Somewhere
along the
veteran biker routes of northern California pulses the thundering heart
of the central
valley’s DIY music crowd. Tucked loudly and proudly behind Plainfield
Station, a
random dive north of Davis in rural Yolo County, the local independent
radio station
KDVS 90.3FM hosts the biannual, non-profit music festival Operation:
Restore
Maximum Freedom (O:RMF).
Here, distortion pedals and anti-corporate
ideals cut with
the same edge as the bikers and brews that make the scene. Founded on a
democratic and diverse approach to music, the festival has never
featured the
same band more than once since ORMF’s start in 2005. Quintessentially,
the
variety of artists include the Gamelan Ensemble, a group of drum, gong, metallophone
and xylophone players that perform
songs from the
Sunda region of the island of Java; the Sacramento hip-hop collective,
Delorean;
and fathers of Australian punk, X.
Largely, the sound skews more toward punk and
experimental, with the inclusion of many west coast bands rounding robin
from stage
to grassy horseshoe patch. Highlights include Davis’ Mucky the Ducky
that
combine unstructured high voltage instrumentation with sweat dripping
percussion,
and Los Angeles’ Foot Village, an audio colonoscopy created from four
drum kits
and one speakerphone.
