David Willey

Dave Willey is an American experimental musician and composer, best known as the co-founder and member of the Boulder, Colorado-based avant-rock group Hamster Theatre. He is also a member of Thinking Plague and 3 Mice. He has released two solo albums and has performed with Hamster Theatre and Thinking Plague in the United States and Europe. When he returned to the United States from Europe, Willey settled near Boulder and began multi-tracking himself on numerous instruments (keyboards, accordion, guitar, bass, marimba, xylophone, percussion), completing the music, with mastering assistance from Stubbs, that he had begun in Europe and releasing his unique amalgam of rock, European folk, avant-garde experimentation, and modern composition as the solo cassette Songs from the Hamster Theatre…

This 98-minute documentary, written, produced, and directed by Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder of the Washington, D.C. area's Zeitgeist Media, begins and ends at the 2011 Rock in Opposition festival in Carmaux, France, and between those two bookends tells the story of this idiosyncratic movement – or style, or whatever you want to call it – that was birthed in the late '70s and has against all odds persisted on and off to the present day…