BURNING COCK (featuring Wife)
Oct. 6 - 11, 2025
From Asheville through the woods of Marshall, North Carolina
Following his utopic DIY tour of the North East corridor documented in Midbrow here, Philadelphia-based musician Tyler Maxwell is headed South on a less idealistic mission: To survive as a working artist amid housing hardships and financial uncertainties at home. Follow along here as he writes about life as a performer and audience member traveling through Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas over the next few weeks in search of new sounds and scenes — and in lieu of, at times, a sense of security or stability.
I’ve been putting off writing about Asheville and Marshall and Greenville in all manner of ways: reading, going out, playing guitar for over six hours a day, listening to the same D’Angelo recordings incessantly. (It sucks so, so much that he’s gone.)
My latest weeklong stretch of touring and traveling through the South began a little chaotically, as these things do; I was driving to Asheville without a plan, or rather, with the need to hastily make a new plan because my initial plan got the strikethrough treatment. I thought I knew, and then didn’t know, where I was staying. I’d had a place to stay, or so I thought, and then I didn’t, thus the need to find another. My Mondays are days without shows by design, and I figured I’d have better luck in Asheville than anywhere else in the general region between Chattanooga and Greenville, having a few friends and acquaintances in the area. The thought that I had a few friends and acquaintances in the area quickly began to shrivel, revealing in its residue a realization: I actually maybe only had one or two friends in the area (that I knew of), and barely any acquaintances beyond that. The process of finding a place at this point meant hoping that the acquaintances were more generous than I had any reason to expect.
Sure enough, they all were. Asheville is a small city, only about 70,000 people, though teeming with tourism and travelers (like me), and I suspect that can breed a certain welcoming conviviality, particularly among the artists, the creatively-minded folks. (Especially – and I’ll go into this more and more – since Helene, the storm which ravaged and decimated so much of this region a little over a year ago. I was, in fact, coming into town right at the one-year anniversary; my tour last year with Sinai Vessel came to Static Age Records, in Asheville, mere weeks before the storm hit.) The relative smallness of the city was especially clear to me when, asking my two acquaintances if they knew anyone who could put me up, each got a “yes” from a friend of theirs; it turned out that those two friends were roommates, so though I’d gotten a “yes” from two people, it yielded one option.
More importantly and crucially, this big “yes” was offered with warmth and enthusiasm, and accepted in kind, and even more importantly and crucially, I was invited to join them for an intriguing event, either before or after dropping my things off at the house. The event was called BURNING COCK. My reaction was more or less the textbook definition of intrigued.
I asked fairly normal questions. I got answers. The COCK in question was a human-sized peacock sculpture, made of wood and branches, perhaps loosely inspired by feral peacocks in western North Carolina; this sculpture would be burned as the finale of an evening-long revue of performance, music and art, in accordance with the Harvest Supermoon. This was the third-annual BURNING COCK. If you’re picturing a vital, non-scalable experience, a miniature, immersive Burning Man, a communal happening with artists and music and vaguely nondenominationally pagan-ish rituals, crankies cranking and black horses appearing seemingly from nowhere in the silver moonlight, you’re in the ballpark. But I didn’t know any of that when I accepted the invitation. I just knew it would probably be interesting, and that my hosts were going, and that it had a ridiculous name, and that’s more than I needed, and the minor irritation of having to come up with a plan B now felt like a small, reasonable price to pay for the privilege of having a potentially way cooler night ahead of me.
My attempts at capturing the glory of October's supermoon.
I drove through winding back roads, with the moon already out in huge splendor before night really fell, stopping frequently to try to take cinematic photos with my phone: cemetery photos, grain field photos, solitary road photos with one oncoming car’s headlights blaring like I was living inside a Springsteen song circa Nebraska. Arriving at the non-descript location, a long row of cars and trucks parked ahead of me, I parked, assembled a quick sandwich, then puzzled my way to the house, hearing the music but unclear in the dark which of these long uphill driveways led to the COCK. (Eventually, a friendly guy leaving in his truck pointed the way.) I arrived in time to catch the last band of the night, called – short, effective, to the point – Wife, from San Francisco. Swathed in dark red light, they played a raucous and in-your-face brand of discordant mid-tempo punk, each song a short, condensed blast of energy. The crowd was in thrall, spread out in the grass watching as their singer, Char, ventured forth beyond the garage into the open air, into shady night rain. The band could hardly contain their joy: one of the guitarists remarked near the end that this was the best show, by far, they’d ever played. I felt a friendly twinge of envy.
Already it was as though the strident, vigorous energy of the music was dissolving any imagined divisions between us, bringing us together, but there were greater binding agents to come: soon, the COCK would be transported, lifted up hill in the dark, and the whole gathered throng would become a procession to different stations. We were bound in the endeavor by simple things, like keeping an eye out for each other in the dark, watching our steps, careful of the recently-rained-on uneven ground, not knowing where we were going or what was going to happen next. Your energy, and everyone else’s, coalesced around trying to take it all in: the great moon and clouds above us, the shadowy path, the mission at hand.
Our first station was a small barn. The COCK was laid down before it, and there, all facing the barn, we were once again an audience: first, to a beautiful marvel of a piece, involving spoken narrative, shadow-puppets displayed through the screen of a cranky, and music improvised by a miniature harp near me, a cello I never saw, and probably some other instruments, not to mention lots of improvised vocalizing and singing, which all were tacitly encouraged to engage in. Then the cranky was removed and we were invited inside for more: a woman played a famous Beethoven theme on her recently-procured xylophone and we passed around a big white flower, taking turns taking whiffs.
Then there was more walking, and then another station, and another cranky performance, this time by Primrose, who would be hosting my Marshall show days later at her studio, which she’s affectionately dubbed The Tea Tent. This piece had a gentler, more private quality, stopping me in my tracks: we were like trees in a field, though some of us still caught the melody she sang and lightly sang along, like wind lightly shaking our leaves. Finally, one last collective hike took us out from the cover of trees and tall shrubs and plants and down a path, emerging into an open field, where the moonlight pooled brightly, to the spot where the COCK would be set aflame. In the same way that music is its own language, and can, at its best, obliterate our general reliance on words, our need to communicate rationally, standing around a blazing fire, in its immense warmth, invited so much extra-lexical vocalizing: I’m talking here about hooting and hollering, woo-ing, straight-up animal noises.
For me, this was like the inverse of FEAST, the festival I attended in Hillsborough, North Carolina to kick off my travels away from Philadelphia. If, there, the fire was an unintended scene-stealer, a downcard actor that unexpectedly owned my attention, here it was the marquee name for a reason, a simple, true, elemental force that could induce a trance and bring out our best instincts and traits, while the effects of all the previous art and music seeped in. The BURNING COCK was burning now, and it was the show, and it made us the show, throwing its heat and its warm light in our faces. The burning of this big, crude wooden bird was comical, goofy, and primal, fun, ridiculous, and downright therapeutic. The immediate center of the circle around the fire got particularly non-verbal, and even turned into a prolonged musical improvisation – voices only – for anyone who felt like throwing down. I participated for as long as I could, probably ten or fifteen minutes, then backed away, only about fifteen feet; returning to language, to conversation, on the outskirts of the circle, felt as weird and arbitrary as when you cross state lines, a sign announcing verbally what cannot possibly be intuitively known. Chatting with friendly strangers and new friends, I was amazed to learn how many of us didn’t live there in Marshall. We were just passing through.
