Dream Oven: The Kiln for Creativity.

Text and image by Nikki Volpicelli.

Once upon a time, there was a big bread oven conspicuously placed in the middle of the dingy basement on Frankford Avenue. Just sitting there, taking up space, front and center to many a basement house show.

The renter of the house, Marshall James Kavanaugh, gave that oven a story. He made it an idea, a vehicle for alternative expression, a symbol for a creative community on the rise.

Kavanaugh called it the Dream Oven and started using the moniker to book shows at local venues, including Little Berlin, Kung Fu Necktie and El Bar.

He started building a base at his own home, in the loose likeness of Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon and her open-house philosophy. The writer would open her doors to her great contemporaries including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. She helped initiate what’s known as the Lost Generation of now-renowned writers, poets and painters.

“That’s the main thing I’m trying to accomplish with the Dream Oven, to offer an open art space for a community to perform within, and a place where people can just hang out and be friends,” muses Kavanaugh, whose East Kensington space is flush with expression in the form of letters, paintings and literal, triangular hand-crafted freak flags strung on a rope by the stairs.

The middle of the living room is sometimes the place of word exchange, the stage or the sleeping quarters for a visiting band.

But right now, there is a television pyramid, 12 TV screens stacked in a pyramid of static white noise. Fuzz speaks out of the screens, which have magazine faces with eyeholes cut out and glued to them, strands of color cutting through their middles and thumb-sized terrariums nestled in their corners.

“At the original house, the show would be in the basement,” says the 25-year-old Kavanaugh. “In the middle room, upstairs, there would be the static room, which was just TV installations. At one point, there were, like, 25 sets in that one room. One person at a time would go into that room and just sit down on a couch and zone out. Maybe they were tired of being at a sweaty basement show. A normal show only has one room and it’s that show and if you don’t like it, then you leave. I try to create this giant madhouse with a different vibe in each space so that everyone can have a good time.”

Past good times have included local psych-fuzz outfit Birds Of Maya and the South Philly garage-punk people of Far-Out Fangtooth. Last month, the Dream Oven is sitting in at Little Berlin for Plato’s Porno Cave, a series of plays, readings and musical performances focusing on philosophical new beginnings and erotic fiction.

“The Philly music scene in the last year has gotten so much national press,” says Kavanaugh. “Some bands have got some really big deal record deals. Some friends are being covered by Pitchfork, which doesn’t mean anything really, but it’s awesome. It’s a big deal, because five years ago, Philly was really off the radar.”

The Dream Oven, Kavanaugh points out, was one of the first showcases in the city to book up-and-comers like Daniel Bachman and Mmoss.

Kavanaugh’s style is all over the place — punk and potlucks and poetry. You can see it all whirling in his brain as he talks. The concept behind the Dream Oven is the physical byproduct of that type of thinking.

“The new generation is killing it on all spectrums,” he says. “We’re performing, we’re writing, we’re creating, we’re filling the market and we’re all collaborating, we all get it.”

The New Generation: a community charting a weird time in the world, a time of underemployment and overstimulation and some times too many options. A creative community that’s dealing with this environment by bouncing ideas off of each other, coming-of-age together and getting un-lost together.

The next Dream Oven event is at Little Berlin on Sunday, featuring Spacin’, Bitchin’ Bajas and Chris Forsyth. See details here.

It all sounds eerily familiar, in fact. And the Dream Oven is just opening its door, letting it all in and cooking up something good.