Three years in, the trio of avant-folk rockers lead a Triangle Renaissance By John Schacht
Brad says, is “addicted to learning from people” and other musicians’ processes; playing in the sets of whomever they’re touring with — and vice versa — seems like it’s written into their rider. “We always, always have collaborative minds,” says 30-year-old Phil. “Part of the fun of being a musician is meeting and playing with other musicians.” The informal fun often morphs into formal collaborations impressive for their range. Brad plays bass in The Rosebuds and contributed to the most recent Love Language album; both Cooks will be joining Mount Moriah on tour; all three ‘Fauners are integral members of Gayngs, Ryan Olson’s 10cc-inspired pop-soul outfit; and a one-off with drone maestro Greg Davis inspired the band’s Seamless Night of Music (featuring overlapping sets with Davis, Marissa Nadler, and the Jeb Bishop Trio, among others) at September’s Hopscotch Music Festival. Most recently, Megafaun curated, performed and recorded their Duke Performances-commissioned re-arrangements of Alan Lomax’s seminal Sounds of the South. The three nights of shows at the acoustically exceptional Hayti Heritage Center in Durham featured Bon Iver’s Vernon, up-and-coming Brooklyn singer Sharon Van Etten, and Virginia-based jazz ensemble Fight the Big Bull. (A CD will be culled from the performances and released in
Photo courtesy of Hometapes Records
2011 on Hometapes, Megafaun’s label.) But maybe the most telling anecdote of the band’s promiscuous curiosity revolves around their meeting with modern classical/ minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt. After listening to Dreyblatt’s conceptual record The Adding Machine in the minivan one tour, Westerlund decided he would send Dreyblatt an introductory e-mail. Within months the band was holed up for a week on an artists’ commune in upstate New York, writing compositions with Dreyblatt (who wrote a 22-minute piece specifically for Megafaun) and rehearsing for a brief tour that culminated with a performance at the 2008 Wire Festival in Chicago. Those recordings will make up the final disc in a Dreyblatt box set due for release later this year on Table of the Elements. “It’s funny, people get drunk and amped up and smash mailboxes, or whatever, but our idea of drunken fun is to e-mail a German composer and see if he’d consider making music with us,” Brad, 29, laughs. Testing their limits through collaboration is cousin to the live improvisation Megafaun does on stage, in that it keeps the band’s musical borders permeable enough for new ideas to flow in. And though there are plenty of avant garde sections on the first two records, the trio felt the care and time it took to produce and record them could use a jolt of that live spontaneity. So when
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