No Fun Fest - 2005

(photo courtesy of Ed Howard)

Joe drew attention to this festival a while ago here, so it would only be fitting for me to follow up with a little report on that it was like to be so awash in these musics for the last week. Even better than reading this missive would be to check out Bill T Miller's amazing pictures of the festival.

This was the 2nd year of Carlos Giffoni's No Fun Fest. Last year, the first one was remarkable both in its scope and its depth: Pita, Wolf Eyes, nmperign & Due Process, Arthur Doyle's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Sightings, and many more. It seemed to be tapping into a number of overlapping scenes, the noise-rock of Sightings and Hair Police, the more discordant end of free-jazz, electroacoustic improv, and whatever it is you call what Wolf Eyes do. It was like a cross-section of a teeming reef of practices, barely held together by an interest in the extremes of volume, density, pitch. The common threads were the musicians themselves: members of Sonic Youth, Giffoni's own projects (Monotract, the duo with Dylan Nyoukis), rather than shared approaches.

This year's festival felt more like it was an exploration of just one thing, like the heads of a hydra, or the faces of a mountain. Maybe the feeling was a function of the social atmosphere: I must have met at least a dozen people whom I'd either only interacted with via electronic communication, or knew as friends of friends. Everyone seemed like someone you knew from a message board, had bought records from, or seen live at some point or another. Downstairs was a zoo of networking, 1/3 conference, 1/3 bazaar and 1/3 drunken middle school dance. The Hook was a great venue for the festival, and Carlos really knew how to make use of the space: the main space was devoted to the bar and the mainstage acts, downstairs was the merchandise and more music curated by Chondritic Sound on Friday, Chocolate Monk on Saturday and Heresee on Sunday

Before I go into the details of the shows, I'll lay down the background against which the lineup took shape: About a month or so ago, the headlines of the final night of the Fest backed out, SUNNO)) + the Total Acid Ensemble (John Weise, Pita and Lasse Marhaug.) To replace them, Giffoni booked Fe-mail, a Norwegian laptop noise duo. Then, about a week before the fest, both William Bennett and Phillip Best cancelled, forcing a replacement of Whitehouse, Consumer Electronics and the Bennett dj set by Borbetomagus, Macronympha and an Emil Beaulieau DJ set/performance. Around the same time Rudolf Eb.er of Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock had to cancel his in-person appearance, due to passport and visa issues. Matthew Bower of The Hototogisu missed his flight over and Ron Lessard of the Nihilist Assault Group got sick the day of his show, being replaced by Richard of FFH (I don't know his last name).

The effects of these changes on the lineup changed the character of the festival in interesting ways: besides Chris Corsano, who was playing drums in two ensembles, Borbetomagus became the most solid connection between the free-jazz and the younger, more primarily electronic based music making. This brought it a touch closer in spirit to the earlier festival. In light of my other experiences with Borbetomagus, I imagine they blew the roof off the place, but, as with all of the other musicians who played last each night (I hesitate to call them "headliners"), I missed their performance. The addition of Fe-mail was a solid addition to the already impressive and prominent number of women musicians (Metalux, Tovah Olson of Dead Machines, Carly Ptak - who co-curated the Heresee night along with Twig Harper- Leslie Keffer, and Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards and many others).

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One thing that's common to many of the musicians/performers at No Fun was this hyperconsciousness of tradition. Say what you will about the music, one thing you can't really say is that any of it is especially new, or perhaps, that novelty isn't its main appeal. So much of what happened was about the continuity and bastardization of old forms into new ones. Psychedelia's ghost was the most obvious one, alongside the spirits of industrial, sound-poetry, minimalism, Aktionism, power electronics, harsh noise, no-wave, and countless others. Different threads of musicians, chains of influence, geographically situated communities (Michigan, Ohio, Zūrich, Boston, Vienna), commonmindedness in strange ways.

Psych has some kind of special resonance for a lot of the musicians that played; anyone who's spent time reading the Hanson_American list is well aware of the voracity for obscure psychedelic music therein (the Blops, anyone?) I'm not really sure why: some kind of retrospective longing for unselfconscious weirdness? A love of color? Fuzz pedals? I personally think that some of it is excessive, but for a group of musicians who played at the festival, psychedelia is channeled without the mysticism, without the obscurity, and without the message. They abstract from the motivations behind a lot of it's "weirdness" (musical approximations of drug experiences, desire to "expand consciousness", appropriations of "exotic" religious practices, etc.) and take from it cloudy, damaged strangeness. Hive Mind's set made me feel like I was back in 10th grade, listening to Tangerine Dream's Pheadra after drinking too much cheap vodka with my degenerate friends, while Heathen Shame were total guitar/vocal/trumpet freakout, with an otherworldly vocal attack by Kate Village and a stage-dive (!) by Greg Kelley. John Olson of Wolf Eyes embodied the spirit in apparel: printed-over denim vest, no shirt, and headband. There was also the more explicit free-rock revival tone of Pengo, and the anarchic performance/ritual/rock of Magik Markers.

No Fun gave me the chance to reevaluate my opinions on two bands: Hair Police and Double Leopards. During Hair Police's set at last year's No Fun, I found myself in the midst of a swirling mass of bodies, which grew progressively more and more rowdy. Not 10 minutes into their set, I had my glasses knocked off and stomped on (unintentionally, I believe), which cost me $200 and a fair quantity of grief. I imagine that that had colored my feelings about them, but for a while, I've been skeptical about the considerable following they've amassed. I've also seen Double Leopards play before (maybe a year or so ago?) and found it pleasant but aimless drone-soup. Both bands totally impressed me this year; it's difficult to say whether it was a change in their approach or in mine. Maybe it was the PA? Whatever it was, Hair Police were vicious, loud but focused as well, and Double Leopards were less sludge and more shimmer, dense and overwhelming. The Double Leopards set is one that I'd love to hear again, there was one passage that I remember being especially beautiful, one strong high-end synth buzz that stood apart from the rest of the sound mass.

Contraposed to all of this hippy longhair'dness were the more theatrical performances: Dave Phillips, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Sudden Infant, Justice Yeldham & the Dynamic Ribbon Device, Glamorous Pat & Mokinox and HAZMAT featuring Anthony Miller & Large Parts. While everyone at the fest was putting on a "show", for better or for worse there were some acts where keeping your eyes closed would have been of significant detriment to the experience (Macronympha as well, but for different reasons.) You had a few approaches happening: the more flamboyant, dressup styles of Glamorous Pat & Mokinox next to the crazed destructive antics of HAZMAT. The former pair took turns trying to outdo each other in cawing, electronically processed screamswhile removing their clothes. Oddly enough, the two switched roles during the undressing, Mokinox with his fish costume got less interesting with his clothes off (revealing only some sort of fishy attachment to his phallus), where Glamorous Pat became more interesting, with his body paint (if those were tattoos, color me impressed) and sparkles. HAZMAT was one of two performances during the fest where I felt like I was in some real danger, dudes had a fucking chainsaw going on stage, where they were tearing through various objects that I could barely see.

The most anticipated, and in my opinion, two of the most fulfilling performances were those of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe: Dave Phillips and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. I'd seen Sudden Infant -the third Schimpfluch member- play on the Thursday prior to the festival, and wasn't so into it: covers of songs like Roxy Music's "In Every Dream home a Heartache" and Cabaret Voltaire's "Nag Nag Nag", via turntable loops, babydoll microphone with accompanying vocalist/cymbal smasher, Anne Stubbs.

Dave Phillips' was in every way, the best performance I saw during the festival. John Hegre of Jazzkammer did the sound, which accounts for the clarity and massive dynamic range (it went from quiet to LOUD). Phillips played alongside an unabashedly polemical video: footage of animals being slaughtered, tested upon, and abused, interspersed with short slogans attacking those who treat animals as a means, and bourgeois values. The sound came from a variety of sources, his amplified heartbeat, sounds from the throat/vocal chords, samples of insects, and electronics. Halfway into the performance Phillips walked into the audience and blew up balloons until they popped right in audience members' faces. There was an intensity of discipline and focus, a rigor which never again came up in the fest, as Giffoni wrote in an email to the Hanson_American board; "Dave doesn't fuck around." The seriousness, the intensity tempered with menace was a bracing contrast to the looseness and openness of the much of the other music in the festival, an antidote to the hippy vibe that was present in mercifully few of the acts. Fucking heartstopping stuff.

Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock (Rudolf Eb.er) was unfortunately unable to attend due to visa issues; his set was a video performance instead. Ed Howard has detailed the contents of the video nicely on IHM, so I'll just quote him:

"and oddly enough, possibly the most talked-about set of the whole fest was not really a set at all, but runzelstirn & gurgelstock's videotaped performance from japan, provided because rudolph eb.er had passport issues and couldn't actually make the fest. the video showed eb.er on stage with 3 young japanese women. the first 15 minutes or so consisted of an elaborately staged and slowly paced ritual in which eb.er gave each woman 3 different-colored drinks, washing the glasses out carefully between each round. what followed was another 20 minutes of the women vomiting copiously into tubs provided by the musician. the sound in the first half was some sampled screeching and chopped-up laughs, providing a deeply unsettling air of foreboding to the performance, and for the second half of the performance there was only the amplified sound of retching and of vomit hitting the plastic pans."

Ed goes on to mention how much he disliked the performance, I can only say that my opinion was the simple opposite: I loved it! I'd seen the Kurt Kren films of the Viennese Aktionists only a month before, and the film - titled Vomitplay (for 3 girls) - had interesting resonances with those, as well as to the entire Runzelstirn corpus. The only complaint was that the color contrast on the video could have been a little higher; I'd have liked to see more of the color detail in the pools of vomit. But that's just me.

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"Influence" wasn't just some far off cloud, discernable only through its effects. One of more amazing parts of No Fun was seeing the inspired playing amongst their inspirations. Whitehouse would have been the most obvious example of this; their take-no-prisoners, black-humored nihilism were the blueprint for any power electronics, but also because of the simplicity of their set-up: cheap synthesizer, voice and effects. This building of shitty music out of shitty materials, this use of barely anything to make some of the most blistering din was a clarion call towards anti-professionalism, towards a juvenilia unhindered by any musical form at all. Super-crude sexual rage, carnal violence turned first within, then without, nihilism from an inner source.

On the entirely opposed end of the noise-spectrum (at least ideologically), were The New Blockaders, of whose Richard Rupens appeared with Emil Beaulieau (RRRon Lessard) and Dominick Fernow. Where Whitehouse seemed to be more about the individual, the New Blockaders wrapped themselves in arching claims about politics, history, art, and institutions:

The obscene progression of regression shall be halted by us, The New Blockaders! Let us sever this Parasite called History, it has nothing to do with us! This is the future! This is now! Move over you museum relics! Get out of our world, you poisonous scum! Avaunt! Avaunt! Avaunt! The Church of The Absurd marches on! Anti-newspapers, anti-magazines, anti-books, anti-music, anti-art, anti-poetry, anti-films, anti-clubs, anti-communications! We will make anti-statements about anything and everything. We will make a point of being pointless. ( The New Blockaders Manifesto, 1982)

The sound on those TNB records is some of the most ferocious noise I've ever heard, it's not often that I put them on.

Right between the two sits Fernow who performed under his solo project (Prurient), Macronympha, and the Nihilist Assault Group. His Prurient set was like the others I'd seen, 2 mics pointed at a stack of amplifiers, minimal processing, spasming, short vocal outbursts, feedback. The set couldn't have lasted more the 5 minutes, but it was plenty intense.

Macronympha was one of the last minute replacements for Whitehouse on the 2nd night Macronympha has been mainly Joe Roemer's noise project for the last few decades. He holds a special place in my heart for an "essential noise" primer he wrote for the Relapse Records magazine sometime in the mid 90's. A record store clerk in North Carolina gave me a copy when I was about 15, and it served as a buying guide for years. Aside from the palpable tension while Fernow was setting up (the lineup was he, Roemer, and Fernow's girlfriend, decked in fetish-gear, standing at the front of the stage), the pleasure of the show was in it's garishness, total working-class idful caricature, Fernow banging and scraping on contact mic'd paint rollers, with a denim vest on and no shirt, Joe Roemer slamming his body against an amp feeding back, and then going to the front of the stage to lasciviously grind up against and lick Fernow's girlfriend, while rubbing some sort of amplifying, sound generating thing against her torso. It was a bizarre spectacle, at once, some sort of ritual of a son giving up his lover to his (musical) father, while raging at inanimate objects, and on the other hand, this fury of sexually charged violence, which played itself out in the audience (a huge pit erupted next to me, so while watching the show, I was watching to avoid the careening bodies.)

However, what I was most looking forward to was the Nihilist Assault Group. This would be the NAG's only performance, and it was amazing, three figures in suits and black masks with masking tape Xs over the faces, 2 of whom were behind a table, thrashing away at a table full of electronics, one sitting in front of them, legs crossed, calmly drinking a glass of red wine. There was something decidedly alien about the set; a friend commented that he thought it was even more intimidating than the explicitly violent acts of the festival.

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As far as personal preferences go, my partisanship towards experimental electronic music is likely well noted by readers herein. Solid, abstract electronics, with some measure of control, and a minimum of dogma/posturing: music that moves you like snow caught in eddies around windows. Something with a drop less personality, not the self-in-the-face-of-the-cosmos psych of Double Leopards, but more formalist. This was, in my view one of the hidden pleasures of No Fun, or at least the part that's been least commented on.

The two standouts in this field were Damion Romero and Buzzardstain & Dogjaw (Nate Young of Wolf Eyes and Twig Harper of Nautical Almanac). The latter was a great surprise to me, having seen Nautical Almanac a few times, I'm always ready for a little bit of shtick: some wackiness, some comedy, something extra-musical. But this wasn't the case at all; the set was just really solid electronics, Twig playing what seemed to be hand-lathe cut records, and other devices, while Nate Young was playing the hand-made, minimal electronics that brings the Wolf Eyes sound together. Really solid and focused, you could tell that the two were listening to each other, and really building something together.

Damion Romero is best known as Speculum Fight, his long running electronics project. His work under his own name is more minimal than the work he did as Speculum Fight, in ways, it's more conceptual sound-art, much more an exploration of the limits of a few electronic constructions. His actual performing during his set was limited mostly to slight adjustments on a few knobs of some devices he'd built (internal feedback controllers?), but the resultant sound was massive. Huge waves of low-end sound, cascading across each other throughout the space. It was simple, but incredibly effective, akin in many ways to a Phill Niblock piece.

Also impressive were Kites, Green Mist/Ykeo/Withdrawl Method (all tapes and feedback) and Jazzkammer. This sort of thing is never easy to describe (or in some cases, to remember), but I recall good feelings consistently through all of these acts. Especially notable was Dan Mithra's fine manipulation of busted-up walkmans (with a can of PBR!) and Jazzkammer's Lasse Marhaug rattling around a mic'd contraption of wires & stuff, rocking out the false endings with a big death metal sample.

The Quartet of Mike Shiflet, Peter Kolovos, Spencer Yeh and Chris Corsano was an interesting case. One had the feeling that if Corsano wasn't there, the trio of musicians would have produced a thick exploration of textures and drones. However, as Corsano is decidedly a free-jazz drummer, that's what the set turned into, loud, raucous improv. The energy level was like something you'd see during a set at the Vision Festival, it really was Fire Music played by a bunch of guys on electronics and drums. Not the feeling you'd expect amongst so much.....noise, but it great fun no less.

I did not see Hecker's set during No Fun, but I did see him play a solo set, along with a duo in collaboration with Yasuano Tone at Experimental Intermedia, the Thursday after the festival. Dave Phillips described Hecker's set at No Fun as "very mean spirited", so perhaps the two were very different, but gauging from his set as XI, he must be one of the more creative sound-designers in the laptop field. I can't say I've heard anyone do laptop squiggles (sorry, can't think of a better word) like he does; and what he lacks in moderation, he compensates for in terms of sheer novelty of sounds. It was very much in the vein of his Sun Pandemonium disc. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize anyone from No Fun at the XI set, and as Hecker is not the easiest man to talk to, we'll have to leave the concordance of the two sets a mystery.

I also did not stay through the Lasse Marhaug/Pita set, but I've been told that it was ridiculously loud. Jon Abbey telling me that he almost put earplugs in during that set is a sign of something just short of being inside a jet engine. I wish I'd stayed, but I did need to be coherent for work on Monday.

Soooooooo. Yeah, what's more to say? I'm still full of good feelings after the festival, it was an amazing time. Here's to more in the future!

~ Nirav Soni

Posted by nirav on March 29, 2005 9:47 AM