Rock on the clock

In rehearsal space off Fore Street, the members of a four-hour-old band are taking five and trying to plan out the next two days, their instruments squeezed in beside sacks of un-roasted coffee beans. It's Thursday afternoon, and in less than 48 hours, these five musicians — who have never performed together — will be taking the stage at Space Gallery and performing 25 minutes of original music.

“We are feeling good,” said Salli Wason. “We just started working on songs immediately, it's nice not to have any deliberation.”

With three songs nailed down in four hours, including “Dynamite for Christmas,” the members considering calling it a night, but not before hashing out some key creative differences.

Mostly it's a question of how many “X's” to include in the name “VaXine,” which is certainly subject to change before they make their debut.

Welcome to Portland's second 48 Hour Music Festival, where 27 musicians are randomly split into six bands, and given two days to produce 25 minutes of original music before a culminating concert. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. tonight (Saturday) for the concert, which kicks off at 9 p.m. at the second annual 48 Hour Music Festival at Space Gallery.

In an effort to maximize the “atom-smashing creativeness” of the event, organizer Leif Sherman Curtis had only one rule.

“It's about fresh collaborations, so members in a band are not allowed any previous musical history with each other,” said Sherman Curtis.

But in trying to divvy-up the 27 musicians into six acts on Thursday afternoon, it became clear that the insular, close-knit nature of Portland's music scene was going to make this rule tough to stick to.

As Sherman Curtis drew names from a plastic bag Thursday afternoon at Space Gallery, an oral history of the Portland hard rock scene began to emerge as those gathered offered up full disclosure on their musical pasts.

“He played a solo on my first album,” said one musician.

“We've just jammed together,” said another.

After one pairing had already been established, two of the members admitted that they had been in a short-lived project that had never played a live show. “Was it for more than two days?” asked Sherman Curtis.

“Everyone in Portland has been in a band together for two days,” said Katherine Hulit. This might be especially true with this pool of talent, which Sherman Curtis said drew heavily from the Geno's scene, in which he is thoroughly mired as a member of rock acts Conifer and AoK Suicide Forest.

With the event drawing so much from one end of the rock music spectrum, a certain tone is bound to emerge. “Last year, five out of six [acts] were hard rock, even though the members had no previous experience with each other,” said Sherman Curtis.

But having spilled blood and sweat on the Geno's stage was not the only qualification Sherman Curtis looked for in formulating the list of 27. Selecting a pool filled with the right mix of raw talent, leadership, and personality can be a tricky recipe to pull off; call it a sort of Ston(er Rock) Soup.

“I definitely got a few very versatile musicians with good-natured character I could foresee having a role in the band to make things come together for their ability to stretch things musically,” said Sherman Curtis.

Sherman Curtis said most musicians going into the project will check their egos at the door, and work together in the spirit of collaboration. “There is not enough time to have too much clashing of personalities, you've got to get along and make things happen.”

But for some, it just means compressing the stereotypical rock band plot arc into a smaller time frame. Eighteen hours into the festival, Sherman Curtis reported that one musician had already got too drunk to play, left rehearsal and quit, only to apologize and rejoin come Friday morning.

The lottery-style band formation reflects Sherman Curtis' vision of the event as a “community building exercise that gets people out of their comfort zones.”

But the system is not without it's structural quirks. Both this year and last, participants voted to not divide names by primary musical talent, resulting in atypical band rosters. “Sure enough, three drummers ended up in a band,” said Sherman Curtis, noting that this is just the point of such a festival; the math-rock outfit of complex beats and layered rhythms might have never formed on it's own volition.

Sherman Curtis' band in last year's festival was another unlikely match-up — he ended up playing alongside three of the four women on last year's roster under the name Prism Camp. Producing a sound he described as “stoner rock for sci-fi soundtrack,” the band stayed together after the festival and went on to play four or five shows before breaking up.

The music produced as part of the project can turn out just as well as something that gets deliberated over by an established band for months. “'I'm kind of hoping to approach it in a different way, to not be so picky about stuff,” said musician Ryan Macdonald.

“Some of the best albums are just gone in and made,” he said. “I love the concept of just jamming.”

Macdonald was looking forward to what clash of styles could emerge from the lottery system. “The weirder the better,” he said.

Thanks to Mark Bartholomew at Acadia Recording Company, the haphazard bands will get a chance to do a studio recording or their festival creations. Bartholomew provided the same service to last year's participants, and the resulting recordings were made available for free at http://48hourmusicfestival.bandcamp.com.

The annual event sold out Space Gallery in its first year, and Sherman Curtis expects to see a similarly packed show tonight, but said he is more concerned with the festival fulfilling its function of stirring Portland's musical pot. “It's about getting people out of their comfort zones, and finding magic in things that are random,” he said.

“I definitely have a vision of having these things more frequently. I would trade in all the hype if I could do this three times a year,” he said.