Over the next month, the Central District’s Hollow Earth Radio will be hosting its 8th annual Magma Festival, a glorious celebration designed to expose the Pacific Northwest’s unsung musical weirdos to the wider world. In the next issue of Seattle Weekly, we’ll be providing a comprehensive introduction to some of our favorite Magma freaks playing this year that you might not have heard of before. But since the “Warm-Up” shows for the festival start this weekend, we thought we’d let you meet one of the bands playing this Sunday to kick the month-long shenanigans off:

Freeway ParkHometown: Seattle, WAGenre: Literary Riff-Rock

“I feel like Freeway Park the park and Freeway Park the band are similar in that both aim to be very structured and beautiful but often up very dirty and full of drunks,” lead poet Graham Isaac says. A Dorito chip bag blows across his feet, getting caught in a shrub before plunging to its doom down a deep cement pit built into the park’s jagged brutalist architecture. Isaac, author of 2013’s non-linear narrative novel Filthy Jerry’s Guide to Parking Lots, is the “frontman” of Freeway Park, a spoken word project featuring readings from his books and poetry that just happens to have expansive Fugazi-style hardcore riffs behind it—riffs that rarely repeat themselves. “Once we wrote a song that was verse-chorus-verse and I was like, whoa, we’ve never done this before!” bassist John Jernigan says. Freeway Park is the collision of non-linear narratives with non-linear rock. If you are a person who demands linearity, Freeway Park will not comply with your demands.