Marfa Myths is a multi-day music festival that’s been held annually in Marfa, TX since 2014. Where many extended fests are about listening to a succession of acts in a field while staying hydrated and succumbing to sunburn, Marfa Myths strives for a refreshing and memorable experience by establishing yearly artists in residence and encouraging creative interaction. And through Mexican Summer’s series of Marfa Myths documents, the fest’s collaborative aims can be engaged with from the comfort of one’s listening room. For “Myths 003,” the participants are Stockholm’s Dungen and Brooklyn’s Woods. If expectedly psych-imbued, the results are quite disciplined. It’s out March 16 on vinyl and digital.
I’ve never been to Marfa, but any city that hosts a yearly film festival that chooses to screen its program one film at a time, holds outdoor showings in the desert, and aligns silent films with the performance of new scores (as per Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler’s recent LP of music for Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur) sounds like my kinda place. Marfa Myths only intensifies this notion. The fest, founded by the nonprofit Ballroom Marfa and Brooklyn’s Mexican Summer, aims to be a “multidisciplinary cultural program” (including music, film, and visual arts) rather than just another pileup of performances.
Live music is a big part of the event to be sure, but so are collaborative recording residencies designed to produce results that endure as something other than just snapshots and shaky phone video footage from those holding a festival lanyard. Last year Marfa paired up Dungen and Woods, a combo that highlights how the Myths crew isn’t merely throwing together random participants and hoping for a spark, as the Stockholmers and Brooklynites toured together and struck up a rapport way back in 2009.
Furthermore, both outfits, and especially Dungen, are aptly described as psychedelic (Woods has been tagged more than once as freak-folk, though they strain against tidy categorization), which likely applies to why they hit the road together in the first place. Of course, the term psychedelia sometimes gets attached to meandering formlessness, but not in the case of these groups and ditto for “Myths 003,” which, like the prior two releases in the series, is an EP, with this installment consisting of seven tracks lasting just shy of 31 minutes.