By Brandon Bussolini
When the Guardian checked in with Operation: Restore Maximum Freedom two years ago, the quasi-annual, daylong music festival, organized by UC Davis student-run radio station KDVS, was in its fourth incarnation and ready to present one of the most ambitious lineups of its short existence.
Seventeen bands, ranging from Kid 606 to Michael Hurley, were slated to play, but just as 606 and hip-hop crew Third Sight were setting up - the bands with the biggest guarantees - Yolo County’s finest shut the proceedings down. “Some nearby residents complained about the noise level to the police,” writes Elisa Hough, co-organizer of this year’s O:RMF and a KDVS DJ, in an e-mail. “Everyone - even people who weren't involved in the organizing - looked and felt so defeated.”
Plainfield Station, a Woodland country bar that has hosted O:RMF since its inception, is an unlikely place for this to happen: plunked down amid flat, tawny farmland, the nearest house is probably at least a mile away. But regardless of the small irony that crops up between its name and that incident, O:RMF is a provocative title in more ways than one. According to Rick Ele, a longtime KDVS DJ and veteran booking agent in Sacramento’s underground music scene, the name comes from a brainstorming session with former KDVS Events Manager Brendan Boyle and former DJ Joe Finkel.
Ele and co. had stumbled upon a Web site explaining the naming conventions for military operations, so the three devised the name with a mind to the venue’s location and KDVS’ own free-form, educational mission. “Even though it’s only two miles from the edge of Davis,” Ele says by phone, “Plainfield Station feels like you’re just kind of beyond the arm of the law, and you can take full advantage of what freedom you have left in this era of our civil liberties eroding.”
O:RMF has a history of showcasing bands who play the festival as relative unknowns and, within one or two years, attract steadily increasing attention. The 2007 lineup of O:RMF V included New Age revivalist White Rainbow, one-woman psych dynamo Valet, and the narcotic dance jams of Lemonade.
Any thematic or aesthetic coherence within a lineup is purely accidental, though - community members and KDVS staffers are invited bring bands to the table and take part in the process of shaping the festival’s bill. This year - which, unlike previous years, doesn’t have any clear headliners - two East Bay groups happen to account for some of the most promising performances: Inca Ore and Religious Girls. Inca Ore’s recent Not Not Fun LP, Birthday of Bless You, sculpts tape noise and dissonance into visceral, prayer-like invocations. Religious Girls are eerie, too - something about their music suggesting the dark flip-side of Battles’ “Atlas” - precise drum hits slowed to a trickle and cresting waves of voice-like chiming keyboard.
But beyond issues of taste, Boyle thinks O:RMF offers something that larger-scale, clusterfuck festivals - the kind with cross-branding opportunities and $9 beer - do not. “Plainfield’s a great environment to rein in the end of the summer,” he says in a phone interview. “What established the festival was the idea of a classic kind of Americana - a place to drink beer and eat burgers and listen to bands all day long.”
OPERATION: RESTORE MAXIMUM FREEDOM VI!
With LSD and the Search for God, Traditional Fools, Blackblack, HEXLOVE, Ohioan, Inca Ore, Beware of the Knight, the Countless Others, Religious Girls, and more
Sat/11, 1-10 p.m., $7-$10, all ages
Plainfield Station
23944 County Road 98, Woodland
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