Check out an interesting article "A performer’s-eye view of ATP NY by Hopewell associate Alexandra Marvar" below. Marvar is a writer for Time Out NY and also participated in ATP NY this year as part of Hopewell's choir...
[timeoutny.com] Brooklyn psych-rock band Hopewell was formed in the late 20th century. Not since the group’s original drummer, many albums past, has a girl graced its stage. But when the Flaming Lips invited Hopewell to play ATP NY this year, they saw an opportunity arose. To accommodate the Lips’ request that all bands do something “a little different” from their usual set, rumors circulated that Hopewell would play the whole of Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual, or feature nude dancers. Of course, those rumors were started by the band and shared primarily among the band. This past Sunday, Hopewell performed a 45-minute medley they dubbed The Desperation Suite, a distinguishing facet of which was an all-female choir, the Good Good Desperettes (named after the band’s new release, Good Good Desperation). Cue Cat Martino, Christiana Key and myself (top row, far left).
Kutsher’s, the defunct borscht belt resort that has hosted ATP NY for the past two years, appears to have peaked in the ’70s and been on the decline since. An odor of decades hung in the creepy, carpeted rooms, chipmunks darted across the lobby, there was a sewage incident in the hallway near where Vice was filming interviews with Ian Svenonious, and so on. Based on rumors passed down from last year’s headliners in My Bloody Valentine, Hopewell’s Jason Russo’s first order of business at check-in was a dreaded inquiry: “Tell it to me straight—are there bedbugs?” The answer was a meandering, “Probably not.” We decided to appreciate Kutsher’s rustic charm and tried to accept our free accommodations with grace.
Hopewell’s “dressing room” was a curtained quadrant in a large former banquet room, the walls lined with expired, floral-print mattresses to form a sound barrier between the hall and Oneida’s all-day performance next door. From there, we could covet the superior rider beer of our neighboring bands (e.g., No Age’s Kölsch to our Corona), and eavesdrop on the banter between other bands, had there been anyone back there at all, ever—which there wasn’t.
I assumed that artists’ catering might be the place where musicians would actually commingle outside of watching shows together and the occasional Ping-Pong game at the table where Animal Collective and then Akron/Family held court. But seating in the dining area was strict. There formed the Hopewell lunch table, the Shellac lunch table, the Black Moth Super Rainbow lunch table, like an indie-rock high-school cafeteria. Such segregation would make it more of a challenge for band members to hand out copies of their solo projects to other bands further up in the hierarchy of notoriety… hypothetically.
For the first two-and-a-half days of the festival, we indulged in classic fan behavior. At least I, being a lowly chorus member unburdened with the logistical responsibilities of the core Hopewellians, was free to meander, bounce back and forth between the stages, and spend a good percentage of my first 18 hours on site recreationally stalking Nick Cave. The minutes before our set were the only tense ones. Our preshow band meeting/pep talk/emergency rehearsal of daunting harmonies was truncated dramatically by last-minute orders from the stage manager to arrive early. While setting up, soundchecking and adorning the stage with fake ivy, as is Hopewell custom, Russo observed, “There’s no one here but my brothers.” Mild panic in the choir.
But as set-up progressed, and we retreated to the back door for procrastination cigarettes, the room was populated, just like every set for every band at ATP had gone. And by the guitar-noise intro, we had a proper audience that stretched far back into the weird, low-ceilinged banquet hall that was Stage 2. There was a clear line between the Pitchfork-touted newcomers and the Lips’-curated, dedicatedly weird rock lifers, and the most victorious moment for Hopewell, in retrospect, was being counted among the latter, and playing a set that fit in so eloquently."
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