda doing me own thing.

Gavin: Cool. What's your opinion on the local music scene?

Seth: Right now I've noticed there's a lot of good things happening, because I think people are dropping their stigmas of what music should be and they're more pushing their boundaries. Especially here locally, bands like Stag Hare and Navigator, Aye Aye and Grizzley Prospector. There's tons of cool bands that are sparking up right now who are pushing the limits of what music should be and not caring necessarily what mainstream media has put labels on music and pushing it to new bounds.

Gavin: With that said, what's your opinion on the current trends out right now?

Seth: Well, I'm not really one to fall into trends. There's not much good mainstream music right now, that's just my opinion. I think really if you're going to find good music that people are really doing for the soul reason of music instead of other reasons like money and fame. You have to go to more underground places to find that kind of music that's happening. Because now what's on the media is more of a market, they're just selling as many record sales as possible. But right now there's a lot of small independent record labels sprouting up that are doing really cool things. You're not going to find that anywhere in the mainstream media, you need to go to alternative sources.

Gavin: So then what's your opinion on the industry in general?

Seth: Well I guess when they call it an industry, that's kind of saying ti right there. It shouldn't be an industry, music is art, music is an expression of a person, and it should be looked at as a market or an industry or a way to get money. It should be taken back to its roots when it was all just about community and collective, people getting together listening to music and making music, expressing themselves.

Gavin: What's your opinion on file sharing?

Seth: I think it's awesome! A lot of the music I stumble across is from blogs and stuff, of course most of those blogs encourage that the readers and the downloaders to buy when possible. Today a lot of kids don't have the money to go spend all this money on CD's, so I think file sharing is good as long as people realize that they should still support local music. Facebook is good because so many people use it, but there's a new thing called Virb that's a lot less corrupted than MySpace.

Gavin: You have one CD out, are you working on another or just enjoying this one?

Seth: Yeah, I'm actually working on a completely new music project called Silt Labels. I've been working on that and I already have eight songs recorded, not final, but at least concepts. I'm planning on it being anywhere from fifteen to twenty-two tracks long. I'm actually planning on heading to Peru to help teach music at an elementary school for three months and also record a lot down there with my field recorder. Hopefully when I get back in September, give me a couple more months after that around November and I should probably have that next CD out. I plan on doing tapes and small releases in between.

Gavin: Any local artists you recommend?

Seth: Well first my friend Dustin Mirran is doing some cool stuff you can check out on MySpace. Other than that I'd say the whole A-Star family, everything I've listened to is cool. They're from Farmington and Kaysville. And then one of my really good friends, Taylor Christensen. He has a project called Sparks & Spools and they are just awesome. And two kids who are going to be leaving us soon down int he Utah County area and they have projects called Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla and Who's That Grunting