Sonic Circuits artists

 

Thanks for the comprehensive comments and definite opinions. As one who helped organize the fest, run some shows and played, it's satisfying to see well-considered feedback, observations and criticism.  Me and the LED headlamp appreciate the music purchase, hope it offers some sounds you'll return to as the mood strikes. Cheers, PatG

It was nice meeting you too, Raff.

I am still stunned by the quality of these two shows, I wouldn't even have known how to speak about them - you did it well.

I didn't feel the need to bring a camera to take pictures, but here are some words:

I went to see Ashley Paul and Eli Keszler, but their car broke down in NY so they didn't make it, which was a bummer. I overslept and came in late to walk in on some pretty good free improv by Colla Parte, which was a trio formed just for the festival. I wasn't too impressed with Corridors (dull expansive ambient music), Fuse Ensemble (chamber avant with pretensions of John Cage), and Nobu Stowe (piano/drums free jazz with a slightly irritating guitarist and a laptop guy was playing so loud at times I couldn't hear the piano), and I probably would have liked Astma but it was too loud for me and I left. Which, in hindsight is incredibly ironic since I sat through Fennesz. After that it was almost 8pm and I left because I had class the next day, so I missed a significant number of musicians both before and after I was there. Although I didn't end up doing any work or going to bed at a reasonable time so I might as well have stayed. The most interesting thing was when Nobu Stowe's guest electronics guy was warming up and he play some meowing and Nobu said "No cat sounds!" then a little bit later he played some barking and Nobu said "No dog sounds!" and the electronics guy said "You know, complaining about it is the most sure way that it's going to be in the set..." But it wasn't so I guess he was joking. Also, before Corridors I was trying to read some guy's shirt because the band logo was black metal gibberish and he said "What the f**k are you looking at!" and then started laughing. I should have told him that black metal sucks but I didn't really care. There was an old guy wearing a Progday 2009 shirt and I wanted to ask him he posted here but I didn't.

The room was really small, there couldn't have been more than 60-75 people there, and there were no chairs. However, the front guy was cool, and he let me in even though I had forgotten my ticket because he remembered me from Sunday. Opening was Low End String Quartet, who played sort of a mix of chamber rock and post-rock without drums, but the most interesting thing about them was that their cellist is a woman who looks like she's 75. They played a new song which had a really goofy section where they stopped, played a Bach prelude for 3 minutes with no modification (the guitarist who is also the leader of the band didn't even play then, I think he couldn't handle it) and then kept going with the rest of the song. I bought the CD anyway because I remembered liking the studio version online more and I felt like supporting them as a local avant band. Then after a break was Janel and Anthony playing a piece by Arturas Bumsteinas, which was some sort of ambient Fennesz-lite thing I found completely uninteresting in every way. Arturas played it with them, contributing some very amateur sounding piano and synths and annoying Moonchild-esque bell ringing. The guitarist was dressed like a hipster and kept playing the same riff over and over. The cellist was an attractive girl wearing fishnet stockings and a red dress, so she gets a pass. ;-) After about 10 minutes, every time the music got soft I was hoping it was going to trail off and end. This was not good when the piece was 50 minutes long and I was sitting on a hardwood floor. But everybody I talked to seemed to like it, I guess I'm just not enlightened enough, although I thought the audience looked bored, but maybe they were just in a trance state? After that Fennesz played, although only for around 35 minutes, but that was OK because it was absolutely the loudest thing I've ever heard. It was good, he was playing much more aggressively than the samples from Endless Summer, Black Sea, and Venice you can hear on Youtube, which is what I was hoping him to do because I'm not into ambient music. Fortunately, a woman behind me gave me some foam earplugs when she saw me cave and cover my ears, but my ears are shaped stupidly and I spent about half the set trying to get them in properly, so I really can't tell you much more about what he actually played. I tried occasionally to listen without the earplugs but there was so much sound I couldn't even process it. Even with my attempts at protection, I was so sensitive to sound afterwards that it temporarily slayed my tinnitus, and my ears slightly ached for 2 days.

It started half an hour late because they blew a fuse during soundcheck, which made me lol and infuriated the blind guy I was talking to because he had to get up for work the next day at 6am. Despite Merzbow's fearsome reputation, this was a fairly reasonable volume, I only felt I should use earplugs a few times. I heard them talking about the volume behind the merch booth, I think they told the sound guy to tone it down a bit after Fennesz. They opened with two local noise musicians, TL0741 and Blue Sausage Infant. Both were more on the quiet, hypnotic side of noise. TL0741 played in total darkness with only a small head lamp to see what he was doing, and Blue Sausage Infant played with a large screen of Tool-esque (but much tamer) disturbingly manipulated stock footage/pictures. I thought the video was kind of annoying because it was extremely repetitive since it was attempting to simulate a drug trip (in the beginning a female voice thanked us for participating in the test--the compound had already been administered through the seat fabric), but I bought both their albums to support local noise. Merzbow and Pinhas are easier to describe because it pretty much sounded like this. I've only recently gotten into noise, so while I've enjoyed some Merzbow I've heard, I found an hour of it all at once after the previous two acts kind of exhausting. Visually, it wasn't that exciting either, since as a laptop musician Merzbow just looked like he had an incredible amount of email to check, so much that he required two laptops to see it all, and Pinhas was fiddling more with his effects/loops box than playing the guitar. I think Merzbow got a new Mac, though, one had a different Meat is Murder sticker than the one I've seen on the internet, and the other didn't have a sticker at all. I said hi to him after the show, I was going to ask him what software he used but he really clearly did not want to talk to me so I didn't. I guess after 30 years of noise you just don't give a f**k anymore. The other funny thing was that Pinhas brough 19 CDs and 5 vinyls, which is about his whole discography solo and with Heldon, and Merzbow didn't bring anything, when he has hundreds of albums. I was hoping to get some of his albums at a good price, but oh well, I just got the Merzbow/Pinhas CD from 2008 and Pinhas' new CD from this year which has Merzbow and others on it. I'm probably going to add them to PA once I figure out how to format it.

If you didn't read all that, my tl;dr for this is that all these shows are a reminder what a narrow demographic sample we get as internet losers. The audience was solidly 30-40% female for every show, with at least half of the whole audience being over 35. There were even a few women with fully grey hair at Merzbow, which blew my mind. And there was a 10-12 year old boy sitting in the front row with me at Fennesz, he seemed to enjoy it. Now, almost all of the women there appeared to be there with a man, so I don't know how many of them actually wanted to be there (one middle-aged woman at Fairfax was knitting the entire time), but that can also be explained by fewer women being anti-social loons. I don't understand why you would take your SO to an event you know she is not going to like, unless it's as revenge for her dragging you to a concert you didn't want to go to. I would never go to a concert I would hate and I would never take someone to a concert she would hate, I can't see how your concert would not be more enjoyable without the other person silently fuming, but maybe I'm missing something in the finer points of human relationships...

 

All that sounds excellent. And your Vander pic makes me jealous.  And Kobaïa?!!? Wow, Of all the songs I expected them to play, this wasn't one of them. Can't wait to see them tomorrow!