- Night One
by PSRE
As close to a scene report as contemporary noise can afford, No Fun Fest, with Carlos Giffoni at the helm, each year confronts problems of selection. Over three nights, some 25 acts say their piece, spanning a vast geography of provocation and anomie. But how to organize such a spread?
Issues of sequencing carved this first night into awkward, unconversant provinces. Reliance on the Music Hall's single stage — in stark contrast to the Knitting Factory's three variegated tiers last year — forced every juxtaposition and prevented sonic refuge anywhere but at the bars (three!) or the merch zone. Surely, this format appeals on some level, a force for equalization and eclecticism. Yet, all the same, it cripples the element of choice: the harshmongers were left out to dry during the set of antiseptic synth-wave excreted by Xeno and Oaklander — a curatorial choice that, in the name of variety, really debased the sense of fest-wide mission.
Likewise with Thrones, the risible one-man metallurgy — bass, Vocoded vocals, and pigtails — from Joe Preston of The Melvins. His set, ostensibly ‘heavy,' merely disrupted, distracted, prolonged — but contributed nil.
This isn't to say that a show must always be predicated on a unified market, a ready continuum of consumption and complaisant enjoyment. However self-consciously, experimental music is nourished by variety and the sly crumpling of expectations. Night One cut deep, but episodically.
Bastard Noise (pictured) of course loomed large, the eventuality of their set an organizing principle for the night. But even this fact seemed circumstantial, less a representation of the scene's quiddity than a happy accident, a smuggling-in of one (rabid) niche market, a fluke. Eric Wood, their mutton-chopped mouthpiece whose bass defined Man Is the Bastard, Neanderthal, Pissed Happy Children, and assorted (post–)power-violence flare-ups, spoke at length before the show, dropping names with abandon but articulating their project's earnest inability to quite fit in. Friday in Brooklyn, they could seem the muscular outsiders, misplaced hardcore aftershocks in a room of twiddlers and theorists (new shirts read “Sick and Brutal Mechanized Assault”). But they'd just hit Japan, rubbing up against Corrupted and Mind of Asian: “Then we were the weirdos!”
Noveller, or Sarah Lipstate, set the stage around 8. The tones she generated would dive and recompose, sometimes abrupt in their modulation but never forced. Aided by the mighty EBow, Lipstate toggled between diffident knob-twisting and more doggedly physical guitar work, digestible if unassertive.
With Raglani, a mainstay of St. Louis's fertile scene, warm heaves shook the low frequencies — never suffocating, but stronger for it. His polyrhythms and divagations held up, never precious, Moog and laptop complicating it all.
Giffoni was Giffoni, declarative but playfully abstract. More to the point, Corsano was Corsano. In just 13 show-stopping minutes, the Western Mass percussion polymath performed nothing short of hi-hat surgery. The hats stood alone, contact-mic'd, amped, and ravaged with distortion; Corsano tore in with sticks, mallets, and metal rods, prying tones from the bowels no one knew existed. His work with Mick Flower, Paul Flaherty, and others is well known; alone, though, Corsano answers to no one, and his clinic realigned every facile give-the-drummer-some heuristic underwriting our approach to percussive or non-tonal technique. Satisfied, the good doctor seized the hi-hat, shook out its last rippling roars, and decamped to the kit for another crusade: gongs came and went, toms quivered, another exquisite eruption. Corsano's improv never feels indulgent, and his set, the night's only to engage acoustic tones in a substantive way, wasn't surpassed.
Shortly thereafter, power-electronics dinosaurs Grey Wolves fell hilariously flat. An undifferentiated, oh-so-harsh curtain of sound would periodically give way for Dave Padbury to pontificate at the mic: “(unintelligible) religion (unintelligible) hypocrisy (unintelligible).” Affected, overblown, busily frisking, and then displaying his own genitalia, this was a portrait of crestfallen masculinity — hellbent on immanent critique, but dementedly half-baked and just defeated.
And Bastard Noise? Headliners Bastard Noise? Not empirically weirder than the run-up, but nonetheless bringing the pain. They've recently reintegrated bass and drums, effectively reprising MITB (check out their February Gilman show immediately), but this was strictly noise. Wood paced a bit, lending his best Cookie Monster growl to the darker stretches, but all in the name of texture. W.T. Nelson, expressionless, sustained a concentrated, hyper-organic backdrop of sizzles, bellows, and chirps as the intensity built and, then decadent, retreated — the inscrutable capstone of a themeless first night.
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- Night Two
by Emilie Friedlander
To speak solely in terms of all-around energy level, Saturday at No Fun is perhaps best described as the Night after the First (and therefore more manageable) Hangover: crowd seemed a little bit bedraggled, but prepared to ride the joys (and perils) of the second wind. Young and old, men and women, stinky and well-groomed alike followed some of the evening's most provocative antics with good-natured laughter and applause. This included a half-baked (but well-intentioned) stunt by Mattin, who sat down at the side of the stage after a short Whitehouse-style freakout (including Philip Best's signature Park Ranger sunglasses), picked up a microphone, and proceeded to trash the festival itself as a destination for “white, middle class, educated men,” happy to mill around for three days “buying their little records and being a part of their little scene” and to return home utterly unchallenged and utterly unchanged.
Whether we agreed with Mattin's words or not, Night Two was probably the night to pronounce them. With Sonic Youth and a few other (almost) crossover acts up it sleeve (Bardo Pond, Blank Dogs, and a C. Spencer Yeh-related goodie), Saturday was as close as the No Fun Fest could come to a “headliner' night: the kind of night that sells out before all of the others do, that sells the most t-shirts and pours the most drinks, even attracting (God forbid!) people who were just hoping to see Sonic Youth play some songs -- in other words, the night that is “scene” in the worst sense of the word.
Truth be told, Night Two of No Fun Fest was nothing like what many of us were quietly hoping it would not be. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon's celebrity did not translate into a higher head count (all of the nights of the festival, in fact, were sold out, and Saturday not the first of the three), and their presence did not detract from the crowd's earnest attentiveness to any of the “smaller” acts that passed on stage. Pulse Emitter, who demonstrated a powerful but modest craftsmanship in his throbbing one-man drone sonatas, was greeted with an equal number of hoots and ear-to-ear smiles in a 7:00 slot, as Swedish noise paterfamilias Sons of God were in a 9:00 one. Which all goes to say that if the prospects of Sonic Youth at the end of the night made people's expectations high (or low, depending on how you slice it), all that just boiled down an evenly distributed wealth of adrenaline and enthusiasm -- not a clear-cut distinction between “openers” and “headliners.”
In Mattin's defense, however, this was definitely not a lineup that seemed overtly concerned with questioning the politics and aesthetic limitations of contemporary noise culture as we know it. Raphael Toral's use of movement-sensitive musical phrasing device in a red hot free-for-all with violinist C. Spencer Yeh and drummer Trevor Tremaine added something of an experimental “new media” feel to the Saturday night mix, but nothing all that conceptually earth-shattering. Sons of God's inclusion of two performers who did nothing but shuffle around the stage in business suits -- contorting and grabbing onto a table as though they were about to be carried away by a gargantuan gust of wind (pictured) -- made for a particularly spellbinding nod to noise music's correlaries in the performance tradition -- but wasn't really preceded or followed by anything that could be said to take this thread in a new or different direction, other than the obvious exception of Mattin.
What the Giffoni's curatorial choices seemed most concerned with that night, as with the previous one, was hitting upon as many different incarnations of noise in the contemporary musical landscape as nine 30-40 minute time slots can afford -- or in other words, to “provide a little something for everyone,” as the old saying goes, and somewhere along the way, tap into a sense of continuity. Which is perhaps why we were made to digest Bardo Pond's cosmic psychedelic sandstorms alongside C. Spencer Yeh's post-free-jazz, or Blank Dogs' grating industrial pop anthems after Sons of Gods' flirtation with physical and spiritual catastrophe.
Unfortunately for Griffoni, when all was said and done, the only connective fiber most of us could come up with was the performers' combination of loud sounds and serious energy -- though that was not really a bad thing. And Sonic Youth, who are perhaps most noteworthy for having passed through all the evening's many genres at some post in their quarter-century of existence, finished by providing us with just that: a flaming distillation of noise down to its most rudimentary essentials, a bombastic dictionary definition, guitars on the ground, strings popping left and right, and legs flying in the air. Some of us may have feigned surprise at Sonic Youth's decision to do a noise set. For most of us, though, it made perfect sense.
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- Night Three
by PSRE
By Sunday, problems of representation and flow hadn't been overcome, but the fest's grab-bag character, its just-so ethic of endurance, had been implanted for good. Even with the scattershot lineup, certain sets began to recall bygone days — Cold Cave this night's misbegotten synth-schlock, Black Pus its restive drummer gone wild. Without a justifiable headliner — cowering before swine flu, Merzbow didn't make the trip — the burden was again diffuse and inconsistently borne. Skullflower's drone wars, the night's ignorable denouement, weren't a marked departure from Jazzfinger's monochromatic ampgaze just hours prior.
Drumm Prurient at least felt important, a hard-edged collab between Chicagoan Kevin Drumm and Dominick Fernow, the dark prince behind Hospital Productions and a legion of none-more-black documents at noise's sooty boundary with black metal. Fernow played the caged rat, convulsing and screaming sweet nothings as the brutality reached its eclipse. Drumm was the dispassionate technician to Fernow's misanthrope-in-chief, but the personae didn't collide: at their junction rose the fest's only paean to pure rage.
An unadvertised — but hour-long — set from Boston Keith Fullerton Whitman supplied something of an intermezzo. Bearded, bearish, cross-legged at his laptop, KFW peddled ambient noise with a thus-spake, almost devotional quality. He'd beam in percussion or woodwinds, then wash them away, mere residues in the longue durée. A humbling performance, but equally a frustrating one, too fully at fickle mercy of mood.
The night's best-received — and, say it with me, best — set came from Emeralds (pictured), Cleveland it-drones and the only Rust Belt holdover since last year's Jasons–Hair Police fracas proved too much for Knitting Factory admins (plug pulled, door shown). The trio throttles synthesizers and a distant, pedal-washed guitar, questing through weird but revelatory underworlds — stalactites everywhere. John Elliott leads, feelin' it, a sort of brigadier general; sidekicks stay the course. The drone receded halfway in, delicate synth pangs splashing in the middle distance, Mark McGuire's tender arpeggios now foregrounded — but back it came, the kind of crypto-crescendo that stops hearts.
Sonic Saturday was demonstrably this year's populist handout — the Blank Dogs mania also continues to baffle — but Sunday impelled no less reflection on noise demography. If Emeralds amassed a consensus, as they appeared to do, and if to the peanut gallery this crowd could evince a certain monoculture — pale, frail, male — the jigsaw lineup spoke to a more atomizing scene, an economy of idiosyncrasy and separate peace. Noise shows, more than anyplace else, enable distanced, oblivious personal consumption.
Sunday's first set, then, from Peter Rehberg and Marcus Schmickler, captured this psychodrama at its awkward peak. The sun hadn't even set, and most early birds were ogling tapes in the foyer. Sudden digital squalls sent folks running in, but the perpetrators weren't on stage: live from the sound booth, they spun aleatory harsh noise, cascading palimpsests of static and code. Rehberg led, then deferred to Schmickler, whose crackling understatement recalled a campfire dying as the kids get bored and break out the boombox. Eardrums quaked, and the pair didn't relent.
The set killed, but what of this crowd? Turned around, bathed in the house lights, discomfited — secret's out — each coping strategy was vividly on display. Some rocked; others nodded; still others raised a fist. Inevitably, brought to reckon with the absurdity of it all, solidly half opted out, enduring the set in eyes-wide-shut anomie. Like this fest, and maybe like this scene: not more than the sum of its parts.
