Dissonance Gets Organized
IN his seminal 1913 manifesto on noise music, "The Art of Noises," the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo denounced what he called the "second hand ecstasy" of past musical masters like Wagner and Beethoven. The musicians of the future, he wrote, would dispense entirely with conventional harmonic instruments in favor of the limitless possibilities of the machine. The howling of industrial equipment, the grinding of wheels against pavement, even the sounds of war, would fill the concert halls of the world. Music lovers, jolted from the boredom of melody by "a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face," would rejoice.
Like most Futurist polemics, poor Russolo's has become quaint with time. His call to arms was unsuccessful and, outside the academy, did little to affect the world of music. In the end, it's difficult to imagine what Russolo's world would have sounded like.
Unless you attended the No Fun Fest two weekends ago at Northsix. The three-day festival was a gathering of some of the world's best noise acts. According to Carlos Giffoni, the show's organizer, the event was a chance for him to gather together some musicians whose work he liked. However modest his ambitions, the festival felt like one of those watershed moments that signals the start of something larger-or confirms that it is already happening.
With so much of underground rock paralyzed by 80s revivalism, a handful of bands from small towns across America has blown through this stasis with shrieking abandon. While trafficking in self-released records, frenetic stage shows and the occasional guitar, the sounds they produce are unlike anything previously heard from punk and hardcore. There are antecedents to be sure (Big Black and Throbbing Gristle come to mind) but bands like Ann Arbor's Wolf Eyes and Louisville's Hair Police are unfettered by rock's sonic conventions in ways that their forebears were not. The music is abrasive, difficult-not much fun, sometimes-but it's representative of a push to reduce things to an elemental level in order to start afresh. And what has the look and feel of nihilistic desperation, with performers alternately confronting the audience or burying their noses in gear in defiant concentration, is something else entirely. These bands may not be the future of rock, but they've bothered imagining that rock might have a future, which is more than can be said of most everyone else.
For an exhibition of all that rock could become, though, the No Fun Fest started off a bit jazz-heavy. The Arthur Doyle Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, fronted by the legendary saxophonist, wandered through familiar free jazz territory and never quite decided on a destination. Doyle, sitting front and center, moaned into a microphone and unleashed bleats from his horn while the band behind him went in a separate, more restrained direction. It was as if band and leader were on separate stages. After a blistering set of waves-of-sound dissonance by Giffoni, an improv quartet featuring Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke ran through a taught set of squawks and screeches.
The high point of the first evening came at the end. Austrian laptop esthete Peter Rehberg, aka Pita, constructed heaping piles of wreckage from bulky chunks of aural dissonance. Eyes locked onto his monitor, he played a short, emphatic set that was over before it could begin to make sense. His dispassionate onstage demeanor belied the visceral intensity of his music-whatever conceptual intentions he may have had were summarily obliterated by the dense momentum of the sounds that came rumbling out of the amps.
The second night got off to a dizzying start. Laundry Room Squelchers, a Florida collective made up of least 15 members (many of them likely temporary), scattered themselves around the fringes of Northsix's main space. After friendly warnings to those unfortunate enough to be standing in the proximity of strategically placed amps, the band attacked their gear. Noisemaker-bearing instrumentalists wove their way through the crowd, dragging audience members into the fray with their trailing cords. The music amounted to little more than a sustained roar, and it all crashed into a splay-legged and unkempt-hair pile in the middle of the floor. To be in the crowd was to not know which way was forward or backward while being swept up in a chaos that had, despite its illusive tameness, moments of real menace.
Relatively subdued performances from Nmperign, Due Process and Alan Licht offered respite before Hair Police, who looked like a cross between a hardcore band and a medical experiment: a guitarist, a drummer and a third member ensnared in a tangle of wires who jerked around like he had a defibrillator strapped to his chest.
It's difficult to know what will become of this movement, or whether the bands that played at No Fun Fest even represent a movement at all. The music is probably too reductive to sustain itself for much longer; the bands will probably have to open themselves up to elements other than noise-possibly even melody, like Massimo-before the novelty of it all wears thin. But to look too far into the future is to miss the point of what happened that weekend. The traditional rock space, where everything has become predictable and safe, became a place where confusing things might happen again. Being in the audience at Northsix was challenging. Whereas going to a rock show usually means knowing exactly what to want and always getting it, at No Fun Fest it was impossible to know what to want. It was thrilling.