The Doe Bay Sessions Takes Unplugged Music to the Wilderness

Of course, not everyone is Bumbershooting this Labor Day weekend. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a personal music festival. Abbey from The Sound on the Sound emailed me about the Doe Bay Sessions, and I would be greedy indeed to keep the news from you. Every Tuesday, from now through October, they're posting a new live session from bands like The Head and the Heart, Hey Marseilles, Ravenna Woods, Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives, and Fences.

It's a new project from SOTS, which begins with music videos of The Maldives somewhere in the woods, filmed during this year's Doe Bay Fest. The initial idea was to invite a few bands to the SOTS yurt for a Vincent-Moon-style "takeaway" shoot...but these things have a way of getting away from you, and now:

Over the next 10 weeks we will be releasing videos featuring a candlelit session from Fences, The Head and the Heart (and the Doe Bay All-Stars) singing down the sun, Ravenna Woods using trees for percussion, a mid-trail serenade from Drew Grow and the Pastors’ Wives, The Maldives on a mossy knoll, picnic table perching with Hey Marseilles and many more.

You can thank videographer Tyler Kalberg and sound man Chris Proff for the gorgeous, how'd-they-do-that results. It wasn't easy. There's a reason you don't see DIY recording studios popping up throughout in the woods in general. Abbey says that basically everything that could go wrong, did:

Our generator (see: "lone power source") broke before the first session was filmed, our "mobile sound unit" (which weighed about 80 pounds) started eating tape early Saturday morning, with five sessions left to record.

Doe Bay is anti-bummer, though, so the head of Doe Bay maintenance lent them a generator (delivered to their campsite) and "a stranger who happened to be walking down the trail in front of us" loaned them a mobile sound unit. Backstory aside, you'd never know it. The HD video captures just the glory of the natural settings, and the happiness of musicians in their natural environment.