The anti-fragile revolution of Treefort Music Fest

A collective of art-punks destroys a ballroom as they call for the destruction of borders; films of love and longing roll in the Egyptian theatre, and at the rooftop bar drag queens dance on in a spray of dollar bills and leave the rest of the world at the door. While America stumbles in the darkness, its artists grope for the light switch; the unlikeliest of places are where eruptions of creativity offer a lifeline of togetherness.

True to its home in the Treasure Valley, Treefort is a music and culture festival which has proven to be a gold rush for showcasing the arts. While creatives have flocked to the storied lands of LA and New York City, the festival was founded to show that the grass is not greener on the other side but where you water it. Boise is one of the fastest growing cities in the US, a gasp of blue in an otherwise overwhelmingly red state where kindness is not forced but reflexive. Attracting over 20,000 people each day to explore events and performances taking place across the city, the fortunes of Boise have transformed in line with Treefort’s vision.

Each ‘Fort’ excavates a subculture of the city and brings it to light: Filmfort which celebrates the best of emerging independent cinema; Storyfort showcases the brightest literary voices, while Dragfort and Skatefort invest power into those communities to present their scene’s talent on their own terms.

It’s this very spirit with which the festival was conceived in 2012. Choosing to transmute loss into impactful change for the city, co-founder Lori Shandro chose to dedicate her resources to build a legacy for Boise’s arts and culture scene following the sudden loss of her husband in a private plane crash. The vision was brought to life by producer Drew Lorona, marketing smarts from Megan Stoll – and, of course, the indispensable Eric Gilbert. A veteran of the Boise music scene as both a musician himself and DJ for the local radio station, Gilbert has overseen the curation of Treefort since its first edition. Determined to represent homegrown talent, whether that be the teenagers cutting their teeth at the Boise Rock School or the artists descending from its historical Basque community, the festival seeks to capture all the colours of this kaleidoscopic city.

As you explore Downtown Boise, its surviving frontier town charm competing with widespread modernisation, you’ll find that each coffee shop, bar and food joint not only supports but is inextricably a part of Treefort. Windows are painted with murals for the festival and local businesses offer discounts to attendees; over 800 local volunteers are an essential part in bringing Treefort to life. Gilbert, an artist himself (who performed this year alongside Built To Spill’s Doug Martsch in the skatepark as secret side project Buffalo Surfers – a Butthole Surfers cover band), understands what it’s like living on the road. Hotels, decent meals and festival wristbands are extended to all performers as a matter of principle – another stroke of warm, Boisean hospitality which ought to be a given but is really quite exceptional.

Even though there is a thrill in seeing Geese - the redeemers of indie-rock and the darlings of just about everyone - headlining the festival on Saturday night, there is an arguably even bigger thrill when you bump into Cameron Winter in Slow coffee reading a book on Yugoslavia recommended to him by Brian Eno. What more can be said about Father John Misty and Magdelena Bay when following your nose in Downtown Boise can offer up experiences that simply couldn’t happen anywhere else?

You cannot tell the story of Treefort without the people. The festival makes a virtue of the smalltown curse that everyone knows each other and plays that as its ultimate strength. Woven throughout the programming are the artists of Mishap Records, an experimental record label and “coalition” created by - and for - Boise musicians. Its founder Shad Tuck belongs to hip-hop/hardcore outfit Trauma Kit and post-punk band Chief Broom, which he balances alongside being a graphic artist and software developer. In short, “a guy who generally does too much here in Boise, Idaho.”

He shows me his sketchbook, a now-battered article which has now taken on the importance of a relic, where the logo for Mishap Records – an ink drawing of rabbit with its foot severed, the inverse of good luck – was first committed to the page.

“The label began as a pact between me and a few of my close friends to finish what we started,” he shares. “I’m sure any artist can relate to that mental battle. It felt like a really communal thing and an act of accountability. For better or worse, I'm an artist first and a businessman last.” To see a physical manifestation of the music he and his friends had made across vinyl and cassettes, to pool together knowledge and resources to overcome an increasingly inhospitable music industry, has been the label’s forward motion which now sets its sights on signing talent from Boise all the way to Nebraska and London.

“I think the scene here as a whole has that scrappy mentality. The Treefort founders were just close friends who were always throwing their own shows, so they were like, ‘Okay, well, we’ll make our own festival’. It’s a good time to be in this city, and the investment in the arts is multi-generational. You’ve got people of all different ages making fucking awesome music here.”

The Mishap Records DNA can be found across bands including the horizon-shifting shoegaze band Porcelain Tongue, the experimental hip-hop trio Cigs Inside and the stripped-back reveries of Frankie Tillo. Even in these eclectic, far-flung sounds, the commitment to their art and their community is what binds them together.

I first learned of Realms when I saw John Gorbus destroy a car in its parking lot in the squalid heat of July 2024. How many venues would allow a noise-punk cult armed with baseball bats to perform in its first months of opening in the name of art? Well, never mind, because Realms did. This year is the first that the venue has joined Treefort, one of 50 which sprawl across Downtown Boise and alone in its claim to having unlimited Dance Dance Revolution and the ability to play Space Invaders at the bar. Crucially, it’s an all-ages venue which champions youth expression in Boise above all else.

With Treefort’s line-up boasting over 500 bands this year, its radius has expanded – but so has the route of the entirely free Treeline bus which mirrors the spirit of a tavern if you’re lucky enough to catch one with bands performing including Hillfolk Noir and The Country Weepers. Even in transit as you travel from one side of town to the other, there is the magic of happenstance. Realms is only a short ride away and entirely within reach.

Tanner Nielson, a born and raised Boisean, founded the venue in 2023 with his parents. His father chose to use the money he received from selling his stake in an employee-owned company to build something meaningful in the city they love. After living in Japan, Nielson returned to execute their vision: he hunted down dozens of vintage arcade games from classified ads, racking up hundreds of miles; he hired Idaho musicians as subcontractors who learned to mud drywall and apply finishing materials to the bar. It’s a labour of love and community.

“I’m the manager, but I have no experience in business,” he laughs. “I’m not an entrepreneur. Everyone who works here is either a fellow artist or someone who shares our dream. I don’t think I’ve looked at one single resume in my entire time of hiring anybody - which is maybe good or bad, I’m not sure. We have a lot of different crowds because we’ll go from five kids’ birthday parties in a row on a Saturday afternoon to a hardcore show at 7pm, and it’s cool if there’s some crossover. I feel like there are some people who don’t really know much about the music scene who have gotten a view into what’s happening by being here. We're very inclusive and queer-friendly – we just want to create a safe space for everybody. There are no barriers here at Realms. I guess it’s quite nice that there’s crossover between crowds who might not interact with each other normally, which is important for humanity as far as understanding each other. It’s very productive for the culture.”

He recalls the defining John Gorbus performance which anointed Realms as a venue for Boise’s counterculture. After meeting the band’s livewire frontman Matt Neymard at a Super Smash Bros tournament they formed an alliance which led to them hiding a car with tarp (with all the glass broken for safety). In their performance, it was a final, biblical act of destruction and catharsis. “People started ripping the doors off, and skaters started showing up doing cavemans off the top of the car. And then it started to tip over,” shares Nielson. “At that point, there were about 100 people and my dad was watching our parking lot camera, texting me like, ‘Please, you’ve gotta make it stop’ – and I looked up, and my mom had grabbed the kitchen knife and was stabbing the tires! My mom is very punk, she’s way cooler than me.”

This year at Treefort, Realms hosts the vitriolic Rat Utopia Experiment. With their faces painted white with freakish swirls and exaggerated smiles, their grunge-oriented strain of pop-punk carries the corrosive rage which can only be unleashed by teenagers. Fronted by mesmeric vocalist Phia Lane, her voice turns on a dime from hardcore, guttural screams to melodic flourishes of feeling in the vein of Hayley Williams. Their name flashes behind them in the vein of an 80s screensaver, interspliced with scenes of video game violence, and in their rallying cries against the presidency and questioning bodily autonomy hoards of kids are magnetised to the depth of their expression.

But there are other ways and means to tell a story. In a horny, head-on collision between Storyfort and Dragfort, the Death Rattle Literary society presented Erotica: Working Nine to Thrive. Local erotica writers met with burlesque brilliance as blue-collar tales took unexpected turns: a boot-licking missive which underlined the degradation of applying for a job was followed by a fantastical tale of fucking the twin-tailed siren of Starbucks. And for the loftier heights of literature, the likes of award-winning Irish author Megan Nolan and the tastemaking young authors showcase This Is The Place could be found reading at Ochos cocktail bar.

Another venue which opened its doors to Treefort for the first time this year was the Boise Contemporary Theater. Hosting the Podfort programming, I stumbled upon a recording of Popular Music That Will Live Forever. Taking its name from a box set of vinyl records found in a dumpster in Akron, Ohio, the podcast is an “exercise in thriftology and memoir”. Excavating long-forgotten physical media and bringing their unknown or mysterious creators to light, its host Calvin Pineda unspool these tales with the calm, assuring storytelling in the vein of Ira Glass. This episode detailed the story behind a cassette tape they found in an antique store for an ephemeral band called The Full Moon Syndrome. Their origin story, what became of the duo and how it ended up on a cassette tape no one can explain the existence of gestures toward notions of stillborn dreams, changing passions and the relentless intervention of circumstance.

At the end of the show, Calvin Pineda hands out handmade zines – photocopied and folded thrice, the kind of thing born of scissors and glue and felt tip pens. It announces that Calvin Pineda & The Antacids are “the only bad playing Treefort” after Father John Misty had allegedly began his career as a Mormon prophet, Mother Mother had experienced virulent food poisoning after an extended luncheon at Joe’s Crab Shack (“They’re nursing some Pepto and are handling it like champs <3”) and Flipturn are too busy trying to get into R-rated movies by standing on each other’s shoulders in trench coats - “again”. And so what choice have you but to go back to Realms to see these anti-folk darlings if everyone else has cancelled? With a box of cassette tapes free to take – not their own music, but the thrift shop miscellany which fuels their own curiosity in the hope it will fuel yours – their songs are self-described “ex-Mormon break up songs” and “sort-of-secular hymns” steeped in offbeat, careworn warmth.

Boise’s underground headliners are John Gorbus, the many-headed beast which I stumbled upon at The Shredder three years ago and have kept me soul-bound to Boise ever since. So much so that I have felt compelled to return each year to Treefort to watch their startling, ever-unpredictable evolution from the destructive agents of chaos to theatrical art-punks performing on a Brechtian scale. Badly photoshopped posters enlisting members for an entity called “Gorbcorp” started appearing around town – looking to hire for roles including “small and big guys”, “poop taster” and “money maker”.

The stagecraft spills into the audience at the Shrine Ballroom with rows of computer desks, their monitors scrawled with declarations such as “You will live and die for your shareholders, you are easily replaceable, you are cheap labour nothing more” with “FUCK I.C.E” stickers and toy minions. What unfolds is an all-consuming annihilation in the Gorbian tradition, railing against capitalist rot and America’s failing promises. “Borders are wounds upon the world,” frontman Ben Chappell announces. “Stop defining maps by their borders. Define them by all that is inside them.”

But the violence is tempered, always, with extraordinary feeling and vulnerability. The band’s music is more directional than ever, with tracks drawing from the sprechsgang tradition in the vein of Life Without Buildings and the instrumental exhale of Explosions In The Sky. Tears were shed for John Gorbus’ final act, the story of a friendship severed by distance and the agony of letting go when old tethers remain. A door stands at the end of the floor as the audience gather around Matt Neymard’s tortured path from the stage to what lies on the other side of it; the elusive touch on a shoulder, the urge to move forward but being drawn back, being one of their most visceral acts of storytelling in the collective’s journey so far.

With no separation between artist and audience, John Gorbus dissolve borders as Treefort has always done. Ending their performance in the tradition of a mass embrace, the togetherness this festival fosters for five magical days leaves its afterglow that lingers long after.