The smell of steaming rice and beans blends with the smoke of a sage smudge stick burning by the front door of a house-show venue in Ravenna. The ’70s-era thrift-store couches slowly begin to fill with laughing artists, reminiscing and anxiously chattering about a potlatch they’re headed to later. Curran Foster, the writer, director, and songwriter behind Marvelous Good Fortune, didn’t personally name this house that he lives in—a place known as “The Future.” Nevertheless, it eerily fits his metaphysical vision.
“I guess I’m trying to predict the future,” Foster says, criss-crossed on the floor. “The future that I want to see has always been highly based off of my desires for the kind of community I want to be a part of. And so then by making a play that includes a lot of people from real life, then it kind of becomes that.”
Marvelous Good Fortune has been many things over the years, never settling on a singular identity. It started within a play Foster wrote, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, the first in a psychedelic trilogy following two friends in search of a cure for their loneliness. The play debuted at the University of Washington’s Cabaret Theatre in 2012, evolving into a full-fledged musical movie starring and produced with his friends. The music from the production prompted Foster and friends to take the fictional band of the script out into the real world and play shows. Marvelous Good Fortune’s shows involve dressing up in cloaks and arranging set lists to tell the story of Foster’s scripts.
But Marvelous Good Fortune is only one part of a greater whole. Though not an official collective, Foster and his friends have spun off into Seattle’s version of the Soulquarians—in many ways, manifesting the original community-building intent of Foster’s play. The like-minded music and arts projects of burgeoning groups like the skateboard power pop of Sick Sad World, the freak disco-groove of iji, and queer production group Woedette all overlap with MGF. Foster and MGF wouldn’t be described as the leader, but instead are a sort of common denominator. With each artist there’s also a focus on the ephemeral, whether visions from mushrooms or the subconscious.
“Psychedelic art is good art because it emulates dream worlds,” iji frontman Zach Burba says. “It shows people images that you may not take right away as what it is. Later, maybe you realize what that is, or maybe it just tells you something straight to your subconscious instead of straight to your ears or to your brain.”
The friends even all share their dreams. What started out as a collective dream journal has turned into a Facebook dream-sharing group, which they use to inspire one another’s art.
To help you navigate this overlapping Seattle arts dream universe, we’ve created a handy spirit guide.
Marvelous Good Fortune
Leader: Curran Foster
Dreamweavers: Evan Easthope, Jake Jones, Zach Burba, Will Murdoch, Leena Joshi, Autumn Thomas, Derek Blackstone, Evan Anderson, Sam Peterson, Annie Chung
Vision: Predicting the future with plays, films, and a psychedelic, freak-rock soundtrack.
Future:
Psychic Training Camp, which will start as an actual training camp and then become a play and film, pre-production on second film.
Sick Sad World
Leader: Jake Jones
Dreamweavers: Leena Joshi, Curran Foster, Gordon Baker
Vision: “I just didn’t give a shit about being in a cool band anymore. I didn’t think anyone would like Sick Sad World when I started it. I was doing it to be, like ‘What’s punker than punk?’ I hate punks. I want to punk punks. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make a really nice band and try hard to make it good.’ ” —Jake Jones
Future: Debut album Fear & Lies, out May 12 via Help Yourself Records. Jones hopes to assist in a project called The Wig Show, a local arts talk show in which guests are required to wear wigs. He’ll co-host the show alongside Burba and Foster as their fictional band the Qiwi Boys.
iji
Leader: Zach Burba
Dreamweavers: Jake Jones, Curran Foster, Evan Easthope, Will Murdoch
Vision: The name iji is not confined to one pronunciation. For Burba, it’s about the image it portrays, with the dots above the letters forming an ellipsis, begging to be continued forever onward. “I consider this my life’s work . . . It’s supposed to be a completely open and free genre project that focuses mostly on pop and groove based music.” —Zach Burba
Future: Latest album Whatever Will Happen, out June 2 via Team Love. Also working on a Beach Boys fan-fiction comic.
WoedetteLeader: Autumn Thomas
Dreamweavers: director of photography Leena Joshi (who also creates her own videos and performs poetry separately).
Vision: “Because Woedette has been constructed by a queer person of color, it is a queer video-production house of color. The multiple identities I hold are now also held by Woedette . . . As [Leena and I] continue to work together, the creative process is further shaped not just for us but by us, and thus we are able to better transmit even deeper channels of our identity into our work.” —Autumn Thomas
Future: Thomas and Joshi recently released a short film called sleep is over, soundtracked by a playlist curated by the band SLEEP∞OVER and a series of conceptual dance videos centered on the idea of synesthesia titled Furze & Whinstone (below). Next Thomas will direct a music video for Seattle electronic act Lilac, a video series with Joshi called Pluto and Scorpio set to Gucci Mane tracks, and a feature film.
