Winging it
Comets on Fire's analog electronics czar, Noel Harmonson, fakes the turntables and makes some noise.

By Kimberly Chun

DJ SHITBIRD IS dead. Long live Shitbird.

I guess I'm taking DJ Shitbird and the Party Machine's demise personally because I shook my borrowed panda hot pants – or rather fat pants, because the fake fur makes your butt look as large as a bear's – at the joke band's final, silly string-shooting, piñata-smashing blowout at El Rio in June. But Comets on Fire's Echoplex maestro, Noel Harmonson – who assumed the role of faux DJ behind the prerecorded mix and "Ultimate Party Machine" suitcase sound system, and moonlights as the drummer in the Lowdown – isn't weeping.

"We finally killed Shitbird," he said matter-of-factly during a break from a real DJ set at the Attic. It was the end of the baldly bad music but ridiculous good times that put stupid smiles on the faces of uptight indie rockers with folded arms – despite the efforts of key members like Big Techno Werewolves' Eric Bauer and Lil' Pocketknife's Kristy Geschwandtner. "That just seemed like it was something that went on for way too long, got taken too far, and everyone was working on other stuff."

After producing a split CD with the Coachwhips' John Dwyer and Numbers' Eric Landmark's Revenge, the joke band named after Harmonson's "moody, psychotic" ex-roommate crash-landed. "There was a period when I was, like, everyone needs a DJ name, and I was battering my brain," Harmonson recalled. "Then I was like, 'I got it, Shitbird is my name.' I wanted to go to parties, set up in front of the fridge, in the way of everything so people couldn't get to the beer, and play really bad records and sing along to them. Eric [Bauer] said, 'Oh, I want some of that.' " They promoted the poo out of the band with stickers and buttons before they even booked a single show and added in the concept of an eight-year-old girl, played by Geschwandtner, who befriends a robot and teaches him to boogie.

But that was then, and the party is much different now: at 26, Harmonson, the youngest member of Comets on Fire, is something of a wild card though always the center of some sort of party. The Ojai native didn't grow up in Eureka like the other Comets, and until recently he maintained an active role in the noise scenes in both Santa Cruz and San Francisco, hosting house-party shows in the banana slug capital and playing with the legendary no-wave performance-art provocateurs of the Lowdown.

What kept the Lowdown together despite their playfully chaotic attitude was the will to reflect a surreal reality around them, Harmonson said last autumn when their latest album, Y Is a Crooked Letter (Zum), was released. "Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to be governor, the world is a weird place to live in – how did we get to the point where that's even a possibility? I can't explain it. I can't break it down," he said then. "The world's a weird place to live in. We're bewildered by it, so we try to react in weird, spastic ways. Using inadequate equipment."

But in spite of the continuing strangeness in the world, the Lowdown turned to other diversions: keyboardist-guitarist Josh Alper and vocalist-guitarist Hugh Holden recently put out a "forest-folk" album as Wisp, and the party noise group fell dormant. "We had been doing no-wavy disco-beat noise rock for a long time, and it just got harder and harder to be inspired as it got popular," Harmonson recently explained. "We used to be the odd man out, but after a few years, everyone sounded the same."

Now he's devoting most of his time to Comets, when he isn't working on a broadcast and electronic communication arts degree at San Francisco State University, making music with Bauer and OCS's Patrick Mullins in dubby, deca-dancey noise band Bloodstool, and releasing very-limited-edition solo electronic noise cassettes in tribute to the Leprechaun horror flicks. "They're power electronics, different from what I do in Comets but equally noisy and disoriented," he said.

Harmonson joined Comets while living in Santa Cruz, just as they were taking off as vocalist-guitarist Ethan Miller and bassist Ben Flashman's four-track cassette project. Miller had been running his vocals through a digital delay pedal to give it a bit of echo until Harmonson brought the noise with his old tube-based tape-delay effects box, the Echoplex.

Miller remembered Harmonson promising, "Dude, if you ever want me to lay some real heavy shit on your vocals instead of that fucking puss fucking digital delay pedal or whatever, I got this fucking mean machine right here, and I'll hook it up, and I'll fucking show you some real shit."

"Now when I was listening back to our first days' recordings of Comets on Fire, our very first songs, there was a pretty unhinged, maniacal, fucking bull-in-a-china-shop going on," Miller continued. "There's a certain rhythmic thing with the breakup of vocals and Echoplex and kind of the noise and chaos that was involved in that and in the sound of the Echoplex vocals." Harmonson was in, though it helped, Miller added, that "Flashman and I were drinking a lot and partying a lot and Noel was also along those lines."

As one of the few knob twiddlers to play a prominent role onstage in a noisy but trad rock band lineup – in contrast to, say, Mission of Burma's Martin Swope – Harmonson had to get used to functioning as a semi-frontperson. "I was like, 'You want me to stand up there and affect vocals and make noise? It's crazy,' " Harmonson said. "It felt awkward at first, hanging out with the box, falling on the floor, and trying to go apeshit."

These days Harmonson has more to busy himself with: his current heavy rig of "junk" includes a tone generator, P.A. heads for volume, and random analog trinkets turned up loud and feeding back on themselves. And he's happy to do his part to create what Miller referred to as the band's live "pure musical holocaust." "There's this whole East Coast rock-psych scene that's a lot different than out here," Harmonson mused last year, shortly after Comets' first tour in the region. "Typically their psychedelic scene is more mellow, so we kind of blew some minds."