free103point9 co-presents SAWfest 2008. Live webcast of performances at www.free103point9.org.

Salem Art Works will be presenting its annual, all-day, outdoor music/sound/poetry/transmission event SAWfest on July 19th from 2-11pm at its 119-acre site in Washington County. This year will see a broader scope of music, expanded to include all methods of sound-making and broadcasting. The public is invited to attend with tickets going on sale for $10 on June 1st at the SAW's newly inaugurated Visitor's Center at 19 Cary Lane or by calling 518 854 7674. The roster of talent to be performing at the event is detailed below.

Opening the day will be a special radio broadcast by fellow nonprofit organization free103point9 out of Brooklyn, NY. Starting with a 4x4 radio broadcast where four performers from the festival's roster are chosen to perform a score for four radios, free103point9 will then continue a live internet stream of the event's happenings. Several radios will be spread throughout the SAW site to enable audience members to wander freely throughout the property and listen remotely. For more information on the free103point9 and the Wave Farm, go to www.free103point9.org.

Radio 4x4
Radio 4x4 is a collaborative radio transmission performance. Four simultaneous audio performances are separately sent through FM transmitters tuned to different frequencies and are picked up by radios positioned throughout a performance space and tuned to those four frequencies. The audience becomes an active collaborator in the performance, "mixing" the audio feeds by moving about the space among the four signals. Radio 4x4 was conceived of by free103point9 staff members in 2003. Since then, over twenty Radio 4x4s have taken place in the United States and abroad. http://www.free103point9.org/transmissionprojects/

Jonathan Kane
Jonathan Kane's February (New York, NY) will headline this year's event. As a Woodstock, New York teenager obsessed with the mystique of Chicago's Southside, Kane, along with his brother Anthony, formed the Kane Bros. Blues Band. This was no standard teen garage band -- Kane was good. Very good. While other high school kids sloughed at the burger shop or studied their algebra, Jonathan Kane was lying about his age, playing bars opening for Muddy Waters and James Cotton. Kane's rise to prominence as a Downtown NYC legend began as co-founder of Swans, the seminal no-wave, New York band he started with Michael Gira in 1977. Kane takes credit for the deliberate rhythms and complexity of Swans' early work, attributing it to his lifelong love of the blues. Leading February, his six-piece, four-guitar band, Kane summons Swans' concussive wallop, then steers it all head-on into the blues. As _Rolling Stone_ sums it up: Kane is, quite simply, "volcanic." For sound samples, please visit myspace.com/jonathankane.

Neptune
Neptune's three members are equal parts musicians, sculptors, scientists, blacksmiths, electricians, and industrial machinists; relentlessly inventive, possibly sane. Together, they construct all of their instruments, forging guitars and drums out of circular saw blades, gas tanks, oil drums, bike parts, VCR casings, and miscellany from the trash. Electronics, and even cords, are homemade as well. The combined effect is a bizarre, post-apocalyptic mélange of steel, iron, wire, rust, rivet, knob, and cable; it's lunacy, arc-welded for maximum destruction. Concerts are seizures of motion. Wearing 40-pound guitars assembled entirely from scrap metal, the members don't play their instruments - they battle them, like mechanized golems. They will be in residence at SAW the week following SAWfest teaching a nontraditional instrument building and electronics workshop Sound, Object + Action, and also play late in the day on July 19th. For sound samples, please visit myspace.com/neptuneandjupiter

Megafaun
From the vibrant Southern quasi-capital of Durham emerge Megafaun, wearing earnestness across the chest and abstraction along the sleeves. They pour forth dulcet harmonies, as seeking vocals tug banjo lines up the Appalachian mountains; redemptive noise soaks everything, like thick air wafting from the Atlantic. Bury the Square, Megafaun's debut, is a triumph, bearing an essential consequence: folk music has been wrested from purist hands. Clawhammer banjo and strummed acoustics lock and roll with electric guitars and electronic textures. They don't add freak to folk or folk to freak; rather, they realize that folk implies deep, personal, intense expression, whether the instrument is a parlor piano with the lid thrown back or a distortion pedal with the case cracked loose. In this band, orthodoxy and unorthodoxy flow together as one. For sound samples, go to www.myspace.com/megafaun.

Also performing: quirky fems New Randy (New York, NY, www.myspace.com/newrandy), avant performance poets Bob Holman + Vito Ricci (New York, NY, www.bobholman.com), psych rock kids Gun Christmas (Albany, NY, www.myspace.com/gunchristmas), Marvelous Stairs (Brooklyn, NY, www.myspace.com/marvelousstairs), old school punkers Next President (North Adams, MA, www.myspace.com/nextpresident) and reverent rockers Syd Barrett Appreciation Society (Salem, NY). All performers subject to change without notice.

Peter Barrett
Opening in Barn II, also on Saturday, July 19th, is Peter Barrett's 80-foot wide mural. Barrett has been in residence at SAW during the summer 2008 season.