Wylie's newest album Montana to the core

Wylie and the Wild West’s latest album provides a select compilation of previously recorded songs that illuminate Montana’s sense of place.

The 15 tracks of “Skytones: Songs of Montana” span more than a dozen albums dating back to 1997, according to Conrad contemporary cowboy songwriter Wylie Gustafson. The album includes “My Home’s in Montana,” voted among the top five Montana songs in a recent Tribune readers’ poll.

Gustafson’s brand of Western music is rooted in tradition yet embraces broader influences as well.

“I’ve made a concerted effort to bring cowboy music to a contemporary crowd,” he related in a recent phone interview. “That’s the great thing about American music. We have so many influences to draw from.”

“I think you develop an acute awareness for the outdoors and the beauty of the landscape just by bein’ a rancher,” Gustafson said. “It becomes this theme and this pulse of your life. The beauty really weaves itself into your psyche.”

Gustafson, raised on a cattle ranch near Conrad, noted the natural environment plays an active role in shaping the culture of the ranching and the agricultural community.

“Montanans are very unique, you know,” he said. “They’re very independent yet friendly with a sense of humor. You have to have a sense of humor equal to Mother Nature’s sense of humor. I think Mother Nature humbles you time and time again. You’re not in control.”

The driven rocker “Buck Up and Huck It” and the spirited “Hi-Line Polka” pay tribute to the hearty character of Hi-Line folks. Songs that clarify the spiritual power of landscapes include the serene “Grace,” which describes a mysterious connectedness to the land, and the reverent “I Get High,” which reveals sublime feelings inspired by Montana’s natural beauty.

“The Yodeling Fool” is an autobiographical account of a young Montana kid chasing perceived greener pastures outside the state. In “Montana Love Song,” Gustafson employs the metaphor of Montana as a lover. Gustafson described “Big Sky Lullaby,” a slow yodel, as “a sonic reflection of the beauty of Montana.”

“I tried to capture the loneliness and beauty of the landscape through just a melody,” he explained further. “It’s just an emotion.”

Gustafson said the release of “Skytones” at this stage in his 40-year music career is a retrospective realization prompted by the return to his native state four years ago after an absence of 20 years.

“If you wanna figure out how much you love something, go away from it,” Gustafson mused. “Looking back, the theme of Montana is so prevalent and such a key part of the foundation of my songwriting. It’s all I care about in terms of place.”

Nowhere in the publicity did it say that Peter Jackson had entered a work in the Sculpture on the Gulf exhibition. But there it was, on the headland, a Hobbit building complete with squealing Hobbit children prancing around and playing on the swings which hung from the creaking construction, cobbled together from bits of timber.

But these heightened expectations were dashed when it was revealed that the work was actually by the mere mortal of an artist, Gregor Kregar who had created the Middle Earth structure.

Constructed out of eleven tonnes of recycled timber “Pavilion Structure” owes much to the traditional children’s tree house, the elegant European pavilion and the jerry built bachs of Waiheke.

The work has much in common with the artist’s previous work that sees him working within the area of the cultural landscape looking at architecture, cultural symbols and emblems with an element of playfulness and wit, giving the everyday object a surreal and mythic quality.

    What made the work successful was the presence of two grass skirted female musician/ dancers / singers who performed mid-twentieth songs of the Pacific accompanied by some hula dancing. This bit of Pacific on Waiheke was a clever and witty take on colonialism, cultural appropriation and exploitation.

The most successful work of this sort was “Field Notes” by Carolyn Williams. Dozens of delicate metal rods suspended between the bough of a tree and the ground with each rod having a metal shape representing a sound which the artist had transcribed from sounds she had recorded in the environment around the tree. These shapes hovered in the air, a physical representation of the sounds one could hear.

Her work had a companion piece in Sharonagh Montrose’s “A Weave of Words” which consisted of a small grove in the bush  where which the artist had created a soundscape which could have been pre recorded or sounds picked up from elsewhere on the trail and fed back into the grove.

Several of the works were interactive with works such as Aaron McConchie’s "I Am Auckland" ($11,430) which initially looked like a giant scrum machine. The work consists of three large wooden paddles which can be manually manipulated by levers. The work is like a primitive form of semaphore, enabling participants to signal across the harbour to those on the mainland.

The most innovative of these notions about communication is Kazu Nakagawa’s “A Play – Catwalk” in which the artist has chosen two curators who in turn have designed costumes to perform on the large outdoor catwalk. The whole piece is a combination of fashion show and promenade with the audience as spectators, voyeurs and participants.