Sightings w Tom Smith at Death by Audio

I showed up to this show and the place was, surprisingly to me, already full. Sometimes shows that are can’t-miss line-ups of legends in my mind have single-digit attendance so I’m not really able to predict these things. But I was happy to see that these bands are apparently not just legends to me.

I completely missed the first act, which was Tom Smith and Don Fleming playing together. Don Fleming is a longtime NYC avant-rocker and Tom Smith is best known as the central figure from the post-music band To Live And Shave In L.A. Tom currently resides in Germany and was briefly in the states around the holidays, playing a few select shows. So I’m sad to have missed their performance.

The second band, Child Abuse, was going on. No photos, I was in the back of the room and they wouldn’t have been good anyway. Child Abuse are a bass drums keyboard trio who play metally brutal prog. Very technical, very tight, but with very messy and grungy sounds. It’s funny actually, most of the time the keyboard sounds like a distorted bass and the bass (run through some synth pedals I’m guessing) sounds like a keyboard. They were as great as ever.

Then the anti-rock, max-confusion band Fat Worm of Error was up!

Fat Worm of Error at Death by Audio

Notice how it’s not even clear what’s going on in this photo? That’s how they sound, but much moreso. Of course 5 people just noodling and doing separate things would be pretty boring. Okay, maybe I’d think that was pretty cool too, but what makes Fat Worm really mind-bending is the way they have a plan and they’ve really honed their own style of playing – in a way that sounds like chaos at almost every moment. Until both guitarists suddenly play the same sequence of notes exactly together and your brain twists 360 degrees in your head in an attempt to figure out what just happened. More Fat Worm photos:

Fat Worm of Error after one of a few costume changes

Fat Worm of Error, feeling it at Death by Audio

I spent a little time chatting in the back room and realized this was almost like a reunion (to me) of people from a show waaay back – at the Polish National Home, now known as the Club Warsaw. Maybe I’ll write all my recollections from that show someday, but it’s where I first met lots of the people playing or in the audience. Anyway, with all these long-time friends and acquaintances in attendance, there was definitely a very friendly and supportive vibe going on. You could tell from all the chatting and joking and cheers, but also from the huge smile on Tom’s face between songs.

Tom Smith with Sightings at Death by Audio

Mark Morgan's guitar moves

Sightings were doing their thing, sounding as focused (yet blurred) as ever. I was told there was exactly one practice for this show but it would have been hard to guess they hadn’t been playing this set for a month on tour. Everyone seemed 100% in command, holding back or cutting loose exactly when needed with no nervous or puzzled glances. It’s a pretty perfect pairing too, Sightings and Tom Smith, as they both work in a similar mode: composed but loose, planned but spontaneous. Sightings works with sound shards and Tom works with words, both of them stretching their material to the breaking point.

Sightings w Tom Smith at Death by Audio

Mark Morgan of Sightings, bending spacetime

Sightings w Tom Smith (and Pat Murano!)

Oh yeah, this fellow named Pat Murano also played with these guys. You can see him lurking behind that synth in the photo above. I can’t say too much about his playing, which is probably a good thing because it means it blended right into the Sightings vibe.

The set was short but satisfying. Definitely worth catching, but if you missed it some people seemed to be videotaping and recording so hopefully that will turn up online soon. Great show all around!

Even more photos over at the NO-CORE Flickr.

Clang Quartet at INC2011 in Miami, photo by Valerie Martino

As of right now, the podcast side of No-Core has an interview with Clang Quartet. I don’t usually double-post items like this, but just in case there are some people following the blog who aren’t following the podcast, I thought I should point it out here. The summary goes like this: “Scotty Irving AKA Clang Quartet is an incredibly nice, honest, and humble guy who is also one of the most – maybe THE most – captivating and intense noise performers around. He is also a very devoted Christian whose religious beliefs play a central role in his performance. Just to head off some potential comments, I’d like to point out that though I’m an atheist and we do mention this difference, this was not intended as a debate. I mainly wanted to let Scotty explain how his beliefs motivate what he does and just get a picture of what he’s like as a person and an artist.”

GO PODCAST-SIDE AND CHECK IT OUT!

Get the latest Clang Quartet tape from Hanson Records.
Follow or contact Clang Quartet on Facebook.

Satanized at the Cake-Shop

The Cake-Shop is one of the last places left in Manhattan that I still go to for shows, with virtually every other show happening in Brooklyn these days, but it’s also just about my favorite place for shows. They’ve got coffee and yes, cake!, and awesome records to browse, and the downstairs show space is great. And of course they host awesome shows like this one, which deserved a far larger crowd than it got.

White Suns at the Cake-Shop 2/27/11

The White Suns opened things up with their thunderous noise/rock. For some reason, this sounded better than any previous time I’ve seen them. Things can sometimes sound pretty indistinct when you’ve got 3 different people making 3 different grinding and/or screeching noises, but I could distinguish everything that went into the formula this time. While watching them, it occurred to me that while they look like a rock band, this is really a noise band with some rock instrumentation. They do scripted songs, but elements like rhythm or, um, melody? (ha ha) are distant seconds to sheer noise terror.

Drums Like Machine Guns at the Cake-Shop 2/27/11

Drums Like Machine Guns are a long-time favorite. They’re generally a mixture of oddball experiments and howling, head-banging beats-&-noise. To be honest, this show was noticeably less intense than I’ve seen from them. I mean, these dudes always sound great, but they’ve set the bar pretty damn high for themselves with past performances. On the other hand, they did some different stuff, possibly knowing that most of the people in attendance had seen them several times before – and that’s a good choice too.

Satanized at the Cake-Shop 2/27/11 - 2

Satanized at the Cake-Shop 2/27/11 - 3

Satanized pushed things to new extremes with their music, becoming more obtuse and perplexing than ever. Which is meant as a high compliment, in case you don’t know me very well. Satanized are both heavy-bottomed and high-ended. The chugging bass and heavy, complex drums almost sound like they’re operating in a different dimension than the super-shrill guitar, which sounds like equal parts Mick Barr and Big Black. I’m used to Alex’s maxed-treble guitar sound, but he did some harmonics things this time that went into dog-whistle territory.

Cellular Chaos at the Cake-Shop 2/27/11

I hadn’t seen Cellular Chaos before, but since I’m almost always into Weasel Walter’s projects, it’s no surprise I thought they were great. It’s nice to see Weasel playing guitar too, and some of the heavy-handedness of Lake of Dracula is definitely present, but it’s also nice how there was subtlety and complexity involved too. All the members of this group are definitely players, but mercifully un-showy ones. There were moments of freakout improv and moments of rigid tightness, on-a-dime switches between the two, and times when it wasn’t entirely clear what was happening. Unclear to the audience that is, but the band was in command at all times.

All around great show, killer line-up from start to finish.

Satanized on MySpace
Drums Like Machine Guns
White Suns
Cellular Chaos

this show brought to you by the number 8

This show got far crazier than any I’ve seen in Brooklyn recently. (okay, technically the Silent Barn’s in Queens) The headliners here were a super-group merger of Sewn Leather and Dog Synth/DJ Dog Dick – both dudes who trade in weird noise/beats mergers – into one band known as DOG LEATHER. Somehow this duo seems instantly more popular than both of those guys together, which seems weird but makes sense. This is just an idea that as soon as you hear it, you know it’s going to be amazing. Everyone came to this show just knowing it was going to be amazing. And it was. Things got kind of crazy. How crazy?

That crazy. Now let me back up and mention some of the other stuff. The first act, filling in for Shams who had to cancel, was Guardian Alien. I recognized these people from other Brooklyn acts but hadn’t seen this one yet. Improvised blast beats, some kind of stringed instrument that sounded somewhere between a lap steel and a sitar, and some free vocals and interpretive dance. That combination might sound like it could go either way, but this had tons of energy and ended long before it needed to. (always good)

Guardian Alien at Silent Barn

Then came Buddy Bag, who played really, reeeeaally rudimentary sludge rock. So caveman-style that the drummer just dropped 2 toms flat on the floor and played with one drum stick and one random big piece of wood. Depending on who you are, you might think that sounds like it would be either awesome or horrible.

Buddy Bag at Silent Barn

Then came Narwhalz (of sound), whose performances I always look forward to. They generally involve a combination of confusion, technical difficulties, freakouts, and “crowd work.” Narwhalz plays Gameboy programming that has been sounding heavier and noisier every time I see him. In fact, this time things sounded so blown out and distorted that it wasn’t clear what parts were the buzzing and popping of a faulty connection or the intended sound.

Narhwalz (of sound) at Silent Barn

For reasons I couldn’t make sense of at the time, the crowd just went nuts for him! Not that they shouldn’t, and I’ve definitely seen a crowd of like-minded friends go nuts in Philly to Narwhalz once, but I usually expect something like this (from the last time I saw him play Silent Barn):

Narwhalz at Silent Barn 06-23-10

but instead the crowd did this:

Narwhalz mosh pit at Silent Barn 02-17-11

A nice surprise. In retrospect I think the combination of a generally excited audience and a few in-the-know instigators is the combination that triggered this. Up next was Nonhorse (Or is it Non-Horse?) which is G Lucas Crane’s tape manipulation project. It’s super-fun to watch, as he juggles multi-colored tapes spilling out of a suitcase and works a pair of cassette players (with some effects) like an expert DJ would cut records.

Nonhorse at Silent Barn

And then Dog Leather was up.

The Dog half of Dog Leather at Silent Barn

Their show was actually something of a slow build, starting with a mish-mash of noises before breaking into some of their rap songs. Set to blown out beats, primitive electronic sounds, and not-quite-on-the-beat samples, all mashed together into a fuzzy wall of noise – but yeah – rap songs. Rapping that sounded kind of like Skinny Puppy vocals, but still.

The Leather half of Dog Leather at Silent Barn

And it just got wilder and wilder. A sledgehammer appeared. A chair appeared. And then a gigantic number 8 appeared. Lots of crowd-surfing happened. My show-organizer instincts almost kicked in several times, but I resisted the urge to remove objects or take down boot-swinging crowd-surfers when I noticed that the people primarily responsible for the chaos were all the people who lived at the Silent Barn! They were loving it. EVERYONE was loving it. I didn’t see anyone in there who wasn’t laughing and smiling even while they were getting knocked over and piled upon. We all knew this was absurd and ridiculous and goofy and the best thing ever. The perfect antidote to the self-conscious, second-guessing, people-watching attitude that NYC has a bad reputation for.

And I leave you with a video of a Dog Leather song from early in their set, before things got quite so out of hand (though you can tell people are already rocking to it). This video strangely came out sounding really good.

I shot some short videos when I could. If I didn’t get video of something, it might mean I had to eat, sleep, use the bathroom, get ready to play, or that a band didn’t stand in the light and nothing would have shown up anyway. Instead of posting each video separately, I made this playlist. Use the little tabs on each side to skip through the videos, and click that little tongue icon between Play and Volume to access the video list. It’s kinda sorta in chronological order.

There were a number of friends and regulars who dropped out this year, sadly. No Head Molt, Drums Like Machine Guns, Abiku, Loop Retard. But there was still too much amazing stuff to catch everything. At the risk of omitting tons of mind-blowing stuff, I’ll mention a just a few of the highlights:

Night Burger! Every person in the house was rocking out to this by the end. My video does NOT do the sound justice, sadly. When this set was over, everyone was on a total high, smiling from ear to ear and looking at each other all wide-eyed like “Did you just hear what I heard?!”

Time Ghost! I’d never seen this dude before, but in addition to sounding awesome, his show looked amazing with some kind of light-triggered or maybe light-linked synth sounds and his head and face covered in baby oil for maximum shiny-ness. And my video of this one actually turned out pretty good!

Leslie Keffer’s bouncer skills! Angry army dude was clearly not a noise fan, but he sure seemed to like the Cock ESP set and took it as an excuse to jump in with some destruction of his own. In a way, it’s weird and funny when someone really doesn’t get what’s happening, except that it can also be really uncool. I guess a Cock ESP set might look to someone like it’s free-for-all time, but it’s actually not, and when the show is over, it’s over. And when it was over, army dude decided he still wanted to try to bust in some of Churchill’s amps, stick a bottle up Emil’s ass, and then try to talk up C Lavender. Enter Leslie, stage left, who used some kind of snake charmer hypnosis to wordlessly walk Army Dude straight out the side door and shut it behind him. I was impressed.

There definitely was a trend toward dark synth-rock, always with some noise mixed in. Daily Life, which featured both Kites and Lazy Magnet’s Jeremy Harris as members, was a prominent example of this. But I’d like to say that the real trend was “taking it up a notch.” Everyone who I’ve seen at past INCs put in the best show I’d seen by them ever! Seriously. Blue Shift for example? How amazing did that sound? Dick Neff? INC really is a kind of conference, where everyone brings their A-Game and everyone leaves inspired and with fresh ideas to implement. Next year’s going to rule.

I’ll add some links when I find more good stuff online. Please send me whatever you’ve got or leave a comment! The NOISEBLOID blog (http://noisebloid.blogspot.com) has also promised more emerging photos, videos, and gossip from INC.

HumanBeast at Death by Audio

Phew! Some kind of line-up, right? This is going to be the Brooklyn show to top in 2011. And there were lots of big cameras popping off everywhere, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this event has already shown up on a bunch of other music blogs. But hey, I was there, I took pictures, it was awesome, I may as well put my show review out into the virtual world too.

dubknowdub – live at zebulon

So first of all, I missed DubKnowDub, but they’re great. I know the show had 6 bands on the bill, but this being Brooklyn, I still didn’t believe the show would actually start before 9PM. So as a consolation, hit play on the above track and let it be your soundtrack to No-Core browsing. (Music starts about the 1:45 mark.) I don’t know who DubKnowDub are exactly, but they get on lots of great shows somehow and they’re tons of fun. Yup, it’s kinda dub, and also kinda noise. Great live. Don’t make my mistake next time!

Diamond Black Hearted Boy at Death by Audio

I did get there in time to catch Diamond Black Hearted Boy, a guy I’ve met before though I didn’t mentally piece together that it was the same person until I talked to him at the show! DBHB comes from the same Richmond freak scene that Narwhalz and Shams do and performance-wise you can tell he’s on the same page. Live, it’s kinda confrontational (for anyone who’s not into it) or just good fun if you are into it. Lots of goofy genre tags have been slapped on him, but honestly, I’d say his music is sort of proto-industrial. Claustrophobic, pushed-too-far-into-the-red samples and loops, usually rhythmic, sometimes with actual beats. Tonight DBHB also made ample use of a piercing whistle blown straight into the microphone which sounded pretty awesome (maybe a little tiresome after a while though) like it was hitting the resonant frequency of your eardrums.

Shawn Greenlee at Death by Audio

Shawn Greenlee’s performance was really fantastic. He used some kind of camera to scan from a handmade book, and then what must have been custom software to turn the images into noise. Then there was a weird spinning disk, and he’d use the trackpad kind of like a Kaossilator, and… well, just watch him do his thing here. That’s my best guess as to what was going on. It sounded super-sweet too, better than it came out in this video. I was captivated.

And then, humanbeast. This was SO GOOD.

HumanBeast at Death by Audio 3

HumanBeast at Death by Audio 2

Last year at the International Noise Conference in Miami, I, like any mortal person, had to take a break and miss some of the acts. When I got back and asked people what I missed, everyone kept saying “Humanbeast! Humanbeast!” (I’m using the no-space spelling that appears on the tape I got) – so I was excited to finally see these guys. They did not disappoint! Their music was absolutely gorgeous, while at the same time being really dirty and messed up – which was also sort of how their performance played out – and how the theme of their lyrics go – taken together it’s cohesive, deadly effective, and totally entrancing. Amazing music meets amazing noise. Again, I couldn’t really capture the sound in full, but here’s my video of them playing “Come Through the Cloth.” I just watched it again and got chills at the point where she sings at the top of her lungs without the microphone.

I don't know if all those expensive cameras are safe there...

And then Rat Bastard of INC and Laundryroom Squelchers fame took to the stage, with his guitar with only 4 strings and 4 tuning pegs remaining. He was joined by Roger of Monotract fame and another guy who I probably should know but don’t, both on guitars. This was basically a performance following the Laundryroom Squelchers M.O. – a terrific squall that sounds at first like sheer white noise. The infamous Nondor Nevai made his trademark after-the-band-has-started appearance and took over vocals, striking poses but largely inaudible over the din. The thing about these Rat performances is that the beginning always seems just like random loud noodling, but if you’re willing to keep listening it starts to take shape and details come out at you. And these guys must have been listening to one another, because somehow they all knew when it was done around the same time.

AIDS Wolf at Death by Audio

AIDS Wolf went on last, and this was the first time I’ve seen their new(ish) 3-person line-up. (and Chloe’s new glasses!) Losing a guitarist has certainly not diminished the volume or chaos of AIDS Wolf live. In fact, I think I like the new sound even better. The band members really seem to be working toward some sort of Harry-Pussy-like psychic communication music that relies on feeling and intuition more than counting beats. They also introduced some sampled sounds and vocal effects which broadened the sound pallet. At least, I think that was an effect and not just a technical difficulty – but you know what? I really enjoy it when a band can make me wonder what’s intentional and what’s not. Living at the edge of chaos. I was also happy to see that the musical chaos inspired some physical chaos in the crowd. It looks like people are just standing around in the above photo, but there was some serious mosh action happening.

In closing: Awesome show. Good people, good times, great sounds. Show ran on time?!?! (props to Edan) Amazing. I went home feeling reinvigorated about music in general.

Amoeba Men "Worried About Your Wiring?"

This album kinda kicks ass. I’ve listened to it about 4 times today and I think I’m going to play it again now! You know, when I first heard this, I had put it into a playlist of some new and old music. The Ex-Models were playing and I was thinking the following: When the Ex-Models guys were around I dug them but kind of took them for granted. Another “spazzy” Brooklyn band doing that post-punk sound. About that time everyone wanted to sound like that first Liars album so it seemed like there was plenty of that going around. (Ex-Models were way better than the Liars though) But now I just recently tortured myself by listening to all of the buzz-worthy indie bands of today and let me tell ya, how that made me appreciate them! “Where, oh where have all the high-energy, spazzy post-punk bands gone, and can we PLEASE get them back now?”

Next up in the play list? AMOEBA MEN come out of the gate swinging with a “One, Two, Blackout!” – EXACTLY what I was looking for! Every song sounds like they are jacked on caffeine and flipping out. Dense, rapid-fire drums, jittery buzzing synths, scathing guitar attack, and yelped out vocals. They’re not as mathematically precise as the Ex-Models, but all the herky-jerky energy is there. There’s also some new-wave oddball flavor, particularly coming from the keyboard and vocal delivery – almost a DEVO or, heck, even an Oingo Boingo vibe. But where Oingo Boingo or theatrical bands like them can come across a little self-consciously “aren’t we soooo arty and weird?” the main purpose of the Amoeba Men would seem to be to ROCK OUT. I’d also compare them to the Silver Daggers who share their focused but raw, rock’em sock’em vibe.

So these Amoeba Men are another Richmond, VA band featuring Mr. Jason Hodges, and I know I keep talking about his projects but hey, if you want to form a half-dozen killer bands and send me a new awesome album every month then maybe I’ll keep talking about you too. One of the most amazing things about this album? It was given away free! You can still get it too. Just follow this link, click the “download” link on the page you get to, and I think you need to add a “.zip” extension to the file you download.

http://cnproachmotel.blogspot.com/2010/08/amoeba-men-worried-about-your-wiring-cd.html

Be sure to leave a comment and thank them! I also found this 51-second YouTube clip of the Amoeba Men in action to give you a taste. Check it out.

Update: You know who else the Amoeba Men sound sort of like? Dazzling Killmen! Really!

Realicide - Detroit 2009

Everyone loves free mp3 albums right? So maybe you’ve already found these, but it can’t hurt to spread the good word. The gabber/noise/omni-core group Realicide have made a whole bunch of music available for you. They’re frequently compared to Atari Teenage Riot, which is not far off the mark, except they often make ATR sound like, I don’t know… Jesus Jones?

Anyway, you can get no less than THREE collections of stuff, a mega-mix of samples from the latest album with live stuff and b-sides here:

http://www.lunaticfringe.org/~schizoid/dtrashrecords/digitaldownloads/135.html

and a 20-minute tape of misc. live material turned digital release, directly linked here:

http://ia311020.us.archive.org/1/items/Wild063-Realicide/Wild063-Realicide-DigitalScraps2008.zip

and basically a whole live album, with interviews and photos! This one’s pretty awesome. Here:

http://www.digitalvomit.com/dvr048

Rose for Bohdan

And next up, Brian of Foot Village/Deathbombarc pointed out in the comments to another post that his band Rose For Bohdan’s last album was made available as a free download, but since I figure few people saw it there, I’m reiterating it here. 3 members of Foot Village, recently reviewed, were also in this band. Get it here:

http://deathbombarc.com/sound/r4b/creepingmoraldecay/creeping.htm

But wait, this is not one of those self-absorbed reviews where I just talk about me, I have a point about Foot Village. As soon as the Old Joe Smiths band concept was born, it immediately expanded to include multiple odd percussion instruments, including glass bottles with varying amounts of water to make a crude xylophone. Foot Village on the other hand, has a much stronger purity of vision. If someone tells you that a band is made of 4 drummer/vocalists, you might picture some kind of world music group with bongos, bells, vocal harmonies, etc. Heck, even other multi-drummer noise-rock groups like Aa or current Boredoms go in for this stuff.

Foot Village? None of that. Four matching rock drum kits. Kick, tom, snare, hi-hat, crash. Times four. Pounding and screaming. That’s what you get. They allow themselves exactly one additional “instrument” – the megaphone. I suspect the tone in “Death of the Endless” is megaphone feedback and the sirens in “National Jamthum” and “Chicken & Cheese 2″ are a default sound created by the same megaphone. In addition to these restrictions, Foot Village also operate within an established concept – they are building their own nation. This album, “Anti-Magic,” is vaguely about their first war, with the forces of mysticism and magic. The album art shows Foot Village tribe members – all nude – fighting wizard types with sticks, spears, and bombs. I thought this concept might be about the battle between superstition and rationalism, but if so it comes across vague and playful, not political.

You might think the tight restrictions would make things boring, but no. It just forces Foot Village to push the creativity of their composition and interaction. There is one small deviation from this plan, the half-way point track “Grace’s Death” which is mostly vocal, then veers into some kind of remixed/electronic segment. A nice little break, then back to the drums. Also, the album closes with the track ”Chicken & Cheese 2,” which turns into a relay race of rad underground bands covering the song, one after the other. The results are extremely varied and it’s a super-fun way to close things out. In fact, each edition of the album: CD, vinyl, cassette, and digital – has a different collection of bands doing the covers.

One last thought: It is really hard to capture multiple drums in a recording. I don’t know if it always sounds like there are 4 drum kits here, but it almost always sounds like there’s more than one. The drum-layering works best when there are lots of fast rolls going on, like those in “Reggae War Zone.” The “heavy” all-together pounding moments sound much more impressive in a live setting, which is really how you ought to experience Foot Village. Still, none of that changes the fact that this is a great and super-entertaining album. (But maybe they should put out a Dolby 5.1 version too).

Free mp3 sample download: Foot Village – Reggae War Zone

Foot Village website
Foot Village on last.fm
album can be bought here

Hot Guts at Silent Barn

Gay Beast played in the middle and I think I’ve raved about them enough, right? It’s twice as great live as on record. Brain-melting nu-math no-wave.

Gay Beast at Silent Barn 1

Gay Beast at Silent Barn 2

Satanized closed things out with an intense and sweaty set. They play harsh math/noise-rock, often leaning toward the technical. This night things leaned toward the heavy and pounding.

Satanized at Silent Barn 1

Satanized at Silent Barn 2

Satanized at Silent Barn 3

Awesome. Sorry about the slow blogging, but things will pick up here. And hey, if anyone thinks there is a Brooklyn show that I really shouldn’t miss, be sure to shoot me an email!

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