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It’s no secret that summer festival lineups have become increasingly focus-grouped, Venn-diagrammed and otherwise homogenized in the last decade. Two festivals a stone’s throw from the city taking place this weekend are charting their own path—Pickathon, the more well-known, folk-forward immersive festival with a focus on sustainability and community, and the newer, lesser-known Canyon Vibration, an electronica-leaning two-day event in Tygh Valley. Either is a good choice for the weekend, as both festivals embrace eclecticism and uplift lesser-known artists, even if it means raking in fewer bucks than juggernauts like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Outside Lands.
Pickathon
Pickathon is more than just a music festival; when it’s in full swing, it’s something like the 51st-largest city in Oregon.
Now in its 25th edition, the annual music festival at Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley transforms the 80-acre property into a combination of a rock concert and a planned community. The nine stages all have their own “neighborhoods,” each with its own concept and design team.
“Most festivals you go to are like a single field with a stage, you’re there from noon to 10, and then they kick everybody out,” festival founder Zale Schoenborn says. “We’re about as different from that as you can humanly imagine.”
For those who don’t know about Pickathon, some context: The festival was founded in 1999 as a fundraiser for local radio station KBOO and has taken place every year since except from 2020 to 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially focused on roots and Americana music, the festival now showcases an eclectic and smartly curated lineup across multiple genres, though usually focused on bands that use live instrumentation rather than DJs and electronic producers.
Last year, the festival reupped its conditional use permit to stay at Pendarvis Farm for another 10 years. It also established Creative Neighborhoods, a nonprofit with such programs as a mural painting mentorship, coffee tech training for baristas, a film camp, and collaborations with artists on sustainable stages.
The festival hopes to focus further on these community projects in the future, but Pickathon’s art-forward approach means that it sometimes operates at a loss, and the festival racked up nearly $600,000 in debt during the pandemic.
Schoenborn aims to raise $1 million to cover the debt and keep Pickathon and Creative Neighborhoods going through the next decade. He says the festival has raised about half of that by cutting costs and soliciting community donations (a crowdfunding page at the website sits at $15,000, but Schoenborn says the campaign has raised about $150,000 in individual donations). The festival plans to hold a raffle this year to help reach its goal.
“We’re in a great position, we’re actually getting to the point where we can actually pay our bills for the year, but we’re carrying so much from keeping this dream alive since coming out of COVID,” he says.
The major headliners this year include blues guitarist Taj Mahal and jamgrass favorites Greensky Bluegrass, known for their elaborate light show. The most auspicious act this year is Portugal. The Man, the indie-pop band who came from Alaska to Portland in the 2000s and became a formidable commercial force in the following decade.
“They can play Madison Square Garden,” Schoenborn says of the “Feel It Still” hitmakers. “But they want to be part of this. They know this could be their favorite show of the year.”
Further down the lineup are local favorites like Haley Heynderickx and Rose City Band along with buzzy young indie-rock bands like Dummy, Wild Pink and Being Dead. You may not recognize these names, but given Pickathon’s reputation for booking bands that blow up later in their careers, you may soon enough.
“If you look at our lineup, you may know only a small fraction of those bands,” Schoenborn says. “But if you look two years back on any of our lineups, it’s hard to believe that they were all at the same festival.”
Just as important to Schoenborn are the stages the artists play on. Pickathon won awards from the American Institute of Architects for its Treeline stage in 2017 and 2019.
The festival is continuing its tradition of ambitious stage designs with the Fractal Forest, this year’s incarnation of the Grove Stage. Illuminated by modular interlocking frames, the stage, designed by Scott Edwards Architecture, is integrates organically with the Douglas firs on the property to look as if it’s rising out of the forest floor itself.
The stage will be deconstructed and reassembled into bike shelters, garden beds and community seating for transitional housing villages built by Portland’s Home Building Foundation. This repurposing is in keeping with Pickathon’s policy of generating minimal waste, which even includes providing reusable silverware for food rather than disposable paper or plastic cutlery (“we were the first major American festival to wash dishes”).
“Normal festivals would just throw all this stuff away,” Schoenborn says. “We try to cycle it back into the community to make a difference.”
Canyon Vibration
Leeonn Bailey, organizer of Canyon Vibration in Wasco County’s Tygh Valley, is reluctant even to mention the word “festival” to describe the event.
“It’s really more of a container for like all the intersections of community,” says Bailey, a DJ with roots in Chicago who lives in Portland and DJs mononymously as Leeonn. “It’s very focused on uplifting voices in these smaller underground scenes.”
The electronic event is now in its fifth year, and the closest thing it has to a star headliner is A Guy Called Gerald, the pioneering English DJ who made some of the most influential acid house recordings in the ’80s and ’90s.
Most of the lineup, though, is devoted to rave faves whose names might not ring a bell to those outside the dance-music ecosystem but which inspire fierce devotion within them—Kim Ann Foxman, for instance, a New York DJ late of the great queer disco group Hercules and Love Affair, or Portland artist Carly Barton, who’s as well known for her DJing as avant-garde Bandcamp releases like Carb’s Bong Orchestra.
All of this takes place in a high-desert canyon near a town of 224 people; the festival, by contrast, caps attendance at 500. Light projections are mapped to the walls of the canyon itself, which is the kind of place that seems designed to facilitate life-changing experiences.
“It’s high desert and vividly sunny, and there’s a gorgeous river,” Bailey says. “It’s out in the wilderness, but close enough to Portland.”
Canyon Vibration relies on ticket sales alone for funding. This means a steeper ticket price than one might expect for a rave featuring mostly underground artists, but the price also funds amenities like social workers and physicians on site while allowing the festival to remain independent from corporate funding and keep a DIY, small-community character.
“It’s one of the events where folks really get to know each other,” Bailey says. “You leave not just remembering people but remembering people’s faces.”
GO: Pickathon at Pendarvis Farm, 16581 SE Hagen Road, Happy Valley, pickathon.com. Thursday–Sunday, July 31–Aug. 3. $238–$1,860; Thursday admission $95 extra, kids 12 and under free. All ages. Canyon Vibration in Tygh Valley, address given with RSVP, canyonvibration.com. Friday–Sunday, Aug. 1–3. $249.60. 21+.
