Quiet Music Festival: Turn Down For Once

A little over a decade ago, Chris Johanson's ears turned against him.

A visual artist and musician, the 46-year-old has long suffered from tinnitus. Until about 2003, it had been manageable. Shortly after moving to Portland from San Francisco, for reasons still unclear, it became unbearable. He'd made friends with members of the local rock scene, like Quasi and Jackie-O Motherfucker, and suddenly, he couldn't even make it through their shows. It was as if his body were rejecting his own taste.

"I had to regroup my brain around sound," he says.

Eventually, that process of realignment led Johanson to a conclusion: If he couldn't go see loud bands anymore, he'd just ask those bands to turn down. Now in its fifth year, the Quiet Music Festival has seen dozens of artists—including Stephen Malkmus, Mark Eitzel and TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone—take on the challenge of dialing back the volume, with Sonny and the Sunsets' Sonny Smith, Rebecca Gates, Secret Drum Band and, in a return engagement, Malkmus and his Jicks, among the acts stepping up this year. We spoke to Johanson about curating the only festival in Portland where napping through a set is considered a compliment. 

WW: Was it a big deal for you to shift toward listening to and making quieter music?

Chris Johanson: What I found was, it's really bold and seriously hard work to make music that is low volume. That's why I started that band Sun Foot. That was my first step into this kind of thing. We play through the smallest amps, set on the lowest possible amplification. It's really interesting to see how people approach being up there, in a stripped-down situation like that. It's really vulnerable and really revealing to me.

So you see the festival as a kind of challenge to the artists.

That is a big part of it. That's when you can see how truly thoughtful and gifted a performer can be, when they deal with the parameters. 

Do you give the artists rules for playing? 

If you play through an amp, it needs to be a really small amp and barely amplified. If you play with a drum kit, they've got to be muffled, or they need to use brushes. But people are just thoughtful. They know I do it for people who have serious difficulties around volume. Most people who've been playing music for a long time, they have issues with it themselves that they're dealing with, or they know people who've paid the price for the lifestyle. So I think the musicians find it refreshing.

How do you approach the curation?

I've met so many people through the years. What I'll do is I'll just pick a person, and then I bounce it off that, and it just organically creates itself. I make the event based on what interests me more than what's going to be super-popular. If 100 people show up, or even less, it's a successful night. 

Who's surprised you the most with how they've adapted? 

Money Mark's performance was really amazing. He made it more like storytelling, about how he was introduced to music, starting with the first instrument his parents bought him up through the Beastie Boys and beyond. That was really cool, because it was more of a performative situation, and it's not really what he does at all.

You actually encourage the crowd to sleep.

We make it really comfortable. It looks very '70s, '80s, early-'90s interior design, all different types of rugs and blankets and pillows and lamps, with different colored light bulbs. The music is so quiet, it's like a lullaby, and people really do fall asleep. At any given time there'll be like 15 people asleep. 

WWeek 2015