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[MUSIC PLAYING] CHRIS ROBERTS: The best way to define underground music, according to Heliotrope co-founder Eric Wivinus is to describe its spirit rather than its sound. In every genre of music, Wivinus says, there are artists pushing the boundaries as far as they can. He says at Heliotrope, nearly every stripe will be represented.

ERIC WIVINUS: I mean, there's people doing modern psychedelic rock music. There's people doing free improvisation but from the most out end of it. And then there's people with the strange, skewed folk stuff that's going around right now.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Ain't no grave

Going to weigh my body down

Ain't no grave

With my about down

CHRIS ROBERTS: In Wivinus's view, underground music isn't a series of happy accidents that arise from blind experimentation. It's deliberate.

ERIC WIVINUS: It's almost willfully under the radar. The ethic is driven almost as a reaction against more prevailing trends.

CHRIS ROBERTS: This is the festival's second year. It came together somewhat unintentionally. Co-founder, Rich Barlow, helps run an avant garde theater company called Flaneur Productions. Flaneur had reserved Franklin Artworks to stage a play, but then canceled its plans. Since Flaneur still had dibs on the space, Barlow and Wivinus, both experimental musicians, decided to throw a party to showcase the local underground music scene.

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For some people, underground music can be translated into ugly, dissonant noise pollution. How do you respond to them?

RICH BARLOW: Well, I would hope that there was some way to convince people not to be threatened by that idea. A lot of this stuff is quite beautiful. A lot of it is transcendently beautiful, and there's some noise in there, too, for good measure.

CHRIS ROBERTS: This year's Heliotrope will feature 26 local acts. On one end of the spectrum is Paul Metzger, who Eric Wivinus describes as a virtuoso guitarist, who's been in the scene for years but hasn't gotten his due.

ERIC WIVINUS: It's really hard to top what he's doing. And he's blending folk traditions from Asia and India and America and Eastern Europe on a banjo that has 20 strings on it.

CHRIS ROBERTS: then there's a group called White Map. Rich Barlow says the band features a guitarist, who wears his equipment. The setup includes a backpack, retrofitted with a motorcycle battery-powered amplifier, a belt with guitar effects attached, all connected to a cone-shaped speaker which rises above his head like a tuba. The room darkens. A strobe light is turned on, and the guitarist then wanders through the audience.

RICH BARLOW: Thanks to the directionality of this cone and the Doppler effect or whatever. You never knew where he was. And with the strobe light, you'd catch a glimpse of him. He'd be over on the other side of the audience. And then the sound would get really quiet. And then it would suddenly get really loud because he was standing next to you and had just turned to face you. And it was fantastic.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Barlow says the underground music scene in the Twin Cities is fertile yet fragmented. He hopes Heliotrope will lend it some cohesion. I'm Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio.

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