Rats
LA’s three piece Rats opened this $5-for-5-shows extravaganza (just another day at The Smell)… With Jonathan Silberman (tenor sax) flanked by Kelly Kawar (bass) and Eric Kiernowski (baritone guitar), Rats made mathy, jazzy music that evoked late 1990s Thrill Jockey. Complex as fuck, but easy enough to digest to be a really effective opener even for people (like me) who’ve never heard them before, I hope these guys get big so that people will think of something besides Best Coast when they think of LA.
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Moe! Staiano
If Moe! Staiano is at all representative, experimental percussion might be the best of the avant-arts for the ADD-afflicted. He plays fast and tight as fuck, and never seems to keep the same pattern for more than a few measures. He plays so fast that he can play a guitar with his drumsticks in between hitting his drums. And when he gets tired of doing that, he can play the guitar by hitting a metal bat that he rests on his snare, whose other end is resting on the guitar. And when he gets tired of doing that, he lifts the guitar off the stand and drags it around on The Smell’s concrete floor to play it. And then to get the dirt off, he shoves the thing under the rotating brushes of an industrial-quality shoe-polishing machine, which is both badass and creates a pretty hum. Also, Moe! Staiano has found the best use for vibrators since using them on women, employing egg-shaped bullet vibrators (the expensive kind that have multiple speed/pattern settings) to “excite” the “heads” of his drums when he was too busy “playing” with other stuff. And, for a finale, he unspools a big roll of industrial-sized plastic wrap around several members of the audience. Good thing, too: With a performance this exciting, it’s always good to use a dental dam.
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Arrington de Dionyso
How many different things can you make sounds like a didgeridoo? That was the question of the night for Arrington de Dionyso, whose improvised performance focused on the power of breath and voice. Meditative and ritualistic, this performance was much different than his excellent, foot-stomping 2009 album Malaikat dan Singa, but it wasn’t hard to see connections between the two. Sitting on the floor, his set opened with a long piece of throat (or processed) singing accompanied by a lone little snare propped up on its side a few feet away from him, “played” by the droning amp that projected onto it. Though simple and tiny, the self-playing drum felt powerful and primal, a miniature idol that had become animated through the audience’s attention. Or de Dionyso’s voice: impressively deep, seemingly wordless, the texture of rich loam. After the first piece, which seemed to go on forever (in the best possible sense), de Dionyso turned the snare off and, in sequence, used objects – some that just happened to be within his reach – to manipulate his voice: a metal water bottle, part of a saxophone, a rubber band. These short experiments didn’t make me forget everything else in the room like his opener, but it’s still good to see that a little magic can be squeezed out of whatever happens to be at hand.
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Zs
Saxophonist Sam Hillmer’s head looked like it might pop he was blowing so hard. It was like watching a silent movie of a guy playing a saxophone, but shown in an art-house cinema so there’s live accompaniment of a new score by an experimental noise band.
Which is fitting; Zs were on tour performing material from their upcoming album, New Slaves Part II: Essence Implosion!, a collection of remixes of material from New Slaves by folks like Ecstatic Sunshine, Cex, JG Thirlwell, and the Rapture’s Gabe Andruzzi. The upcoming album’s title puts it on sequel footing with New Slaves, but the performance put it on equal: live arrangements (or re-arrangements) of remixed tracks. In these remixes of remixes, you could only occasionally hear echoes of the originals from the band, now paired down to just a duo of saxophone and electronics. The result is murkier and more atmospheric than New Slaves, more chaotic yet less frantic. Towards the end of the set, there’s a big change; recognizable chords form, there’s a beat you might bob to. It sounded like club music. Finally, I thought, something sounds like a remix, and a catchy one at that. And just like that, it fades out. Set over.
I talked to Hillmer after the show for a minute, and he explained a little bit about the new album and the material they played. I mentioned the set’s ending. “That really sounded different,” I said. “You could really tell it was a remix there.”
“The ending?” he said. “That wasn’t a remix. That was Beyonce.”
