About five or six blocks into the heart of Fall Creek, music began to reveal itself before the packs of Ithacan pedestrians in an almost aromatic way, hovering above the little town and seeping and creeping through cracks in the sidewalk, out of front doors, between branches of summer-worn foliage, only to be absorbed by the passersby.

This past lovely Sunday afternoon, residents of Ithaca opened their porches up to local artists, neighbors and music fanatics for the local musical event Porchfest.

This musical expanse pleasantly stretched itself across multiple blocks, various genres and all imaginable walks of life. 

Faced with a potpourri of performers at their disposal, it seemed almost a relief to the viewer to be able to play this musical escapade by ear. The Porchfest attendees seemed to literally prance from porch to porch according to what was pleasing aurally.

The first luring performance to be stumbled upon was Sarah Beckwith.  A senior at Lansing High School, Beckwith was one of the younger performers, green in her shy and endearing interpretation of Regina Spektor’s “Samson.”

Protected and raised behind the quaint white banisters of a porch, before a canary yellow backdrop, she shared a sweet naïveté in her voice that came off as a marriage between a mellowed out Adele and A Fine Frenzy.

As Beckwith carried her tunes, an influx of passersbys carried themselves further into the heart of Porchfest on foot, stroller and bicycle. There were even little red wagons wheeling their way to the core of Porchfest, which could have arguably been the homecoming of the Gunpoets.

Homecoming is an uncannily appropriate word, as Daniel Lisbe, lead of the Gunpoets, returned to perform on the porch of his father's home where he grew up.

Dan Lisbe and his six fellow group members form the Gunpoets, categorized as a hip-hop/rap group. Dan’s father, however, and many of Dan’s fans agree that perhaps this label is an inaccurate and gross generalization.

The tempo of the Gunpoets’ lyrics cohere well with the hip-hop/rap genre; it is the lyrics themselves and their presentation that don’t quite harmonize with the categorization. 

“He’s a spiritual kid [Dan] . . . charismatic… he’s light,” said Ed Lisbe, Dan’s father.

Lisbe reminisced about his son’s childhood in the area and how Dan grew up on the porch he was now performing upon. During the Gunpoets’ performance, the only existing barrier between the performers and the audience seemed to be the sidewalk — a barrier that quickly lost any sense of tangibility as Dan and other Gunpoets engaged with the audience, dancing and singing and conversing in between. 

Dan’s lyrics were tinged with harsh realities meant to provide the audience with morsels of truth to inspire and empower them. The Gunpoets’ presentation, though heavy with reality, was light with promise; the release of their new album Shoot for the Stars is a good testament to it.

“Shoot for the Stars. . . meaning. . . we want people to feel their own inner power,” relayed Dan in a message he wanted to deliver to the community he called home.

Dan Lisbe’s positivity was not limited to music of his own making, however. In a mash up with a song by the local and lauded Sim Redmond Band, the Gunpoets and their audience shouted praise for other local performers. 

Moving deeper into Ithaca and moseying down Cayuga Street, to get the most out of Porchfest, one might have run into a unofficial, nonchalant sign reading: “Kites in Space with Metallica at 4:15. Note: Metallica may not be able to perform/make it.”

After treating passersbys to their earthy blend of rock and folk, the band members of Kites in Space set down their respective banjos, guitars and drumsticks to discuss favorite local talents, recount their background stories and even toss in a little more humor and small town charm.

Ben Bartishevich (guitar), Chris Ploss (banjo) and Aaron Terkel (drums), making up three fifths of Kites in Space, revisited their high school days and homegrown ways. Bartishevich and Ploss have been playing together for over a decade, beginning at the ripe, confusing age of thirteen.

They closed their simple performance and conversation with directions to the Pearly Snaps, singing whimsical, two-woman band praises. Local Gary Hodges dubbed this delightfully eccentric duo the “wizard of Oz” at Porchfest.

Hodges, who had now enjoyed three years of Porchfest, claimed it was his favorite musical Ithaca event, as the “homegrown, musical talent of Ithaca” gathered to share with the rest of the community. 

Granted, not all the music emanating from the porches on the streets of Ithaca was stellar or ear-catching; there were a few humdrum performances interspersed, perhaps meant to keep the Ithaca musical scene grounded so as not to lose its organic nature. 

However, these ordinary shows gave the spectators a variety of definitions of the idea of “ordinary” to choose from: ordinary as a less ambitious or less accomplished mediocrity; ordinary as a run-of-the-mill everyday happenstance, something characteristic of the area (like music in Ithaca); or perhaps ordinary in the manner that Ithaca sets musical emancipation in the hands of its pedestrian inhabitants everyday, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.