|
Fuck
shit up
A short history of noise rock.
By Mike
McGuirk
OK, THIS
is what happened: San Francisco was a sleepy little town that
had a ton of artists hanging out – making art, playing music,
possibly taking illegal drugs. There were a few key players: BlackJack
Records, the multitentacled out-rock magazine Bananafish
that introduced the whole extreme Japanese noise stuff to
everybody, art-noise freaky band Caroliner, retardo-punk band the
Icky Boyfriends, space rock psyche band Monoshock and their pure-noise
twin, Liquor Ball, legendary jokers the Zip Code Rapists, and a
bunch of other bands and labels that I am probably going to get
yelled at for not mentioning.
Then from the
Midwest a couple of completely apeshit things came through, courtesy
of my favorite label, Bulb: an absolutely awful 7-inch by Prehensile
Monkeytailed Skink and a tour by equally reprehensible antimusic
band Couch, which had Pete Larson, Aaron Dilloway, and Weasel Walter
in it. Or maybe that was Lake of Dracula, which came through later.
I don't know – the facts are blurry to me because I wasn't
here for any of this. I was in Somerville, Mass., in pursuit of
the ultimate high, dude. I listened to Cypress Hill 24 hours a day
and even had a hat with a pot leaf on it.
Anyway, around
this time Harry Pussy dropped the bomb on everybody with a negative,
insane stage presence and an absence of formally accepted musical
structures mixed with scarce rock moves. The idiots in the Midwestern
bands made friends with the idiots in the S.F. bands and
a sort of unheard alliance formed. A small explosion of noisy experimentation
happened in our town – and elsewhere, too, to be fair –
and none of those indie rock assfaces paid any attention to it.
Today in San
Francisco we have a glut of bands playing along the fringes of accepted
rock forms. There are laptop and power electronics bands, there
are no wave-influenced dance punk bands, there are metal- and jazz-influenced
noise bands, there are a million fucking bands, and for like two
years now it's as if they're all trying outdo one another with weirdness.
So what?
Don't get me
wrong – I think it's great. Weird music is way better than
boring, stale indie rock or tired, hot-rod garage punk. It's just
kind of strange, don't you think, that there are all these
bands and none of them are even close to writing anything
that gets played on mainstream radio or used in car commercials?
Could there be some connection between what went on here in the
late 1980s and what's going on here today? Is it possible the long-hated,
barely noticed genre of noise rock has come of age? Is there an
easier way to come up with a lead for a story I've written three
times already without posing all these questions?
I think it's
impossible for anyone to say there isn't something interesting going
on with noise music. There's a definite gathering of momentum happening,
with various publications taking note, an influx of youngsters at
certain shows, and the fact itself that there are so many bands
playing this crazy music and they aren't going away. Not
all of this music is "noise" per se, but there's a common
thread running through it that puts it under a sort of underground
umbrella, for me anyway. There's something abrasive and innately
confrontational about the music I'm discussing, a characteristic
that sets it apart from the passivity of indie rock and outside
the parameters of "accepted," major label- (or so-called
indie label-) sanctioned music. While it is unavoidably descended
from the music of established "noise" forebears (Ornette
Coleman, Glenn Branca, improv and agitpunk artists, etc.), it seems
these bands have come from a different school in that they work
from outside that framework and have more to do with the smaller
freak-rock scenes of the mid '90s than with the usual New York hipster
scene. These are the kids who heard Harry Pussy when they were teenagers
and went from there to find Coleman, rather than the other way around.
What are we
dealing with?
The parameters
of this scene are pretty broad; I'll explain why they're related
later.
Dancey noise
There's the structured dance punk that's somehow descended from
the caterwaul of no wave, typified by our very own Numbers, Crack:
We Are Rock, Erase Errata, and newcummers Zeigenbock Kopf; Michigan's
Neon Hunk; and Seattle's the Chromatics.
These are the
biggest-breaking bands: their music is the most accessible, yes,
but they make you work for it.
Numbers (for
whom I've written liner notes) play songs that break and corner
with an almost hard-core hostility, a holdover from the band's past
as a two-second spazcore outfit called Xerobot. These days, Numbers
are finding a balance between total dissonance and dance-floor rhythms.
Erase Errata have a similar thing going, only they're more of an
experimental outfit – it's more like we've caught up to what
they're doing. Erase Errata play music that's abrasive as hell and
rooted in the bizarro jazz-rock of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band,
only we hear it as melodic and danceable. Why? Because we are fucked
up. We are all very fucked up.
The Chromatics
are nearly pop music. I don't really like the Chromatics. But Neon
Hunk are cool. They combine the costume art-noise that Caroliner
do with jittery electronics and Lightning Bolt-type drumming.
Brainy noise
Then there's the electro/laptop experimentalists, the legitimate
noise music of Providence, R.I.'s Forcefield and Pleasurehorse,
Ann Arbor, Mich.'s Mammal, and locally Hans Grüsel's Kränkenkabinet,
Brown Bunny Ensemble, and the whole Brutal Sound Effects crew, which
is lorded over by the godfather of the form – Grux, who was
the major component of Caroliner back in the day. Grux is that guy
walking around town with weird shit sewn onto his pants. As idiosyncratic
as he is, Grux has been one of the most productive, fostering people
in the art community here, and his talent is something you can't
argue with. Just go see Caroliner, who are touring again, to get
a taste. The costumes are like some futuristic combination of Kabuki,
paganism, and trash culture. They are also fucking huge.
Anyway, these
groups all sound pretty much the same, dropping horrendous noises
on top of either nonexistent or disruptive beats. They almost all
wear costumes, and usually their music has some kind of story line
subtext. For some reason people are really into these groups, a
fact that underscores the open mind of San Francisco's show-going
population because there's almost nothing to grab onto here in the
way of traditional music. At its best, as with the heavy, fucked-up
dance grooves of Mammal and the hilarious parallel universes sketched
by Zeek Sheck, these bands generate a chaotic energy that's not
so far from the immediate devastation of a Lightning Bolt show.
Heavy noise
Ahh, Lightning Bolt. That brings us to the last subsection I'm throwing
in here: the chaotic, rock-based noise of big shots like Black Dice
and Lightning Bolt; little shots Burmese, the Lowdown, and Total
Shutdown from the Bay Area; and Sightings from New York, as
well as the Royal Trux-ian freak-out bands promoted by CD-R-proliferating
whacko Matt Saint Germaine and his Freedom From label, meaning the
hated but possibly great No Doctors and the definitely great Hair
Police.
We've written
about most of these bands in the Bay Guardian before. You
could even say we've covered this stuff to death. For instance,
you should know already that Burmese are total war on the ears,
probably the most brutal of all S.F. bands, and that Total Shutdown
mix death metal with free jazz and then they scream their heads
off on top of it. What I didn't know was that Antioch Arrow, from
the post-hardcore scene of mid-'90s San Diego, are a major link
in the chain. As far as big shots go, Black Dice were at one time
the most fearlessly immutable noise rock band ever, crushing audiences
with a seamless onslaught of what appeared to be sublanguage chaos
but in fact was a distillation of Harry Pussy and the Beach Boys.
Today they're a psychedelic disco band.
And Lightning
Bolt are Lightning Bolt, a monumentally great classic rock band
with 50 pedals. Sightings carry the torch of painful recording practices
and cathartic emo-noise. Like Burmese, they create a vibe so intensely
negative that watching them play is anything but entertainment.
Wolf Eyes, a
combination of all three of these subgenres, may be the most interesting
band in the whole scene. They take the sparest elements of rock
and pervert them with truly unsettling homemade electronic noises
to create a thumping ritualistic howl that's almost impossible to
classify. Wolf Eyes may be the only band that have ever successfully
created music that's scary.
By the same
token, Crack: We Are Rock are the only band in S.F. – or anywhere
else really – doing anything that even resemble what Wolf Eyes
have created. They play creepy disco reminiscent of Suicide and
Throbbing Gristle, a little more approachable than Wolf Eyes, maybe,
but at times they can be just as jaw-droppingly powerful. What's
funny is that while Crack make this evil, disorienting antidisco
that sounds like literally nothing else out there, they see themselves
as a dance band and get really bummed when people stand there staring
at them during live shows.
For the past
year or so, the Bay Guardian music section has been covering
a lot of this music, as obscure as it is – or was. People have
even complained in letters to the editor that we were turning into
a clique-obsessed fanzine.
This is partially
my fault, as some of my initial motives for writing for this paper
were to see what I could get away with. For whatever reason the
idea of unknown, who-cares-it-exists music getting the sort of respectable
exposure this truly excellent free weekly affords was hilarious
to me. Plus the Bay Guardian was always covering fucking
DJ culture, which is boring, so I tried to write about bands I knew
people hated.
But now these
bands are beginning to matter, and the Bay Area is a hot spot for
something that's growing out of control all over the country. Art-and-noise
duo Forcefield were in the Whitney Biennial. Black Dice have been
written about in the New Yorker, and the good-looking fashion
punk college kids from Minnesota called No Doctors are seeking to
steal the Strokes' throne out from under them with crappy, out-of-tune
guitars and a concave, dead snare drum. Squirt-vocal dance party
MCs Neon Hunk were written about in the January issue of Jane,
for Christ's sake. Locally, besides the fact that Numbers and Erase
Errata draw like 300 people when they play at Bottom of the Hill
now, shit-sucker rag Rolling Stone has taken an interest,
with a small piece on "college rock bands" Numbers and
Coachwhips last month. This past year Erase Errata toured with Sonic
Youth, and Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label is putting out
a Total Shutdown record.
Why, for God's
sake, why?
So why here
and why now? Anthony Bedard has been around San Francisco's underground
music scene since the late 1980s. As a member of the seminal and
defunct Icky Boyfriends and the still active Resineators, he has
always been on the fringes of the scene. The Icky Boyfriends were
too weird for the prevailing indie rock consciousness then, and
Bedard's allegiances haven't changed much since. He still gravitates
toward a type of music he himself dubbed "panic rock,"
music so steeped in chaos that it rises above the incompetence of
the players to create a truly liberating, rock 'n' roll vibe. He
says San Francisco has always been a major area of activity for
people interested in noise rock.
"When I
moved here in 1989, one of the attractions was that this was a place
where people could go and make noncommercial shit," he said.
"It was this weird kind of fucked-up art community, and people
were just doing crazy shit. Grux was somebody who fostered a lot
of that weird art-noise scene. Then there was this was this crossover
with bands from the East Coast and Michigan – Couch, Lake of
Dracula. When Aaron Dilloway [of Wolf Eyes] first came here, he
knew about two bands, he knew about Caroliner Rainbow and Icky Boyfriends,
and he was 18.
"Then in
the early '90s the scene got dominated by terrible thrash-funk shit
like Psychofunkapus," he continued. "And then there were
the grunge years. You couldn't read about good music in the Bay
Guardian then. You just couldn't. Now the smoke has cleared,
and you can see who the real influences were. If you think about
the kind of shit that's going on right now – the style of performance
– you can draw a straight line from what was going on in the
late '80s and early '90s. The catharsis of one meets the like-costumed
noise, the electronic noise stuff of the other."
The other part
of the answer lies in the events of the past few years, with the
growth of the Internet and the dot-com boom and then the aftermath,
when previously employed artists found themselves out of work and
with free time on their hands to make music. Perhaps the bitter
taste in everyone's mouth is what inspired them to seek out more
extreme types of music.
As Bedard put
it: "Not to drag out the tired dot-com thing, but I think a
lot of people started saying, 'Fuck it,' and there was a rekindled
DIY scene. People just started finding warehouses, putting bands
together, and booking shows because there were all these people
looking for that kind of entertainment. You're talking about smart
people who are good musicians with a fucked-up showbiz sensibility.
People are working
hard on their entertainment, outside the support system of the mainstream."
Spockmorgue
The Internet had a direct impact on the formation of this semi-cohesive
scene, both locally and on a national scale. E-mail newsgroups,
lists/message boards, and discussion forums have made booking tours
easier, helped like-minded bands from different places hook up for
shows, and probably most important, forged friendships between bands
and the people who go to shows. The only music-discussion group
I really know about is one called Spockmorgue, and it appears to
have had quite an effect on the way the scene here and abroad has
turned out. In fact, many of the bands I've mentioned are often
referred to as "Spockmorgue bands," whether or not their
members are on the e-list, simply because so many of them are
on it and the music they all play bears the similarities I mentioned
above, of abrasiveness, a strong connection to the art scene, and
total commercial nonvalue. Plus their shows are usually really fun
because everyone gets drunk and jumps all over one another.
Spockmorgue
was started one day in 2000 by bored Web designer Paul Costuros
as a place for him and his friends to go and talk about music they
had been told was too pretentious by the kids on the S.F. Indie
list. Costuros began inviting anyone he thought was cool –
kind of like that dream dinner party with Karl Marx, Jesus Christ,
and Bob Dylan all hanging out, except Costuros invited people like
Ben McOsker of Load Records, Pete Larson from Bulb and Mark Fischer
of Skin Graft.
These people
in turn invited people they thought would fit with the ideology,
and ever so slowly a pretty giant resource center developed. Today
there are more than 300 people on the list, announcements for shows
in S.F., Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Portland, Ore., pop up
every 10 minutes, Bay Guardian contributor George Chen is
threatening to put Revolver out of business with Spockmorgue Distribution,
and there are like 50 bands who met on the list and now play shows
together, book tours together, and get fucked up together. As much
as anything, this community of musicians has had an effect on the
way noise music has started making waves, because if you play enough
shows and if there are enough bands doing things together, then
people start paying attention. It's bound to happen.
Anyway, I asked
Costuros, who is my housemate and a member of Total Shutdown and
local free-noise act Murder Murder, about Spockmorgue, and he said,
"Any band or any scene, it kind of builds, with playing shows
and having more and more people find out about it. A community builds.
Costuros went
on to describe the how much easier things got with the Internet:
"Booking tours before the Internet was all telephones. We would
use dialers on pay phones in order to afford to book tours. We'd
be calling New York and all these others states, and it would be
so expensive. And you couldn't nitpick about stuff. You took the
shows you got. With e-mail you can contact like 10 different places."
Clitstop
The other side of the Internet answer is the way the clubs were
shut down by greedy assholes during the big boom. Besides Kimo's
– which was the only place that had any good bands for a while,
thanks to courageous booking god Matt Shapiro – a handful of
alternative venues sprang up, the most important of which was the
Clitstop, started by Eric Bauer of Crack and Jake Rodriguez of Bran
Pos and Compomicro-Dexall, with help from Bruce Gauld, who
was a big-time house DJ at one time. The founder of the Clitstop's
successor, Pubis Noir, Gauld was also a member of Church Police,
a Bay Area punk band that have the weirdest song of the punk era
in "Oven Is My Friend," which you can find on Not So
Quiet on the Western Front. "Oven Is My Friend" is
not a punk rock song; it's more of a pre-new wave antimusic ditty
that has tons of echo all over everything and makes absolutely no
sense. In light of this, it's fitting that Gauld ended up fostering
a scene of completely retarded music.
They got ahold
of a space on Tahoma Street in the chic but smelly SoMa district
and started booking shows. They booked electronic noise bands with
free jazz artists, dance punk bands with metal bands, everything
all jumbled together. Coachwhips played their first show at the
Clitstop, as did Numbers. But more important, they played with Total
Shutdown, a band they had never heard and didn't have shit to do
with musically. Next thing you know, Total Shutdown and Numbers
are playing shows together, Numbers are touring with Coachwhips,
and everybody's becoming friends.
Going to shows
from 2001 through part of 2002 was like going to a party. A scene
thrives when people who see music the same way but deliver it differently
figure out they can play together and then a bunch of their friends
start going to their shows and getting drunk.
When Hair Police
came through last year, with Neon Hunk and Mammal, they played at
Kimo's with Murder Murder. It was a highly anticipated evening,
we'd all been hearing about this totally cool Midwest scene for
months. Neon Hunk played their fluorescent disco noise – not
bad. Mammal were just pulverizing with this sweaty groove laptop
stuff, and then Hair Police played and really went to town. In a
room full of strangers, the band acted like they were at a house
party in their hometown – jumping around and into the crowd,
squirming on the floor, breaking their instruments. I remember thinking,
damn, these kids are way crazier than any S.F. band; they're making
us look bad. Murder Murder came out and fully represented. They
acted like it was a contest for who could outspazz whom. Costuros,
on saxophone, was leaping from a spot in the audience, like 10 feet
through the air and onto a table on the stage that had a keyboard
on it. He pulled out a giant plastic knife and attacked the audience,
as well as members of his own band. The other saxophonist, Matt
Hartman, ended up with his face pressed into the cone of his amplifier,
screaming. It was a proud moment, a confirmation that when it comes
to completely stupid, inane behavior and alcohol-inspired moments
of bad judgment, our little scene here in San Francisco can kick
any city's ass.
The hangover
So people are
catching on to this little scene now, and that's a good thing, I
guess. It's weird, though: as it gets bigger you can almost feel
the energy going out of it. Shows are still fun, but there's a hesitancy
that wasn't there before, and the people who were around in the
beginning are becoming more and more distrustful of the larger crowds
and even the music of the bands.
I'm as guilty
of this as anyone. I have no idea whether I like this music or I
just like being friends with people in bands. Maybe I'm just a trend
jumper and now that the noise scene has reached critical mass I
want to go find something else no one likes so I can feel like I
know something other people don't know. Who knows? What matters
is that these people have worked hard to make a scene here in San
Francisco, and they've done a good job. Let's just hope the rest
of the world doesn't wreck it.
Cokra
(with members of Crack and Zeek Sheck) play with Chicken Hawk and
Spider Compass Good Crime Band Tues/11, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern,
1131 Polk, S.F. $5. (415) 923-0923. Hans Grüsel's
Kränkenkabinet perform March 15, 8 p.m., ATA, 992 Valencia,
S.F. $5. (415) 824-3890. Burmese play with Thrust
Revolver March 20, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, S.F. $5.
(415) 923-0923. Wolf Eyes play with the Sheath, Curse
of Birthmark, and K.I.T. March 26, Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th
St., S.F. $7. (415) 621-4455. For more shows and information,
go to spockmorgue.com.
Germaine
matters
This article
actually started out as a piece on Matt Saint Germaine, proprietor
of the Freedom From label, which has released such gems as mentally
handicapped Brazilian free jazz artist Reynols, a one-man acoustic
death metal band called Black Stool, the truly saturated noise band
Hair Police, and much-debated rock band No Doctors. I don't know
what the fuck happened.
Anyway, Saint
Germaine is an exceedingly energetic and positive-thinking noise
rock pusher. He feels that one day noise music will be as big as
third-wave ska, and when he argues the point he's quite convincing.
He almost never stops booking shows, planning records, putting out
records, or just talking about the innumerable bands he loves and/or
has been in. Saint Germaine is an honest-to-God believer in the
idea that anyone can and should play music and the more fucked-up
they make it, the better.
He turned up
in San Francisco about a month ago, with little warning, pretty
much just here to hang out. The day he arrived, the car he was borrowing
got towed, and he had to spend all of the money he brought with
him to get it back. He then promptly lost his wallet and discovered
someone trying to use his credit card in Sacramento. This was when
I decided I wanted to do a piece on him.
Not long after
these events I was at a party that Saint Germaine was at as well,
and I walked around interviewing some folks about him for the piece.
The best parts came from the people with no connection to or affinity
for noise music, people who had never heard of him or his label:
Me: This
is Matt Saint Germaine. He runs a label based in Minneapolis called
Freedom From. Can you guys give me your first impressions of Mr.
Matt Saint Germaine?
Unidentified
Person No. 1: He's a real go-getter.
Unidentified
Person No. 2: I think he looks like a lesbian.
Unidentified
Person No. 3: ... Uhh air-traffic controlling?
MSG:
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Funny enough, I hate planes.
Bay Guardian
contributor Will York: A lot of people think Matt Saint Germaine
is an abrasive asshole ... and he is ... but that's part of who
he is.
Unidentified
Person No. 2: I wouldn't mind a little freedom from Saint Germaine's
Dorito breath.
Me: Why
do you put out records anyway?
MSG:
I don't have an answer prepared for that. How about just "Feelin'
good all the time"?
Me: Feelin'
good all the time, huh?
MSG:
Feelin' good all the time. [Saint Germaine then proceeds to carve
a pentagram into my forearm with a Swiss Army Knife]
My girlfriend:
Can you not mutilate my boyfriend?
Unidentified
Person No. 3: I've always wanted to say "Can you not mutilate
my boyfriend?"
MSG:
C'mon, it's a tattoo! I didn't even cut into the goddamn bloodskin!
M.M.
|
|
