Roar of the crowd
A quiet band and a restless audience prove there's more to music than what's played by the band.

By Ken Taylor

WHEN LOW'S 9 /9/99 bootleg arrived in my mailbox (my real mailbox), I was riveted with anticipation. After a couple months of e-mailing a kid in Toronto whom I'd spotted recording a Low concert there, I finally received my way-overpriced CD-R of one of the most engaging shows in my concertgoing memory. The performance was phenomenal. So soft, calm, and voluptuous that, in an act normally relegated to only Beatles and Backstreet Boys shows, a girl actually fainted during one of the trio's numbers. It was a blessedly memorable evening. (Don't miss their Noise Pop show Feb. 26, 8:30 p.m., Great American Music Hall.)

Recalling it all so fondly, I popped the disc in pretty much expecting to relive the evening. But much to my dismay, I spent the next hour trying to weed out the noise of people I didn't know as they extolled the benefits of raising children in Canada and deliberated the difficulties of taking bikes on public transit, all backdropped, of course, by the faint echo of Alan Sparhawk's lilting voice and guitar.

It was horrible, at first. But in the days that followed, I spent more time memorizing the conversations – as if clandestinely tapping into a phone chat – than I did romanticizing the already familiar songs that now laid the framework for my secret voyeurism. It felt a little creepy. But it felt good too. I soon forgot all about Low's studio efforts and picked up their One More Reason to Forget live disc. However, it paled in comparison. 9/9/99 – replete with my own muffled voice annoyingly calling out requests – just seemed a little more real and not only because I contributed to its making. It was that undesirable noise that subtly seduced me and ruined me for any crisp, clear perfection to come. Eventually Low too would eschew much of their trademark quietude; their shows became roller coasters of emotion and sound, traipsing between melodic ditties and full-on rockers. The next time I saw them, in fact, Wolf Eyes were filling the opening slot.

Rather than continually filter it out, Low had learned to embrace extraneous sound, and it has become a healthy part of their relatively scant diet. But it wasn't even necessarily the band that first let me into their secretly noisy world. Nor was it engineers Steve Albini or Tchad Blake – just an intrepid bootlegger with a tape deck. Without Low knowing, the unwanted noise became wanted, and from the din of obnoxious chatter emerged newly beautiful pop music.

I pondered John Cage's grand plan when he first performed "4'33"," a recording of silence that broke down walls in musical theory and exposed us to the noise we never knew we were hearing. The sound, whether we wanted it or not, controlled it or not, was just there. For years, producers and engineers had (and have) been trying to keep it out, fighting a futile and not so admirable uphill battle against the inevitable – and missing the point. The best thing about noise is that it just exists. Of course, it's such an amorphous concept that it's near impossible to quantify. White noise, political noise, noise rock, the neighbors upstairs ... it all becomes, well, noise. But strip it away from classics like "Louie Louie" and the Stooges' "No Fun" – where that discordant fuzz whirring in the background slyly mimics the '60s countercultural climate – and you've got quite a lifeless tune. Even if they could've made it clearer, it's tough to imagine Iggy (or Dylan, or Reed) choosing clean over dirty.

So it seems particularly sad that sonic refinement has become such an awarded achievement, when we know that, for the most part, a noisier recording packs so much more punch. And isn't it strange that bands rarely get noisier with age, almost always gravitating toward "perfection" rather than rough-hewn sounds that beg our ears and minds to rewardingly tease out the strands of sonic beauty? People who like music purchase freshly remastered boxed sets and Time Life collections. But music lovers, who generally prefer the noise of needles skating the grooves of aged vinyl, have already got what they need. That old sound is a carbon-dating system, offering us a taste of the time, era, and economy.

And that's why retro isn't so bad after all. Bands like San Francisco's Coachwhips (Feb. 26, 9 p.m., Kilowatt) hark back to those garage and post-punk days when noise was half the fun of the record. Settling under an agitated storm of organ, guitar, and vocal noise, Coachwhips are irresistible. Their Cramps-style fervor and heavily layered instrumental pastiche is a full-throttle assault that gets both eardrums and booties shakin', proving that nostalgia doesn't have to be the mark of a band running short on ideas. Sometimes it's just the mark of good taste.

The Locust (Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m., Slim's), four feisty youths from San Diego, play crazily complex, high-concept art rock and take noise to a whole different level. They're one of those bands who may never see wide acclaim but will inspire a ton of unruly kids to pick up the torch for conceptual hardcore. Their aptly titled Plague Soundscapes, on Epitaph subsidiary Anti, flies by in a fury, bounding through 23 tracks in just over 20 minutes. And while the record is a whirlwind, it feels complete when it's finished. The Locust are paranoid, vitriolic, and despite their noisy synthesis, succinctly controlled. Their music is just short of distorted haze; they've managed to hone their sound to such a fine point that their frenzied start-stop motion is as jarring as it is carefully pruned. And when the quartet quiet down, albeit for one brief interlude, they're even more intriguing: "Can We Get Another Nail in the Coffin of Culture Theft" is a matrix of synth and drum pulses that masks the subtly seditious lyrics to another attack on monoculture.

While suitably more restrained, Sage Francis (Feb. 28, 8:30 p.m., Slim's) and Why? (Feb. 25, 8:30 p.m., Great American Music Hall) – affiliates of the Oakland-based Anticon cooperative – are no less political noisemakers than the Locust. They may have a tough time gaining the respect of the more established hip-hop community, but one's gotta wonder if guys like Francis and Why? really give a damn. Why? has rephrased every element of hip-hop with daydreamy swirls of feedback, cheap-ass drum boxes, and sing-song vocals. And Francis's left-leaning inventiveness is one of the most refreshing takes on rap music as we know it. The two hardly seem classifiable at all, let alone in a prone-to-stagnation musical genre. Yeah, they're naval-gazing and self-righteous, but they're also securing a hopeful future for the style. And they're so damn quotable. "It's 2000-whatever / Time to stop acting like assholes / It ain't about backpacks and cash flow / Fashionable afros," Francis spews under his Non Prophets guise on "That Ain't Right." The Anticon pack are known to be deft distillers of culture, and they've made a cottage industry out of rebroadcasting noise pollution and burning off all the bullshit the industry fuels. And they do it largely from their bedroom studios – another trait of noisy, underground masterminds.

Sometimes, though, the bedroom is where all the noise stays. Jandek, whom we'll likely only ever see in photographs, is more than content to never leave the house. In his mysterious 20-year-plus career, he's never performed a live show, and he's only conducted one interview. But on his label, Corwood Industries, Jandek has steadily released one or two albums a year since the early '80s. More out of necessity than stylistic dedication, his poorly handled guitar and vocal compositions are taped on a four-track, probably in his Houston basement, and with almost no care for the recording process whatsoever. Around his prolific release schedule, his god-awful sound, and his absolute refusal to be part of an industry – that wouldn't want him anyway – the hyperreal mythology of Jandek is built. The documentary Jandek on Corwood (Feb. 28, 1 p.m., Artists' Television Access) provides quite a bit of insight into the elusive figure, but while it only aims to proliferate the myth, the further you get into it, the less likely you are to believe Jandek is some unwilling subject. Instead, you get the sense we're playing right into his hands – it's a bit frightening for his legion of cult followers to think they might be the punch line to a three decade-spanning joke.

Like Anticon and Jandek, the once San Francisco-based Devendra Banhart (Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m., Swedish American Hall) also lets listeners into his ultrapersonal world through a sprawling collection of shoestring recordings. His debut a couple of years back was so clumsily beautiful that the first thing you actually heard was the recorder's dense tape hiss. From there, Banhart – a protégé of Swan's Michael Gira – doubled up his vocals so that they were at times mismatched, shifting and locking and fucking with your brain till the two phases hit that sweet, sweet spot of convergence. For his latest record, the eerily indulgent Rejoicing in the Hands, Banhart has slightly upgraded his equipment but hasn't forgone his knack for allowing the unexpected to seep in and take over. And he doesn't change his approach so much as he opens the door for new curiosity seekers to timidly peek in. For more venue and festival information, see "Where to Go," page 43.

Get it live

British Sea Power, Kaito, Citizens Here and Abroad No one mixes Echo and the Bunnymen, the Make-Up, and the Psychedelic Furs quite the way British Sea Power do. Of course, it's 2004. Why would you want to? Crazy live show, though. Fri/27, 8:30 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $10. (415) 621-4455.

Detroit Cobras, Starlight Desperation, Demons, Salem Lights The Cobras are the only band in Detroit that make no bones about ripping off the past. And the fact that they're strictly a Motown cover band makes them that much more the genuine article. Thurs/26, 8:30 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $14. (415) 621-4455.

I Am Spoonbender, Cex, Paradise Island, Quails It's a first for the new Independent club and a welcome return for I Am Spoonbender's notoriously nutty full-on stage show. Don't miss them before they blast off on their tour. Thurs/26, 8 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, S.F. $12. (415) 771-1420.

+/-, Elected, Frank Jordan, Laguardia +/- - Chris Deaner + Fontaine Toups + Richard Baluyut + Ed Baluyut - harmonic guitar-drum interplay + awkward relationship innuendo = Versus. Wed/25, 9 p.m., Parkside, 1600 17th St., S.F. $8. (415) 503-0393.

Unicorns, Why?, Irving, Restiform Bodies The Unicorns graft an intriguing rock pastiche that rests somewhere between Anticon and Daniel Johnston. A welcome addition to Montreal's noisily pretentious Alien8 label. Expect frivolity and fireworks. Wed/25, 8:30 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $12. (415) 885-0750.

K.T.