Show Review

Wolf Eyes, Sissy Spacek, Gerritt Whittmer & Paul Knowles, Sword Heaven

Art Damage Lodge:  Saturday, March 6, 2010

Going to a harsh noise show is a lot like going to an amusement park.  You end up waiting long periods for an experience that only last a few minutes.  Before you experience the attraction, you feel an overwhelming sense of dread.  While the experience happens, you’re filled with a mixture of excitement and terror.  And when you’re finished, you can’t wait to do it again.

Saturday’s show at the Art Damage Lodge, the second night of its 25th anniversary celebration, was a lot like this.  The four artists on the bill took their time meticulously arranging their intricate arrangements of electronics and instruments before blasting the crowd with blood-curdling noise.   The sounds were ear-piercing, immense, and horrible, but lots of fun.

Columbus, Ohio’s Sword Heaven started the night off with a dirge-like mixture of beats and noise that sounded like a robotripping Black Pus.  Consisting of two members, Aaron Hibbs and Mark Van Fleet, Sword Heaven kicked things off with a barrage of screaming electronics combined with brutal drumming.  Each drum seemed to be tied into a synthesizer brain that produced an electronic squeal when the individual drums were struck.  The electronics were combined with a series of homemade noise instruments, while the drummer amplified his primal screams with a heavily distorted microphone strapped to his neck with a collar.  Sword Heaven were an angry, energetic, and brutally powerful way to kick off the show.

After an unnecessarily long set up time (their live setup consisted of two microphones, a laptop, and a couple sound manipulators), Gerritt Whittmer and Paul Knowles began their set next:  a mixture of performance art and digital noise.  Clothed in matching white shirts and black ties, the pair began by simply striking tuning forks and holding them to microphones, allowing the various tones to layer, combine, and slowly massage the PA system into droning feedback.  As the tones began reaching a crescendo, the pair suddenly dropped their pitchforks and doubled over, standing for several minutes in complete silence.  They may have been going for a John Cage-like study in silence, but the length of pause elicited more than a few audible coughs and snickers even from the decidedly experimental-friendly audience.

Returning to the mics, the pair began a series of amplified groans and screams, eventually kicking on a piercing strobe light and a laptop program pumping waves of digital noise into the PA.  The effect was certainly overwhelming, but ultimately somewhat uninspired.  All noise music is open to interpretation, but Whittmer and Knowles seemed hung up on concept and pretention while somewhat rarely producing personally effecting or truly powerful moments.

Sissy Spacek performed next, featuring constant noise figure John Weise (he’s collaborated with Burning Star Core, Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, and Sunn O))), among many others).  They sounded like a ripped perversion of a rock band: prepared guitar scraped with wrenches, vocals manipulated with electronics, and raw bass guitar providing constant foundations of low drone.  As the musique concrete pieces proceeded, the members employed a mic’ed sheet of thin metal, which produced vicious squeaks and squeals as they bent and struck it.

Sissy Spacek created barrages of stutters and screams that constantly confound and intrigue.  They eschewed the strategy, employed by many experimental artists, of overwhelming the listener with huge walls of noise, instead making such genius use of small moments that it’s easy to understand why this group’s somewhat sporadic activity and output garners so much respect.

Wolf Eyes closed the night, also displaying why their mix of deep electronic beats, John Olson’s haunting brass, Mike Connelly’s darkly punk guitar, and Nate Young’s twisted vocals has established them as perhaps the closest existing thing to a noise group with the potential to cross over to mainstream indie rock.  The sounds were sometimes demonic and terrifying, but the driving beats and rhythmic guitar work starts to suggest hits of melody and song structure rising from the soup of acidic noise.  Add to the mix John Olson’s wide array of haunting brass and customized metal pipe instruments, and you have many answers to the question of why Wolf Eyes have been able to maintain their position near the top of the experimental music heap for the last few years.

All the bands obviously cared deeply about the sounds they were creating and, for the most part, they got their points across with ear-splitting precision.  The Art Damage Lodge’s 25th anniversary was a case in point of why it’s such an important music venue in Cincinnati.