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With the help of a little bit of water, music and artgoers came together for another installment of the Crux Artist Collective's monthly open mic night on Friday.
After a brief spell of heavy rain, the crowd slowly grew with friendly, eager people who were ready to see and hear the night's performers. For the most part, those attending were performers and their friends, many of which had attended the past sessions.
The Crux usually holds an open mic night at the end of each month, said Sean Cummins, who worked the sound.
The gray clouds cleared and eventually the vacant gallery was full of people checking out the art on display and waiting for the performances to start.
Everyone sat down with their eyes on the stage, providing full attention to the first performer, poet Fred Wells.
"I've only lived in Chico for two weeks," Wells said as he stepped toward the microphone.
Wells seemed very comfortable on stage, and it was difficult to believe his introductory remark.
He read four different pages of poems about topics ranging from the conflict of man versus machine to high oil prices and his affection for smoking.
Wells describes his writing as an "interpretation of my own brain."
Although he has been writing for about 15 years, Wells doesn't like being known as a poet.
"I think of myself as an earthling," said Wells, who is also an emcee by the name of Dirus.
The next few performers were a bit mellower and paved a path for others. Acoustic guitars and soothing, passionate singing warmed up the small dwelling on Park Avenue.
Jody Nixon has only been singing for about three months, but the audience received her pretty well during her solo performance and her performance with the John Stadler Band.
"It's a good crowd here," Nixon said. "It's easy to become comfortable."
The audience was at its height of excitement for Nixon and the band's performance.
The most stimulating and obscure performance of the night came from Weston Thomson and Ty Gorton, two of Crux staff members. To put it simply, Thomson played some original electronic-industrial music that went along with an interpretive human art performance by Gorton.
The music elevated toward a climax in which Gorton made his way toward a devilish-looking mirror that he covered with paint using his hands and arms.
"How do I describe that?" Gorton said, smirking as he asked how he could even describe the ordeal.
"It goes back to a book I read as a child about inception of the mirror to society and how it changed people," he said.
While many performers took off after Gorton and Thomson's set, Tyson Harris sat silently through every act waiting for his time to shine. It wasn't his first time. He had been to the gallery recently at "Ty the Not," where he took second place in the Crux Groove emcee battle a few weeks back.
Harris finished the night with bang, boom, clicks and pops. He came in to read a couple of rhymes he had written, but introduced himself to the intrigued audience with something more familiar to those that know him.
"I can't ever step up to the mic and not beatbox," Harris said.
The quality of September's open mic night at the Crux proved to be more surprising than the weather shift earlier that day. The performers were well received by the attentive crowd and repeatedly thanked by gallery's staff.
There were no huge highlights or standouts at this open mic, just a handful of talented people congregating together in a place they can call home.
Sergy El-Morshedy can be reached at selmorshedy@theorion.com
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