You could almost set a timer —every 20 years or so, the Northampton-area music scene attracts national attention. Bands get signed, stories get written, hype builds. Then, like a lighthouse beam, the spotlight rotates away to the next town or sound. A couple of decades go by, and the whole process repeats: starting in the late 1960s with western Massachusetts acts like Arlo Guthrie, Clean Living, and Fat; continuing into the late ’80s and early ’90s with Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Scud Mountain Boys; and moving all the way up to a crop of current groups that includes And the Kids, LuxDeluxe, and California X.

Yet as any music fan in the region knows, the local scene doesn’t rely on outside illumination to thrive. For more than 45 years, the sound of music in western Massachusetts—in Northampton, but also throughout the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires—has been abundant and varied. Rock ’n’ roll, blues, punk, and various indie rock sounds have all taken root, along with heavy metal, jazz, and plenty of folk. Bands have come and gone; venues have opened, closed, and burned down; and the scene has flourished through it all.

“I just always marvel at the richness of it, considering how small the area is,” says David Sokol, who was music editor at the Valley Advocate from 1977 to 1993.

Dave Sokol, photo by Izzy Berdan

Billboard magazine expressed a similar sentiment in a slightly condescending frontpage story in 1992 that described the area as “a picturesque, place-that-time-forgot farming community.” Yet despite a population less than a quarter of the 3.4 million people in greater Seattle—the aspirational baseline for music scenes since the city birthed the ’90s grunge explosion that gave us Nirvana and Pearl Jam—the four counties of western Massachusetts have for years had the essential ingredients of any successful music scene: a creative class of musicians; places for them to play; audiences who will go see them; and supportive local media, including radio station WRSI-FM and the Valley Advocate, that will play their records on the air and write about them.

Western Massachusetts is also an affordable place to live, with a youthful atmosphere that flows from the local colleges, most notably Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts. It’s also near the intersection of two interstate highways, which is helpful when it’s time to go on tour. Those attributes have made this area attractive to a continual flow of music-minded people, far more than there’s room to mention. Some of them got famous; more of them, then and now, play music simply because they love it and it’s fun.

“Northampton is an incredible place to emerge as an artist and to find that group of people who support what you do,” says folksinger Dar Williams, who moved to Northampton in 1992 and began building her career. So far it’s yielded 10 solo studio albums, including this year’s Emerald. Though she relocated to New York in 2000, she adds, “I would say it’s the reason I’m still doing what I’m doing.”

Ray Mason, photo by Izzy Berdan

The beginnings of the western Massachusetts scene date to the mid-1960s, when musicians like Holyoke native Ray Mason would play the local YMCA and slip an occasional original song into sets of covers of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Rascals. The covers-are-king attitude started to fade when bands like the Rockin’ Ramrods from Boston and The Wildweeds from Connecticut came through playing their own songs, almost as if they were demonstrating that such a thing was possible for regular guys from New England.

The post Reverb and a Zip Code appeared first on Take Magazine.

The dark, depopulated landscape paintings of Dozier Bell have earned her a reputation as an elegist, but her work and her ideas are far more unorthodox than that. For the past eight years, Bell has been mining the landscape around Bath, Maine, to see “how non-traditional I could make a traditional landscape look.” The majority of her pieces show natural scenes, but she never paints outside. “I like painting from memory because I like using that filter,” she says. “It’s a back and forth between being outdoors and the studio routine.”

A descendant of farmers, Bell keeps bees, hikes, and kayaks regularly to discover new visual details. “I pick through literature the same way I pick through the landscape for what I can use.” For example, “in recent years I’ve been doing drawings and paintings of trees which I haven’t done before. I have a sense impression of what looking up into a pine tree might look like but I can’t always bring to mind the exact pattern of light and dark so I go out.”

Outcrop Flock, by Dozier Bell

After earning a B.A. in philosophy from Smith College, Bell studied under Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania. She took two things from him that still inform her practice: “the necessity of tuning into one’s individual voice, and the importance of just putting in the hours in the studio that it takes to find that voice.” If you log the hours, Bell says, “you end up with a body of work.”

Bell’s own body of work reveals an abiding interest in German Romanticism. Recently, the threat of climate change has plunged her back into German stories where “the landscape, animals, plants, and the weather were characters in the drama,” and as such, capable of “retribution, spiritual solace, or some kind of divine purpose.” This concept of nature has “an inescapable moral dimension” that helps her to reckon with an increasingly unpredictable environment.

22:00, 2014. acrylic on linen, 30” x 50”, by Dozier Bell

While in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship, Bell took stock of the landscape WWII had marked and also witnessed a new kind of religious questing. While volunteering at a local Lutheran Church she met East Germans who were beginning to explore religion again after reunification. “I saw these parallels between the fighting and finding devices like sonar and radar that were developed during the war, and the spiritual finding devices or process people were going through with religious training.” The conflation of these two very different kinds of human searching still moves her today.

Inspired as they are, Bell’s landscapes are omniscient and therefore slightly ominous. A number of her seascapes feature the geometric lines of remote sensing weapons, as if the viewer were training a rifle on the waves. The artist insists however that the lines of a viewfinder don’t always impend violence: “they could be weapon sights, they could be the crosses on a Réseau plate used in photographing an unfamiliar area like the surface of the moon…” With her paintings, Bell gathers together weapons, radar, and religious longing with the one sense they all share: sight.

Dozier Bell–artist
Bath, Maine
Website

Top image, Rising, acrylic on panel, 12″ X 16″, photo courtesy of Dozier Bell

The post Nature’s Morals appeared first on Take Magazine.