When Philip Freeman set out to start his own music website in 2010, he wanted to find a name that "didn't immediately say 'this is a music website.'" He eventually landed on Burning Ambulance, which aside from potentially conjuring images of a 90s garage band, fit the mysterious aesthetic of the experimental avant garde music he was interested in. 

"My wife says it also has a metaphorical meaning related to the do-it-yourself ethos: the ambulance is burning, which means help is not coming, so culturally speaking, you're on your own," Freeman elaborated.  

Since moving to Bigfork from New Jersey in 2023, Freeman has established the lone outpost in the West for the genre-bending music that pushes the boundaries of conventional sounds. If the ambulance is burning, the flames are a torch in the Rocky Mountains for a style of music that predominantly resides in the edgy corners of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.  

As a New Jersey native, Freeman cut his teeth with many of those artists when he began his career as a music journalist in 1996. He wrote for jazz magazines in the U.S. and Europe, reviewing records and interviewing musicians and making a name for himself in the tight-knit community of avant garde music. He published two books on jazz music, including "Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century,” which can be found on the shelves of Kalispell’s library. 

In 2010, Freeman decided to strike out on his own, and he and his wife, the visual artist I.A. Freeman, launched Burning Ambulance. The original vision for the project was a print magazine anchored by a website, but later evolved to include a podcast and a digital music festival. Today, Freeman splits his attention between the record label, which puts out four to five CDs a year, and a regular newsletter on Substack that has more than 5,000 subscribers.  

With so much success in the world of avant garde, Bigfork was an unusual choice of location for Freeman, so far from the hyperconnected centers of the movement.  

Avant garde music is nebulous by definition, spanning genres and refusing to adhere to any one sound. Experimental and renegade in nature, the musicians who occupy this niche corner often strive to challenge their audiences and the boundaries of traditional music. 

"Our records blend two or three things together in a way that's hard to define," Freeman explained as he tossed around phrases like "psychedelic rock with instrumentation" or "death metal guitar combined with a string quartet" to describe the music produced by Burning Ambulance.  

The music of Montana, on the other hand, tends to gravitate toward country and folk, heavy on strumming guitars and soft ballads romanticizing the western landscape. It's a far cry from the avant garde movement, born in the early 20th century out of a desire to reject classical musical forms.  

Yet after visiting Bigfork and falling in love with the artistic community on the shore of Flathead Lake, Freeman recognized that while avant garde music may not reflect the sounds of Montana, it mirrors the spirit of the state. Adventurous music that balks at following the rules and endeavors to tread where others have not gone before? The story sounds familiar, even if the music doesn't. 

"I really like the fact that we're doing it from here because a lot of the labels that cover this kind of music, they're either in New York or Chiago, maybe Los Angeles, but there's nobody in the West doing this kind of challenging stuff, and I want that to come out of Montana," Freeman said. 

While Freeman wants to challenge audiences, he's also aware that avant garde has a reputation for repelling listeners and veering too far into the experimental and the shocking. Many records are a single song that spans more than an hour, while other infamous tracks feature musicians simply holding their instruments on stage without playing them.  

The music Burning Ambulance produces is daring and unusual; music that Freeman thinks no one else would put out. But it's also often rooted in genres that causal listeners are familiar with.  

Metal fans, for example, would be interested in one of Burning Ambulance's recent releases, "Mama Killa," featuring guitarist Ava Mendoza, violinist Gabby Fluke-Mogul and drummer Carolina Perez.  

Freeman knew Mendoza and Fluke-Mogul had an existing partnership together, but wondered what would happen if Perez, the drummer in a death metal band he also enjoyed, got involved. After pitching the trio on his idea, they booked a recording studio, made an album blending their unique sounds and became good friends in the process. 

"There are jazz labels that just make jazz records, and there are rock labels that just do rock records," Freeman said. "We do unorthodox combinations of people. We challenge the musicians that we work for, that we work with, to come up with something entirely new."  

The physical albums themselves even look different and are designed entirely by I.A. Freeman, who blends her photography and painting to create ethereal album covers that reflect the music inside. Made of heavy cardboard and printed on textured paper, Freeman said it's a product that "looks good your shelf and feels good in your hands." 

Burning Ambulance isn't concerned with widespread distribution, either. Freeman only prints 500 copies of each album and views it as his mission to ensure those records find their way into the hands of the right people who will connect with the genre-defying music he himself is drawn to.  

So far, the community of Bigfork has embraced Burning Ambulance with excitement and curiosity, Freeman said. He hopes to continue changing people's minds about avant garde and experimental music.  

"The goal for me is always to say this is a record that anybody could pick up and potentially listen to for pleasure," Freeman said. "It's not homework. It's not a master's thesis in composition or anything like that. It's not quiet, studious music. A lot of these records are loud, they rock. Play them in your car. We want people to be excited when they hear our stuff." 

To get a taste of avant garde music, visit burningambulance.com.

Reporter Elsa Ericksen can be reached at 406-758-4459 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support.