By Spencer Young
Walking into the dark and somewhat dingy den that is Café Du Nord on Saturday night (9/19), I was confronted with the hysteric gritty sounds and seizure-inducing visuals of Joe Grimm (sorry Operative/Scott Goodwin, I missed your potentially amazing set). Interweaving noise with two 16mm video projectors, Grimm literally made sound visual as the former informed the latter into a cacophony of refracted oscillations that during heightened crossover created blinding ephemeral colors, patterns, and images -- I swear I saw Kim Jong Il high-fiving Mickey Mouse at one point -- that eerily resembled a Rorschach test.
Photo by Spencer Young
All this frenzy and sensory overload froze anyone who dared watch, making the audience a mass of automatons blankly staring into a propaganda machine—eyes possessed, ears perked, and bodies stiff. I was tempted to fake a seizure to break the tension in the room or at least prevent anyone else from having one, but couldn't shake the grip.
The cacophony continued as the boys of the evening fiddled with the knobs, switches, and wires of various gadgets. After Grimm, every act on the bill contained a special voyeuristic charm -- on stage, each performer appeared as though he were alone in his bedroom on a Saturday night somewhere in the Midwest with nothing to keep him company save for some random mixers and pedals he found in the garage, and we the audience were seeing this unfold as though through a curtain-drawn, lava lamp illuminated window.
Boys of (psychedelic) summer: Ducktails brings the blur. Photo by Spencer Young
In the case of Pete Swanson, teenage angst coupled with ennui was battled with and exorcised via a wall of sound that had him shaking in desperation. Ducktails donned Ray-Bans to casually careen through his set, evoking a bit of Dylan. His blurry summer psychedelic sound emanated from a mini Casio keyboard and a sampler inside an old suitcase. With its looped circus-like two-step dance trance and warbly guitar riffs that delicately bowed like patrons at a Japanese tea ceremony, “Beach Poijt Pleasant” was the best song of the night.
A shift from boys' bedroom to grown-bald-man-living-in-parents'-basement was provided by Keith Fullerton Whitman, who -- on hands and knees and hovering over a couple switchboards of Medusa wires -- spun out some arpeggiated rhythms and lovely blips, making for the most nuanced sound of the night.
Though the Alps and Tarentel are bands, and thus musicians in the company of others, both still fit into the boys-playing-with-toys-in-bedroom phenom. Particularly because both bands' sound consists of each member creating an individual sonic catastrophe and then pitching it into the already saturated atmosphere. The Alps, with squealing, swirling guitars and steady rock drumming, function more like a band than Tarentel because the individual sounds at least seem partially aware of the others. Tarentel on the other hand was pure sonic masturbation -- each member was in their own private zone on stage and blissing out with eyes closed to the physicality and emittance of their instrument.
While each act took no more than 30 minutes each, I couldn't help but fade into serious abstraction mid-way through Tarentel's set. All of a sudden I felt like a boy alone in a bedroom. But this wasn't my bedroom, and these weren't my walls of sound, and thus I felt disconnected. So I went home and played with my own instruments and made my own sounds.
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