AEA: John Goddard (and Cenozoic)
If I'm reading some history correctly, Cenozoic played the very first Artica in 2002. What do you recall from that year's event?
It certainly seems like the original trio line-up of Cenozoic (Tony Renner on guitar, Duane Perry on drums, myself on bass) could have played Artica in 2002, but I think it's more likely that I just did some manner of audio installation, and also some field singing. I was actively subjecting people to Mongolian polyphonic singing around that time. I should do more of that, but non-Mongolian.
Anyway, that first line-up of the “space rock band” iteration of Cenozoic was kind of fragmenting by 2002, so I believe I mostly helped friends who did installations at Artica that year. Sculptures, installations and performances of all sorts were scattered over a much wider area of the grounds around the Cotton Belt compound than it seems are used now, and it also seems like there were just more artists. There was a pretty vibrant community of sculptors, painters, potters, welders, casters, musicians, dancers and everything else spending lots of time together at the Cabin Inn at the City Museum at the turn of the millennium, and I was fortunate to be among those sweet souls. That scene felt like a big part of the human core of Artica. The spiritual home of a spiritual home.
I can certainly confirm that the first Artica festivals were wild and surreal. In the first years, the land really hadn't been cleared. There were tall weeds and brush everywhere, and in the course of passing through what felt like a wheat field to view the scattered line-up, you'd stumble upon someone and their art, or just the art. Or just someone. Maybe it was a hut or a shrine, a dance or ritual. That sort of thing. I'm pretty sure there was nudity.
But it was quite Dada, anarchic, bacchanalian and maybe even Jodorowsky-an and Fellini-esque all at once. It was, for lack of a better single term, trippy. The first Artica was a very vibrant event for what resources were available, which was none, I believe, aside from the festival grounds and long extension cords. Hap and Nita encouraged people to, “show up and make it happen, you're on your own,” essentially, and a lot of people showed up and made it happen on their own. It was a fantastic display of community spirit and devotion to beauty and freedom.
And what other years have you been active as a musical performer at Artica? Where did you play and with whom?
In 2003, Tony and I did a spacey guitar and bass duo as Cenozoic. I stood on the east dock of the Cotton Belt building facing the river, and Tony positioned himself about fifty yards from me below, amid the tall grasses. Some later claimed that the effect of the decentralized ensemble sound was powerful, but no recording exists to verify that. I was wearing some idiotic vinyl shorts with hot rod flames on the sides, and I think Tony didn't want to be near the shorts, so he actually gets the credit for the pulsating bilocated-duo idea.
Not long after that I resolved that holding a band together was — for me, specifically, and for the Cenozoic project — not so necessary. I adopted a general stance of making Cenozoic a completely free and nebulous musical entity that included whomever was willing, and that was very convenient of me, because I couldn't convince anyone to show up to rehearse. But it led to some very unique incarnations of the ensemble. This is only important because that model was going so well that I invited a whole lot of people to play as Cenozoic for Artica 2004.
Some of them showed up, and so the lineup that year featured: Tony Renner on guitar; Steve Grass, Jerry Green and Tom Sleet on drums and percussion; Paul MacFarlane and myself on guitars, synths and computers; Daniel Shown on some diabolical contraption he wired up; and then Dave Stone and William Lincoln Schafer on a nice selection of horns. I think my cousin Jeff Brown dropped in to contribute some guitar that year. If it's not my favorite Cenozoic performance, it's up there. It was a very accurate representation of the aesthetic.
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[Thomas, here's an embed from that, and a link]
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For about two straight hours on the Cotton Belt dock, we were some kind of space rock, free jazz, ambient electro-acoustic octopus, and it was quite audible. I borrowed a rather large and heavy PA system from KDHX (and returned it), and also rented an enormous worksite generator that came on its own trailer. It was probably way too much generator. Someone probably could have powered a 100' Ferris wheel from that thing while we played.
Randall Roberts (DJ Li'l Edit) was setting up down the hill to spin records after us. He told me we sounded like a very large spaceship taking off, and that guy knows music, so I trust that we sounded like a spaceship. I assumed it was a compliment, and I really should have given the generator more credit for the band's sound that night when I thanked him.
After that I spent seven storied years bouncing around between St. Louis, Croatia and Oregon, so Cenozoic was actually absent from Artica for quite a while. I did settle in St. Louis again for some years after returning from Croatia in 2013, and in 2020, during a cautious lull in that year's pandemic festivities, I got Duane back behind drums for Cenozoic, plus Matt Derouin (of future/modern) on guitar. We did a space rock trio just like the first incarnation of the band, and it was a pretty nice outing. A slow, clacking freight train passed through right as we were beginning the opening drones of the set, and we sort of played against that before launching into the beats-n-notes portion of our program.
In 2021 I hoped to completely redirect Cenozoic toward a more conventional rock band sound for Artica, and for a minute there I had Karl Mueller, Doug Wick and Tony Marshall of Anxious Mo-Fo into the idea of bolting themselves on for a night. Time slipped by, and then there wasn't enough time for the rock ideas I had, so that year Cenozoic was just me surfing feedback and shredding delay on electric guitar. It's a playing style I call "farting through delay pedal." Someone threw a shoe at me, so now I can say I've had that happen to me. I felt like Shooby Taylor at the Apollo.
In 2022 I was readying for a return to Oregon (where I now live again), so I couldn't really get anything Cenozoic-ish together for Artica. But I was there, and I did perform! After the last band finished I sang "The Candy Man" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" to backup tracks on an obnoxious portable PA speaker I keep with me (just in case). It was unplanned and unsanctioned, one of my asinine little episodes. That was my Artica contribution in 2022.
That brings us up to date.
I wish I could fly in for this year's Artica, even just to be a spectator and patron, but I probably won't make it back to St. Louis until at least November of this year. Cenozoic at Artica 2024 is not out of the question for me if I'm not banned for life.
Because you've played and attended over a period of years (well, decades), how can you summarize the feeling of playing there early and playing there more recently? I know that for musicians, there's now a stage and PA, as opposed to playing inside the Cotton Belt and/or on the hill above the lower field, etc.
I really loved playing on the Cotton Belt platform facing the river, but the nice, fresh event stage on the lower meadow feels a lot less chaotic to me. Less brutal. More safe. It's really nice to show up and have a festival sound system waiting, and people who know how to use it very, very effectively. Maybe there's not as much post-apocalyptic ambiance or aesthetic at Artica in the funded, organized, contemporary version, but I like that it's more safe, approachable, and recognizable as an art festival. I like that it's probably a lot more family-oriented, or at least family-friendly.
Any particular anecdotes about playing in those locations, be it related to sound, heat, cold, rain, wind, proximity to audience, etc....?
I think Tony and I nearly lost consciousness from heat exhaustion in 2003, which speaks to the Jodorowsky-an aspect of the early days. Artica was held in August that year, I'm pretty sure. I called in sick to work after we played. It was pretty hot in 2004 also, but I requested very emphatically that Cenozoic not play until sundown. The early years were pretty hot, and moving the festival to cooler months was a great idea on the part of whoever had it.
Looking back, the general conditions of the early years were kind of harsh, and even certifiably dangerous. There was a lot of industrial debris down there, and a lot of milling around like troglodytes in pitch darkness. Tony stumbled on something in the dark in 2003 and came within inches of impaling himself on a shaft of rebar jutting up out of some concrete.
So, yeah, it was probably a much, MUCH more dangerous festival in the early years. As I said, I'm really glad that it's more safe, and also that artists have some funding and other resources available now. Artica should be well funded, and it should continue to improve, grow and develop in its own time and ways. More organization and development is good, but I also hope it never succumbs to an overabundance of bureaucratic or managerial thinking.
I've had a lot of great conversations at Artica. How about you? Any moments that stand out, more in terms of pure social interaction than taking in art?
Well, a lot of us camped out down there in the early years, and that was really nice. It was like camping with all of my smartest, coolest, most brilliant and beautiful friends, or being on tour with a circus or something. We were an art gang, building fires and roasting lambs, making noise and having intense conversations and, frankly, partying pretty heartily. Artica wasn't just a festival then. It was almost like an artist settlement for the days surrounding the festival. Some people basically lived down there for the week or so leading up to the event, and there was every bit as much intense creative work going on as there was partying. The work was the party, and some say that's how we should all work, all the time. I don't mean goofed up on intoxicants, I mean doing anything and everything in an intensely joyful way, or at least in a loving, together way.
That said, are there some art installations or other performances that stand out in your mind over the years?
In 2010(?) there was a very quirky theatre troupe who showed up on a raft, I'm pretty sure. They were headed down the Mississippi River, stopped at Artica and put on a play about Mark Twain or something mytho-historically river-ish. It reminded me of the old Our Gang/Little Rascals movies, in which kids sometimes traveled around on rafts and put on little presentations wherever they felt like it. I hope there's material on that troupe in the Artica archive. They were extremely entertaining, and then they got on their raft and headed down the river to do it somewhere else.
What does Artica mean to you? Broad question, but... yeah. Whaddya say?
Oh boy. You asked for it.
Artica is a microcosm of all life, just like everything else is, only it's a specifically joyful, vibrant, free and positive microcosm. It's important that Artica and things like it exist within the framework of all the intertwined microcosms and macrocosms. Art is the language of the cosmos, and I'm starting to think it's the only language worth speaking.
We change the world anytime we do anything, but when we bring art, music and other enjoyable things to life for sharing freely, we are imitating the true nature of this generous, abundant universe, attenuating and concentrating it, amplifying it, and sending people off with a little piece of it to nurture and share in their own lives however they may be inspired to do so. The math of this is elegant.
Beautification is important work for everyone. Festivals are important. Festivals, like travel, get people out of their heads and into the moment. The focusing of so much attention creates a presence. And when there's a mission of love and positive creativity involved, a festival becomes a sanctifying, cleansing, purifying thing. Whether anyone believes in the existence of "energy" as an actual force in the universe or not, energy believes in us, and it responds to our input. I can't say how treating one's own world to lots of love and beauty will work out for them, but I can certainly recommend trying it.
In that spirit, Artica is an injection site for a whole lot of intensely loving input. It's transcendent in ways anyone can plainly perceive when they visit. It's a holy site, but wholly secular, and it will always be one of my spiritual homes.
Any place for people to find you online, in relation to art, music, cooking, anything at all...?
I thank you for asking, and your timing is great because I'm recording new Cenozoic material at my new place in Portland. Cenozoic is on the streaming services and Bandcamp, but I've determined that hereafter I'll only release a portion of new material to streaming, with the rest of it available via subscription to a regular content drop at
I feel like I'm behind on the web development for these digital plans, but the website isn't broken, things are happening gradually, and anyone can subscribe to the complimentary mailing list there to learn of things available and coming forth. The mailing list is where new music will be announced. I'm kinda done with albums, genres, regular brick-n-mortar appearances and any limiting conventions of the music '“business.” Cenozoic is turning into a weirder octopus in a few ways, and I can't wait for people to hear. I'm singing again, and it's pretty great to have a healthy, mature singing voice at my disposal.
I've sort of outgrown commercial cooking, and these days I only cook on Instagram @hijohngoddard. People tell me I need to do another food book, and I don't rule it out.
More Artica interviews and content can be found here.