Treefort Music Fest is curated by artists for artists

Beneath an underpass in the graceless concrete and chainlink of a skatepark, a band with warpaint and Kool-Aid dyed hair talk of throwing Elon Musk into a tank of piranhas; the music like a death warrant while the kids lose their minds and the American flag flies at full-mast across the street. Elsewhere, drag queens blow kisses in a shower of dollar bills. Middle-schoolers become noise-punks with guitar shreds and hard vocals to make your hairs stand on end.

These are only a few moments in five days at Treefort: a music and culture festival which promises to let you in on all the city’s secrets. When the rite of passage has always been for creatives to abandon their small towns for the promised lands of LA and New York City, Treefort was born with the intention of giving them something to stay for.

One of the fastest growing cities in the US and an oxygen bubble of liberalism in an otherwise stiflingly red state, Boise is in an era of self-definition. Countercultural and punk-driven, Treefort is a festival made by the community for the community. Even as it attracts global talent and enviable headliners including Confidence Man, Bright Eyes and Remi Wolf, many of its artists call Boise their home. Almost two-thirds of its line-up is drawn from open submissions. Through creating a free and accessible application platform, the festival boasts early performances from Lucy Dacus and Lizzo long before their breakthroughs.

This year - the festival’s ‘Lucky 13’ - commanded the highest attendance the festival has had to date with as many as 17,000 people each day exploring the hundreds of events and performances happening across the city. It’s a brilliant, sprawling thing – and music is just the beginning. Each ‘Fort’ excavates a subculture of the city and brings it to light: Filmfort which celebrates the best of emerging independent cinema; Storyfort showcases the brightest literary voices, while Dragfort and Skatefort invest power into those communities to present their scene’s talent on their own terms. In a splintered world, Treefort brings a sense of togetherness which is as euphoric to feel as it is radical to witness.

It’s this very spirit with which the festival was conceived in 2012. Choosing to transmute loss into impactful change for the city, co-founder Lori Shandro chose to dedicate her resources to build a legacy for Boise’s arts and culture scene following the sudden loss of her husband in a private plane crash. The vision was brought to life by producer Drew Lorona, marketing smarts from Megan Stoll – and, of course, the indispensable Eric Gilbert. A veteran of the Boise music scene as both a musician himself and DJ for the local radio station, Gilbert has overseen the curation of Treefort since its first edition. Determined to represent homegrown talent, whether that be the teenagers cutting their teeth at the Boise Rock School or the artists descending from its historical Basque community, the festival seeks to capture all the colours of this kaleidoscopic city. “I like to think of it as curated by artists for artists – then we invite the public in, right?” says Gilbert.

As you explore Downtown Boise, its surviving gold-rush character competing with rapid modernisation, you’ll find that each coffee shop, bar and food joint not only supports but is inextricably a part of Treefort. Windows are painted with murals for the festival and local businesses offer discounts to attendees; we have over 700 local volunteers to thank for bringing Treefort to life. Gilbert, as an artist himself, has insisted that hotels, decent meals and festival wristbands are extended to all performers. It’s a token of hospitality which feels like it ought to be obvious – but for festival standards, this is quite exceptional.

And so, Treefort has the distinction of having returning artists each year. “We want artists to feel that they’re not expendable,” Gilbert explains. “They’re not good just for one year – we want to be a part of their career as it grows. I love watching them evolve with us. I think the music industry can be really transactional and temporary, with short-term gains. We’re really trying to build something that is not only long-term for us but the artists we believe in.”

I could write of the gravitas of Bright Eyes’ headline performance, the main stage serotonin from Remi Wolf and Hinds, or the ever-incendiary Crack Cloud – but much has been said of these artists and not much more I could add would tip the balance. So I will invite you instead to the smaller print, the discoveries which left an impression and the moments which could only emerge from Treefort and nowhere else.

Zookraught are the renegades who declared war at Skatefort: “This is a clear, concise ‘fuck you’ to the fascist leader we have in place now”. The Seattle-based dance punks are jolts of colour in a greyscale setting. Disruptive, loud and charged with a voltage which seems to electrify a crowd of kids with kitchen-scissor mullets, customised clothes and stick and poke tattoos, the band break out into sparks and spasms. Vocalist Stephanie Jones – whose screams seem to arise from the earned vitriol and desperation of a betrayed generation – wades into the middle of it all. Pushed and buoyed by each other, rather than violent it’s deeply collaborative. Listening to Zookraught is like stepping onto the third rail: an urgent, danceable shock.

Treefort honours the earthy, country-driven tastes of Idahoans, but what’s interesting is the darker thing that exists like night to its day. Since their Treefort debut last year, theatrical art-punk collective John Gorbus have become mythologised in the Boise underground. Tremors of their forthcoming performance can be felt in the airmail stickers plastered to lampposts with felt-tip scrawled messages of John Gorbus’ return and didactics about poop and cum and viscera – followed by a smiley face. Their ambition is cinematic in scale, full of art-house instinct; noise is their way of digging under their scabs to find the tender, weeping wound beneath.

Their second Treefort performance is at the El Korah Shrine Ballroom. A grandiose, totally unbelievable venue which boasts an award-winning women’s powder room – not bathroom, powder room, with thick carpet, floral arrangements and wall of dressing room tables – and walls lined with portraits of kitsch puppies and kittens with exaggeratedly sad eyes. The ballroom is kept as it was in the days when it was used by the Masonic brotherhood: a gleaming dancefloor lined with chairs for tired feet and wallflowers.

Before John Gorbus’ performance, cardboard effigies of each member are stood on the stage with gold birthday balloons spelling out their name. When they are announced to the stage (“Please welcome John, on guitar! John, on bass! John, on violin!”) they tear up their cut-outs and throw them to a vulture-like crowd of kids who are either friends with the band or caught wind of the myth. The stage is merely a diving-off point for the pit: a wooden table covered in delirious scrawls is dragged into the centre of the ballroom and cake and chicken are served and gold party hats handed out in honour of John Gorbus’ first birthday. And then annihilation of it all.

One thing: you will never forget how a John Gorbus show smells when all that food is spat out and trampled on. The audience destroys the table with near animalistic urgency until its shattered carcass is abandoned on the dancefloor. But there is a story here; the violence is atoned for with enactments of tenderness and friendship. The mass hug between band and audience strikes me as both a primal need and an example.

It is on John Gorbus’ recommendation that I wait until gone midnight to see Oregon noise punks Help. They are performing at The Shredder, the natural home of hardcore with its dungeon-like atmosphere, excellent smoking area and towering, Creepypasta-fuelled automaton which moves at unpredictable intervals. Help’s description on the Treefort App – which, by the way, remains the best festival app I have ever used – is a manifesto: “Remove fear from decision making. Act in defiant joy. Refuse to dominate others. Do not hoard the gifts of the universe. The future is uncertain. Ends don’t justify means. Solidarity now. Class war now.”

Help are fresher than hell itself. They burst wide open from a place of hopelessness and absolute freedom. The vocals of Ryan Neighbors seem to break the surface from some deep, terrible place; drummer Bim Ditson with sleeves of tattoos snaking up his arms unleashes sweat and force upon his kit that feels almost post-human in power. “I’m here to ruin your fucking night,” Neighbors promises. I see people wearing their merch around town, one of which is a smiling George Bush next to a burning World Trade Center.

It's this instinct for release and outcry that I notice most. I stop by the stage in the central Julia Davis Park to catch the showcase for the Boise Rock School, part of the Kidfort programming which invites young bands to take to a festival stage at a remarkably young age. There is a four-piece band whose middle school babyfaces are transfixed by doling out doom-laden hardcore; a boy whose voice probably hasn’t yet broken capable of projecting guttural growls. Each song is followed by their shared smiles of disbelief, while their parents film it beginning to end and young children – completely unfazed with ears protected – throw great plumes of confetti into the air.

Filmfort screens such treasures as independent documentary Not One Drop of Blood, which explores unexplained cattle mutilations in Eastern Oregon and develops into a reflection of the legacies of Western cowboy life in contemporary America. But it’s their short film collections, most directed by young and emerging talent, which make a lasting impression. Freeman Vines is the story of an 82-year-old man in North Carolina who has spent his life hand-carving guitars in the hopes of replicating a sound that has enraptured and haunted him since childhood – a meditation on the legacies of racism and the importance of art to cope with a troubling world. And London, KY, a short documentary directed by Cody Duncum, was a silent, empty revisiting to the places and the memories of his Kentucky upbringing. Both are visceral, altogether unforgettable acts of storytelling.

Then, I think of Dragfort: a programme which champions escapism and community unlike any other. When the other facets of my Treefort experience seemed elbow’s deep in the gore of the state of the world, the drag extravaganzas are a sparkling invitation into fantasy. The Balcony Club hosts Dark Reign, which invites you to “embrace the weird, because here, it’s celebrated – provocation is a promise”, with a performance from the nightmare-inducing Grey Matter who has worked as a scare actor for nearly two decades. Its darker overtones are countered by the self-expression of The Glamour Revolution where beauty and individuality triumph.

After five days of queer magic, it all culminates with Drag Me To Brunch - an absolute celebration where what lies beyond dissipates to nothing for a while. Dragfort Director Cole Calvin’s speech, shared through tears, leaves a message of unity which is so intrinsic to the spirit of Treefort itself: “To all the children in this room, do not move. This is your home.”