INC 2010

Last night I played at the Oakland International Noise Conference and I wanted to write a little bit about the experience (TF set, murder murder set, blandness of most sets).

First, simply concepts: I have a weird hangup about the term noise because I don’t really believe it exists. Noise is something which you do not choose to listen to, which disrupts or overthrows what is predictable in our lives as far as sound goes. Doesn’t a gathering of people somewhere all with the intent to hear “noise” completely negate the validity of the term?

I think from what I saw of the show only a handful of bands genuinely engaged me, maybe enough to put together to make one really good show….The majority of the performers were kind of unexciting stand-in-one-place-and-make-drones-with-crinkle-noises-on-top-of-it-for-a-few-minutes-then-stop types.

If, suspending my unbelief in noise as a generally viable artform, I do allow for a definition of it (the one posited by Luigi Russolo and the futurists seems well thought-out), noise is part of the avante-garde, meant to complete subvert tonal music, push tension and dissonance and extreme timbres to their absolute limits, and to make use of sounds not typically associated with something someone would choose to listen to (machinery, electronics, etc).

By this definition, I think most of the bands wouldn’t even fall in this category. Most of the noise music sounded so similar I would be hard pressed to make a distinction between many of the bands, sometimes wondering if it was another performance or just the house music feebly blurting and buzzing through the amplifiers. There was so much drone I felt like I was in a Krishna temple, which complete eliminates any sort of tension in the music for me. There was no sense of unpredictability in any of the music. No one utilized silence, space, or time as means of organizing the sound. Bands were essentially sound on, sound off, from one to the next. “Noise” is a genre, and all of these people must be drawing from such similar influences, so noise as a concept is dead. No one even seemed influenced by no wave, which I felt would be an easy way out of the chains of pedal effected guitars and electronics and mumblecore vocals. I feel like the majority of people were making it because it is easy to do.

Despite my dissatisfaction with a lot of the music, oftentimes this can be made up for by performance, but almost no acts tried to elicit any emotions either in themselves or in the audience. These are not people who think about what they are doing, these are not people who feel anything in reaction to it, therefore I don’t give a fuck.

To be honest, I was watching videos of Hanatarashi and GISM the other night, where the singer of the latter band turned a flamethrower on the audience causing members to scatter in terror over chairs, and Yamatsuka Eye of the former drove a bulldozer through the wall of the venue then destroyed the stage while screaming into a microphone while a drummer played behind him. I don’t think anyone can top performances like that, nor would I actually want to. In contrast, everything else is basically a pop band. But to view what Hanatarashi were doing as sound is an intense elevation of the audience’s conception of sound as art, and probably as far as noise can go. I digress, but these are things influencing my thinking…..

on the above clip go to about 5:30

Now let me talk about the performances I did like:

Murder Murder: consisting of Paul on sax, microphone, and feedback, Chris on drums (both from Death Sentence: Panda!), someone else on a weird noisemaking tin thing, and misha and me on saxophone and trombone. This was a case where I feel like an ensemble really boosts what is interesting about music. There were many elements of chance to the music, but also a lot of freeassociation as I felt everyone was listening to the other players in the collective improvisation to make a whole sound. Filling in where it seemed appropriate. The plan was 5 or 6 short blastbeats of noise at about 10 seconds long each, then one 5 minute long jam. The flow of ideas had to be just as rapid and I felt like this kept the energy and interest in the music up. I really liked the connecting improvised factor of Paul playing between the different high and low feedbacks of his two amps with me and misha making staccato quiet gurglings into our horns underneath it. We hadn’t planned on playing with murder murder but I’m intensely glad that we got to. Eden recorded it and I’m eager to hear the results.

TFFWz: I know this makes me sounds like an extreme egotist but that’s just how I feel. We got on the show at all because we showed up with our instruments and asked if we could play. We were probably the most rock n roll band of the night, by which I mean we were the only band performing prewritten songs. To quote ricky marler “it’s funny how the bands you play with can make you feel like ac/dc”. We go to set up our stuff in the corer and there is no PA. I think for a brief moment and we say fuck it we’ll go acoustic. Afterwards some people told me a microphone would have helped my vocals, but I think it is liberating for us to declare our independence from electricity, and I felt confident in my projecting abilities after our tour of 24^th st in san Francisco a few weeks earlier when we played at a skate park, in front of st francis café, and in front of the bart. Since it was a “noise show” misha used his less controllable mouth piece and I think we all felt we could be a bit more free with the arrangements. I screamed at the top of my lungs to announce we were playing, which ended up being louder than everyone talking in the whole warehouse, and we did a really hyper five song set which I think was: snails / lil kid / filmic / mexico / cacophony. I tried this one kudoro move a couple times where you throw yourself backwards to the ground but I don’t quite have it. Lack of any electric instruments makes me feel even more naked as a performer, which is a good state to be in. I ended up doing one move I haven’t done since klacto days, throwin myself onto my head…hurt my arm and knees, as per usual. During the last song I swung misha around by his shirt so he couldn’t even play the saxophone and he threw me into the drums which got throw everywhere at the end. I love that, it always means we’re done. Afterwards everybody kept partially tongue-in-cheek commenting on how all the drummers were biting us by throwing their drums everywhere at the end of their sets. Post Addendum: I don’t mean to sound like an asshole by talking about my own band on here, but I believe in what we are doing, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. I can’t really appraise our set because I was too busy playing it, but people seemed to be feeling it.

Ettrick: both of the people in this band are just amazing musicians, and drummers, with unique styles playing off of each other in a pure form of energy music. I must have missed any of the tenor sax solos, but the alto was doing nothing but playing overtones and altissimo while hitting a squelching noise electro pad periodically. The music had real tension and buildup to it, and it felt like the musicians were really interacting with each other. I think one time I heard someone say the noise scene just takes all the people who aren’t good enough to play jazz, but I feel with Ettrick and murder murder we have some really talented and choppy improvisers in the scene, with a lot of technique and thought put into what they’re doing. (I already ranted on the people who I think don’t).

Seven lies about girls: I watched this cuz it was my friend dave playing. There was some squeally prepared guitar going and a couple of toms and bass drum that made fairly ineffectual backbeat to the music. The drums began to get away from dave and his sheer anger perfectly matched the music, which was propelled by this performance full of, I dunno, things not going right, defeat, ineffectiveness. The mic stand fell over, was kicked away. The microphone was screamed into and swung til the cord snapped. The drums were throw till the heads were busted and came dangerously close to the audience at times, each spare hitting at a breaking open drumhead given voice to the inaudible unamplified screaming of dave. When he lifted the drums above his head onto his back and screamed in all directions at the audience there was real fear that he was gonna throw the whole thing and kill somebody, everybody did a little move behind the person in front of them. The set ended without violence, but the emotion was pure and is what I think noise bands should have.

There were other bands I had some interest in but who didn’t hold it for the entirety of their whole 15 minute sets. So, INC 2010 was a pretty good experience, and maybe I’m just a square who doesn’t get it, but these are some things it made me think. I mean, this kind of music is literally a hundred years old. Do something new with it!

And this is what is what I was singing all night, besides some made up shit about Misha wearin a big woman’s shirt: