QUILCENE — The Quilcene Lantern will host the second Tarboo, a three-day music festival set on an idyllic 53 acres of property in a historic Quilcene barn.
The festival is the flagship music event for the Quilcene Lantern, a family business owned and operated by Steve, Laurie, Willem and Bergen de Koch.
Music is scheduled July 3-5 at the lantern, 7360 Center Road, Quilcene.
“At this festival, a lot of people aren’t going to know who these bands are,” Bergen said. “What we are trying to cultivate here is, at the lantern, even if you don’t know the music, you can trust the curation. Especially at Tarboo, it’s going to be the most intimate and high-quality festival you could go to, where you can meet people easily and feel really comfortable in these spaces.”
In describing the blend of sonic diversity booked for the festival, Willem, who is responsible for programming Tarboo, said “Indie” is a good catch-all term.
“It’s also so broad it doesn’t tell you much,” he said. “The big throughline is that it’s all Pacific Northwest artists. It’s all rock and guitar music.”
Almost all guitar-driven rock, he continued.
Chong the Nomad, who will headline the second night, is a producer who will likely take to the stage with an electronic array.
“No band,” Willem said. “Computers and some samplers and synthesizers.”
Willem said it’s a little out of their wheelhouse, but some DJ dance party events proved to be popular in the past year.
“I wanted to tap into that,” Willem said. “Also, we had sort of an impromptu DJ dance party that happened last year at Tarboo that ended up being really fun, so I thought that might be fun to program some of that more intentionally this year.”
Willem noted another throughline to the programming.
“I like to program bands that have a lot of interpersonal connection between each other,” he said.
It’s not necessarily public-facing, but Willem said having the bands know each other can create a good dynamic that can be felt by those in attendance.
“A lot of the Seattle bands have kind of interconnected personnel who play on each other’s projects,” he said.
The band Blind Pilot’s front of house sound engineer, Nevada Sowle, plays in MAITA and produced a record for the band Desolation Horse.
Desolation Horse has played in Quilcene previously at the Gray Coast Guildhall. Cooper Trail, the songwriter and frontman, is close friends with Kai Dakers of N3gativ3 Numb3rs and Cait Faircloth of Monica, who played Tarboo fest last year, Bergen said.
“You just know the Quilcene crowd is going to really bring the energy to that show,” Bergen said. “They’re an underrated band. Cooper’s songwriting is amazing.”
Bergen said that foundational to the vision of the lantern is creating a platform for Olympic Peninsula artists and bolstering what they’re doing.
“That’s really important to us,” Bergen said. “Getting to spend time in Port Angeles and Sequim and getting to know friends who are musicians out here, I slowly kind of realized what incredible art is happening right here. We just want to be a space that allows for that convergence of regional and hyper-local artists.”
Local to the Peninsula this year are Nate the Junco, NYBY, N3gativ3 Numb3rs, Jonas Myers and Ellie Baird.
Flutter By Pizza Pie will sling pizza all weekend. Bumbu Truck will serve Indonesian food on Friday. The truck is owned by the parents of Alda Agustiano, the artist behind Chong the Nomad. Fiddlehead Creamery will offer ice cream on Friday and Saturday.
Chimacum Valley Brewery and wine makers Fossil and Fawn will sell drinks onsite during the event.
The lantern has a bar, which sells beer, wine, cider, non-alcoholic beverages, espresso drinks and some food options.
There will also be a number of artists and makers selling their work at the festival. Lily Lew Tattoo and Slipstream Tattoo will be giving tattoos on site.
Since opening last June, the venue has presented more than 100 artists and more than 50 concert events.
It’s been a year of discovering and confronting limitations for the de Koch family, Willem said. The theme of the past year has been a lot of construction, physical maintenance and getting the property up to speed, he said.
“The biggest challenge has been, how do we think creatively about programming and work really hard to promote the shows while we’re buried in physical work every day,” Willem said.
Willem, a trombonist, who has toured extensively with Fleet Foxes, The Westerlies and others and has also played guitar and bass in quite a few bands since moving to Quilcene, he said.
He called it a homecoming. Before picking up the trombone, he was a guitarist. He set the instrument down upon taking up the trombone. Willem said he’s extending his musical priorities to the guitar now.
“I’ve always been fascinated by orchestration and arrangement,” Willem said. “Kind of the inner voices and how you make a piece of music feel like it’s progressing and keeping the momentum going. Even on the trombone, I’ve never been a big take a solo and blow the roof off the house kind of guy. I’ve enjoyed playing that supportive role that you might not notice until it’s not there anymore.”
Willem said he feels very purpose-driven creating infrastructure for creatives to connect their work with others.
“I get a lot of personal enjoyment from seeing these things come to fruition, even if I’m not the one on stage,” Willem said. “Last year, doing Tarboo, I remember (the band) Black Ends’ set being like, ‘Whoa!’ No one who was at the festival had ever seen them live before, including myself. It was just this explosive thing. Everyone came into the barn. I get chills thinking about it now. This is the magic.”
Everyone lost their minds, Willem said. That moment was a catalyzed distillation of all of the behind-the-scenes work, he said.
To learn more about the event, visit https://www.quilcenelantern.com/tarboo.
________
Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
(Breakout box)
Band lineup
July 3
NYBY
N3gativ3 Numb3rs
Nate the Junco
July 4
Chong the Nomad
Desolation Horse
July 5
MAITA
Jonas Myers
Ellie Baird
Tickets, available at quilcenelantern.com/tarboo, are $55 for single-day passes and $100 for weekend passes; single-day passes for July 3 are free with an RSVP. All-inclusive festival passes with parking and camping included are available for $145.
Camping will be available onsite and costs $15 per person per night, and parking costs $10 per vehicle per day.
