Behind his ubiquitous black sunglasses, director Jim Jarmusch leans forward, legs crossed to prop one black biker boot up on the opposite knee, "I'm a once-a-week-wash-my-hair guy." The droll drawl spills off his lips and down over his hands as one springs up from the wrist and gestures toward his trademark platinum shock. He seems bored, perched atop a plum-patterned sofa in a sunken parlor ringed in seafoam walls and bad floral prints. The room has an unsettling scale. It's as if your crazy aunt built an addition the size of a hotel lobby onto the den of her split level in Hempstead and decorated the large to match the small -- that is to say, it is all wrong. Terrible palette and worse taste. Jarmusch is holding court at the crumbling Borscht Belt icon of Kutsher's Country Club and Hotel that serves as the backdrop to one of most unique modern music festivals in the world. That's why Jim is here. That's why we're is here.     

Did I mention that this plum and seafoom melee is the nicest room at Kutsher's Hotel? Also this is a "press conference," the only press-related, press accessible event of the whole weekend, everything else is more or less wide open to anyone who cares to come (and pays their monies). Even the press conference seems open to anyone who happened into the sunken parlor. So really, this is more of a bunch of people in an ugly room asking Jim Jarmusch questions about his role as curator of the Sunday music lineup and cult celebrity attendee of All Tomorrow's Parties, New York. ATP New York is a three day music, movie, art, card-playing, naked swimming, good-time-having festival that began in 2008 as an off-shoot of the low-fi, low budget British festival. ATP was conjured up in the U.K., allegedly in 1999, as a small-scale, sponsorship-free alternative to the modern Summer Festival Cavalcade with all the corporate endorsements, brand co-opted life experiences and queue-crazed feeding frenzies of Glastonbury et al. We are not without the same teeming hordes and summer spectacles in this nation, and to the extent that they have tried to defy the model, ATP and ATP New York have been very successful in renewing a certain intimacy with multi-act live music. Their festivals unfold to create less a scripted blockbuster than a ranging, cultish improv where every person seems a player and no one knows which way the stage is. Well actually, the stage for ATP New York is Kutsher's Country Club and Hotel. I've been over this. Back to Jim-we're losing Jim to boredom!     

Concerned that he's losing interest due to hair questions from the media elite (a guy on an ice cream cart), I ask him what the likes of Kutsher's decaying kitsch brings to this unique event and he lights up. "Kutsher's is fantastic; what a perfect place. It's contained (read: minimal civilian interaction), the venues are great and they're indoors (read: "no nasty sunlight"), they got these different bars (read: no lines for drinks), everyone's sort of all together..." which is true. Just under 3,000 people attend the intimate indoor showcases, a fraction of what larger summer festivals draw. This smaller attendance and the fact that the majority of these attendees stay in the rooms at Kutsher's, creates a campus like feel to the grounds as they're possessed for the weekend by all manner and ilk of music aficionados. These creatures, all piled on top of each other sleep sometimes six or eight or more to a room, some sleep in the lobby, others sleep out by the manmade lake and still others, others never sleep at all. Even the musicians stay at the hotel to roam the halls and mingle with the masses during the shows.     

Jarmusch continues, "Kutsher's is not some state-of-the-art resort. It has it's history, but it's kind of hard for 2,000 rock and rollers to really mess it up very much. I like that it's here... It's perfect." He then runs through his lineup choices he's curated for Sunday, a day of music that will blend post rock, neo garage, shoegaze psych, post-hardcore, delta blues, [breath] hipster pop, hip hop and an experimental doom explosion. And that's just Sunday. As he's talking about the bands he loves and his passion for music, it quickly becomes clear that Jarmusch is not bored at all, he just wants to wrap things up so he can go see more music. I guess we all do after what had happened the night before.     

The opening night, Friday,  had featured a lineup of reconstituted bands performing canonical records, an ATP theme of sorts. The sets included 90s Seattle stalwarts Mudhoney playing Super Fuzz Big Muff, Iggy & The Stooges performing the incomparable Raw Power and stoner doom metal legends, Sleep reprising their epic, 52:14 long 1992 masterpiece Sleep's Holy Mountain followed by most of the two track monster Dopesmoker, clocked at 1:13:08. Any festival that has the Stooges opening for a reunited Sleep, I mean come on, there's something going on here. These bands don't just get together to play for 3,000 people at weird hotel in upstate New York, or do they? And what is Jim Jarmusch doing here? Maybe that's what ATP has going for it, the magic isn't really that hard to pull off. ATP know their audience because they are their audience: music lovers and music makers. And it's that understanding that fosters a climate of equality between concert goers, press, musicians and staff unique to any festilval I've ever been to. There is no backstage at ATP. 

With this very French liberté, egalité, fraternité vibe running rampant and a showcase that reads like a who's who of seminal bands, avant garde darlings and cult heroes, everyone feels like they were part of something intimate, something special. The moment that summed it up the best on that inaugural Friday was when that Shirtless Wonder of the Ancient World, Iggy Pop invited the audience on stage for their boogie-down tune "Shake Appeal." It's a move the reconstituted Stooges have done at plenty of shows, but this time it felt... it felt like everyone in the audience was in on something. Sometimes, we all just want to be welcomed onto the stage, however small it is. Mr. Pop did the honors at this year's ATP New York: "Now the time has come! I want dancers, I want spazzers, I want freaks!" Then, as the throngs poured over the stage and stood like fantastically hip deer in the dazzling headlights of rock royalty, he urged them, "Nice and easy, nice and easy..." Nice and easy indeed, Iggy. Nice and easy and Loud as hell for a weekend when everyone could share the stage.