“This place is called the Boris Kar-Lofts,” our tour guide yelled over his shoulder. “It’s built from chain-link and the discharge of indie virgins.” Introduced only as “Jay Mo,” our guide wore little more than a vintage Team Molteni cycling jersey and clutched some foul dollar store liquor bottle like it held the distilled tears of Yoko Ono. It was somewhere after 2am, hours after the close of the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival, and his afterparty-pimping phone call had led us to this scuffed brick warehouse on Chicago’s near west side. Sure enough, there really was a chain link enclosure outside, barricading a throng of sweaty kids from the street. It looked like a hipster holding tank.

“Music’s upstairs,” Jay Mo had called as he wandered into the crowd. “Look for beers in the corners.” But we couldn’t find the corners, let alone any beers. The performance portion of Boris Kar was pitch-black but for a beam of light somewhere near the improvised stage - more like a clearing, really - where Bradford Cox and Deerhunter were hitting the high point of a set apparently responsible for reducing the high school and college-age crowd into a stinking, exhausted mess of clammy flesh and torn satin gym shorts. (Remember, this was hours after the quintet’s own Pitchfork set.) Deerhunter stood in the clearing, inches from the crowd, and drove heads of instruments (or just heads) manically into effects pedals while Cox or a voice from the audience screamed into a heavily-reverbed microphone. A drummer clattered away in the darkest part of the clearing. It wasn’t music, it wasn’t noise; it was release, and if we felt that from the last half-hour of their set, we wondered if we might have found one of those mystery corners to pass out in, had Jay Mo gotten us here earlier. After a full weekend of festival-going community and eclectic, often revelatory performances at Pitchfork, standing crowded in a dank loft while Deerhunter and their fans lost their shit in a two-way transfer of energy felt something like elation.

BRING THE NOISE

Deerhunter’s wee hours set was rewarding in part because it was so goddamn loud. Volume is one of the only things the Internet can’t provide, so it becomes a commodity for artists, particularly those who’ve developed their audience via online publicity or promotion. Volume helped Deerhunter become a living, breathing, and LOUD band instead of just a name in a message board post, the subject of a MySpace missive, the compressed sound in an MP3, or the latest group gushed about in a Web mag or music blog. And even if sound problems marred some of the sets at Pitchfork - more dudes screamed “Turn it up!” during Mastodon’s Saturday evening scorcher than threw their devil horns high - the connection between volume, revelation, and our perception of artists in this Internet age was a consistent theme for the weekend.

Nerds owned. Sets from one man armies Girl Talk (Greg Gillis), Dan Deacon, The Field (Axel Willner) and a spindly, bespectacled, and tinfoil-crowned Jamie Lidell ruled with dirt-vibrating volume but also the sense that they’d transcended any “I don’t like a dude on stage with just a laptop or keyboard” complaints just by appearing at the Fest as live human beings and not .jpeg’s on a screen. Deacon’s set was even shut down due to safety concerns. One beefy guy in geek glasses operating a brightly-colored musical bench makes the authorities go bananas? This despite Mastodon’s bone-snapping pummel? But it’s true - first, the Internet gave bedroom musicians a platform. Then it made them online phenoms. And finally, with the hot sun, cold beers, and huge sound systems of a site-sponsored outdoor music festival, it made them touchable, tangible stars.

IT’S ALREADY BEEN BROUGHT’N

Amidst these revelatory sets were performances from artists who didn’t need any proof of awesome, even if they still needed some volume. There will never be enough Mastodon to go around. The Atlanta quartet’s interpretation of metal keeps the vicious vocals, technical prowess, and grandiose themes, but cuts it all with the manic beat of hardcore. Their music is angry and ready to break faces. But there’s craft in their sound, too; it’s like the world’s loudest art project. And speaking of art projects, that’s what Of Montreal rolled out for their set, an enjoyable racket of psychedelic pop augmented with homemade banners, interpretive dancers, and partial nudity. Clipse needed no more than force of will and the horror house beats from 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury to utterly destroy on one of the festival’s two main stages - MCs Pusha T and Malice kept the focus on songs and aggression instead of shout-outs and weak jokes (two common flaws of live hip-hop), and the result was one of the weekend’s most visceral sets.

With the Pitchfork Music Festival’s ambitious mix of indie music’s past (Sonic Youth and Slint’s vaunted performances of Daydream Nation and Spiderland) and its current, weirdly cool fringe (Deerhunter, Deacon; the pastoral cool of Grizzly Bear), it’s nice that the weekend’s most consistent and enjoyable set came from a band everyone from your parents to the guy who changes your oil would (and should) like. The New Pornographers have been doing this for a while now, but their propulsive, album-rock inspired power-pop never gets old, particularly when it’s played as the sun goes down on a gorgeous Sunday evening.

The material from the Pornographers’ upcoming Challengers album was great, but - like any band with this many hooks and harmonies - it was the hits we wanted to hear. “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” “Mass Romantic,” “Use It,” and the ultimate song for a moment like that, “The Bleeding Heart Show.” It was dusk and the band was almost finished when Newman began picking out the initial, slower section of “Bleeding Heart.” But by the time vocalist-keyboardist Kathryn Calder picked up the melody for its rousing finale, the sold-out crowd was as drunk on happiness and community as those weirdo kids in the Boris Kar-Lofts would be on Hennessey and PBR later than night. People were swaying without irony, and Calder’s voice carried so beautifully, it’s now officially a crime to refer to her as a replacement for Neko Case. The Pornographers’ set proved that, when the experimentalism, knob-twirling, G-string wearing, heavy metal heaving, and bizarre music clashing is all over, it’s solid and rewarding pop music that we probably all want to hear.

Who knows about Jay Mo, though. He’s probably still looking for the discharge of indie virgins.

JTL