Pitch black on a fall night, Arborist Records founder Alek Wiltbank guides me through a set of double doors into a long, dim hallway dotted at intervals with paper flyers and semi-darkened apertures to depths yet unknown. He twirls his keys like a man whistling in a graveyard — a jingling tambourine to accompany the unsteady echoes of our footsteps into the labyrinth. As we walk, he narrates something about the history of the place. A factory abandoned by the mechanisms of fate, come to be a storage facility — and what did they make? Twenty-four by 36 prints, it might have been. Maps of the world with two Germanies on them. But if the hydraulics are all dried and the pneumatics are out of steam, what’s to account for that steady, atavistic thumping that seems to grow louder as we walk the shadowed hall? Or that wall-muffled electric whine, that awash and trembling hint of a roar for spectacles unseen?
We follow the noise to its pulsing heart — an unmarked door behind which some unknown band may well be experimenting with the sound of amplified jet engines and hydroelectric mandolins. Is it Brickwalker? Morning, Sexy? Waking Up With Wolves? No one can say, but the door will remain unopened, the reverie undisturbed. Through another door, I’m led to an inscrutable chamber where a worn sofa faces a stack of televisions old enough to buy beer and so primitively heavy that I wondered how they could have been stacked by human effort. Behind, shelves full of vinyls rise jumbled and multicolored like a flowering shrub. “There’s bound to be something in there for you,” says my guide. “Sorry about the mess.”
This is Arborist Records. If there’s a mess, it’s imperceptible, order and chaos having abandoned their opposing camps. On the wall, a poster of Martian sunrise, another of a canoe paddling ‘cross an icy lake on one of Jupiter’s moons. As for me, I am disoriented as to time and space. Is this St. George, Utah, the city that banned dancing? St. George, whose motto should be “Where the First Half of ‘Footloose’ Comes Alive”?
The guy had to make album covers with scissors and glue. Band names by melting a thesaurus; venues by grace of God. There’s an art gallery hidden deeper within the complex. A while ago, so the story goes, Alek gets locked into some dark section of the old factory late at night by way of bandmates’ prank. An old man appears suddenly behind him and asks Alek what he’s doing there. He says he’s making music. “Come with me,” the guy says. He takes him through the maze to a place where the walls are framed with canvas yearnings and the roof is ribbed with steel pipes. The heart of the beast, named by way of transcontinental self-reference repeated: “Arté Art.” Alek asks the stranger if he wants him to bring bands into the place. The guy just nods. So I’m told.
We sit on the couch discussing metaphysics over “Super Smash Brothers.” It’s miraculous enough that one of these piled screens can flicker to life in the first place. Beyond that, I can’t tell what’s going on. At some point, we’re struck by a conspicuous silence, the music from the practice room making itself known by its sudden absence. A man appears, long-haired and with a genuine expression. This fellow is called “Waking Up With Wolves.” He navigates the room by memory, rummages like a geologist through the accumulated chaos of gatherings past — jackets and coffee mugs and assorted nothingness — and produces a rising-back chair from whence I know not, a priori by his magical whim. He conjures a Gibson acoustic in like fashion and arpeggiates upneck. On the third measure, Alek brings forth percussion from a hardwood table. Conversation follows in syncopated rhythm, and after a while I lose track of the meaning and all I hear is pure noise. It occurs to me that in Italian halls, Hong Kong alleys, and St. George storage units, musicians everywhere are privileged to that microcosm of creation: Let there be sound.
We come out to the parking lot for some reason. Headlights emerge from the offstage desert darkness, heralding dented sedans. Bearded musicians emerge alone and in pairs, seemingly without having coordinated their entrances beforehand, brought in by some absurd serendipity or following the traces of faint melody through the night. And you think you’ve seen it all. They greet emphatically, as if surprised to see one another. Men with ear-piercings and eschewed beanie caps, bearing the smell of cigarettes and coffee. Small towns run deep. There are worlds hidden within worlds, like Russian nesting dolls. Leaving the place, I wasn’t sure I was allowed to mention it. But they’re trying to get the word out: A few months ago Alek started a Facebook group called “Sotah,” inspired by an online guild of non-denominational emos and named for the third most obscure way you can abbreviate “southern Utah.”
There’s that dark old speakeasy, Jazzy’s, out on Bluff, and Arté Art in that old factory off Dixie Drive. Beyond that — so they say — the local sound reverberates in a smattering of basements, bonfires, steakhouses, and secret subterranean societies. But the scene is growing, and so is the city. Someday, St. George music will be out in the open air; for now, it’s blue-collar Americana shouted in the dark. There are no glittering neon signs, and the marquee is written with sticks in the dirt. You have to go out searching for yourself.
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Such an interesting, well written article. I loved the mood that your words describe… thank you for sharing your insight
beautiful writing, dude.