Returning for its third year, Molten Plains Fest, which builds upon a monthly series, is scaling back just a tad for this edition — only a single day, instead of multiple days — but the overall focus is no less ambitious.
On Dec. 14, Denton’s Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios will once again showcase “the spirit of adventurous music and further sounds,” per festival organizers Ernesto Montiel and Sarah Ruth Alexander. (In a welcome addition this year, the City of Denton is partially funding the festival.)
Eight sets featuring 20 artists hailing from 10 different cities will unfold at Rubber Gloves, pulling from an array of eclectic genres — or, as festival press materials describe it, “a convergence of inestimable musical nourishment.” Everything from free jazz to field recordings will be on hand to sample.
“We see the festival, and the series, as a whole, in the sense that we don’t schedule the artists as opening acts, local support [or] headliner,” Montiel told KXT in 2023. “It is more organized by building according to energy and like-purposes to provide a complete experience.”
Here are five can’t-miss artists to catch in action.
Monte Espina
Billing their sound as “electroacoustic, free improvisation,” the duo of Miguel Espinel and Ernesto Montiel (pulling double duty as co-curator of the festival), the pair relies upon, as the festival materials describe “amplified sounds, signal processing [and] improvised sonic environments.”
Emily Rach Beisel
The Chicago-based Beisel traffics in a “visceral blend of extended vocal and woodwind techniques with analogue electronics,” according to a press release. As she told the Chicago Reader earlier this year, “One thing that really attracted me to [improvised and experimental music] is that there’s space in the tradition for the individual. There’s encouragement to explore and self-reflect.”
Stefan Gonzalez
Gonazlez, along with their brother, Aaron, have done a phenomenal job tending to the legacy of their late father, the influential free jazz pioneer Dennis Gonzalez. They intuitively understand the power of live performance when it comes to avant garde music — fusing, as festival materials describe it, an “amalgamation of jazz, punk and free music” takes both daring and skill.
Zachary James Watkins
Lubbock-born and now Oakland-based Watkins characterizes himself as an “improviser, composer, educator and engineer,” per a 2023 interview with Density512.org. “I noticed in Texas that the music was ultimately meant to ‘heal each other’ through song, and musicians are playing ‘because of love and drive,’” he told the site in 2023. “We’re digging deep and having fun and you can see it resonate from our bodies.”
Python Potions
Rachel Weaver and Randall Minick join forces to create Python Potions, a duo trafficking in, per press materials, “slithering electronics, paranoid vocals [and] haunted rhythms.” The band’s most recent release is Illustris, a four-track 2023 release which, per Bandcamp, “emerges from the molten entanglements and murmuring entrails it was birthed from to re-form into visceral cosmologies and ethereal delusions exuding from the dungeons of body music ritual.”
Molten Plains Fest at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios, Denton. 5 p.m. Dec. 14. Tickets are $25.
Preston Jones is a North Texas freelance writer and regular contributor to KXT. Email him at [email protected] or find him on X (@prestonjones). Our work is made possible by our generous, music-loving members. If you like how we lift up local music, consider becoming a KXT sustaining member right here.
