It all started with a hangover. Three hours of sleep and three hours of sitting in the shower, then behind the wheel of our Club Wagon 150 Chateau. The drive went quickly, with a one stop off at Stuckey's gas and a second at Whataburger for breakfast and cartoon porn.
We arrived at New Orleans and took a picture at an abandoned castle-house for the archives, then made our way around the industrial canal to find our venue, a rustic french-colonial punk mansion with clanging static emanating from surrounding alleys. We parked a block away and traipsed back, watching the top of a cruise liner meander past the neighborhood and a group of high-class, armor-clad crusties unloading from a Hyundai, finally entering the backyard of 609 Lesseps St. There we were greeted by a Michael Jackson impersonator going through the motions of Thriller on the main (...actually, the only...) stage.
Further into the miasma there were two more stages on opposite sides of the yard, one being the famed Ray Bong's “No Respect Zone” and the other being shared buy a grizzled guitar maniac and a wall of modular synths / combo amps blasting a haphazard homage to Atari Teenage Riot; complementary hand pipe huffing provided by the stewardess. We wrestled with the confusing noise while trying to locate the sign-up list. When we finally found someone who had some bearing on what was happening we were informed that all the slots had been filled... so we cracked into our beer from the night before and settled into the atmosphere of intoxicated self-love / destruction.
It took an hour of contemplation (slow-sippin' and rippin' through the crowd) and we settled on unloading our gear into the yard, adjacent to the noise-dance collage-ers. Mike and I were sharing amplifiers so we would play back to back, and we agreed that I should be the first to play... so I cracked open another tallboy and drew forth my bass (because I didn't want to write my own review I asked Mike to provide the next paragraph).
"The sun made it's mark, and my rig was set. “It's time to swing the bat”... That phrase echoed in my mind as I throttled my Ric, letting loose a jarring rhythm of sub bass. A tone set forth that can only be described as swampification. I wanted to see the ground bleed. Hoisting my rock maple high, I set in motion the feed back. Glorious low-end filled the ambiance. This rig is my woman, this bass is my phallus; I am Zeus, God of Lighting and Swan-Fucking. I am the Demon. By the time I had finished, I had dug my own grave with the heaviness of the doom.
"
After my mess was finished I rushed to pack up my things while Mike, in his aviator sunglasses, took my place in the dirt. He set up a table and chair which we'd found derelict in the yard and began setting up his equipment on them; a bottle of alcohol, antibacterial soap, a jar of black ink, paper towels and other sundries. He then unveiled his arsenal, a tattoo gun strapped with two contact mic's and a pedalboard loaded mostly with distortion pedals. After a few minutes of sanitizing he chugged a bottle of coke, stepped on his Big Muff, and fired up his gun.
The physical presence was unignorable, people from all sides of the festival turned in confusion to see a man hunched over clutching his calf with an unbearable furnace of sound emanating from behind him. He worked diligently, only stopping occasionally to step on another pedal. The noise was unyielding. The noise-dance group which was still performing next to him cast dour glances for having been drowned out by his impenetrable wall.
It ended after only 16 minutes, but it genuinely felt like a lifetime. He never removed his sunglasses.
Once I was able to blink away the glazing my eyes that had developed from Mike's set, I turned around to see the tail-end of the performance by Once Dead Flesh, a duo from Austin, Tx. Of the two people onstage, the one in red with a head full of dreads who seemed to be fellating a microphone while simultaneously fucking a combo amp in a low crouch. The other, a bearded punk reminiscent of an anarcho ZZ Top cover band, was hunched over a mixer and a mess of pedals, focused on garnering some esoteric white-noise perfection. What we saw of their set was particularly impressive.
The rest of the day went on as it had before, constant noise and a continually more engrossing crowd. One I found worth noting included a duo of a mad scientist clad in a white lab coat complemented by a robot in full chrome getup, invoking noise by jerking her body.
Another would be the group called Noisician Coalition, a marching band shrouded in red and black, utilizing megaphones and handmade trash can based instruments.
As the sun made its way down Architeuthis Dux played one of the most impressive sets of the day. Another two piece from Austin, their sounds were as aggressive as you'd expect from a noise outfit but... the performance was terrifying. Both members of the band kneeled over their equipment, twirling knobs and pressing switches calmly, and then the more dynamic of the duo would launch himself into the air to impose violence unto the crowd. At one point he decimated a microphone, and an instant later he threw himself off of the stage and into an onlooker (the dreaklocked ampfucker from before), grabbing him in a chokehold and throwing him to the dirt floor. He then would return to his pedals on the stage and the man with dreads came back and relight his cigarette. Their whole set was nerve-wracking, an anxious ordeal, and probably the most powerful performance to take place that night.
(I really wish I could have gotten a picture of the violence, but it all happened too fast)
Afterward the festival eased toward closing. The dance kids finally packed up and the No Respect Zone begrudgingly halted. The few remaining people left gathered around the main stage to watch the few remaining performers, the last of which being Ipp (Fountainpen).
The length of the day had worn on everyone, both performers and audience members, and by the beginning of Ipp's set there was a profound drought in the population; but toward the center of his performance he found his stride and kept pace. Blending his guitar with an answering machine, he interwove his power chord melody with a monologue of an anonymous woman lamenting the mental state of her mother whom she'd had committed to a mental home- all culminating with an eventual shroud of white noise centered on a D-chord.
After Ipp had resolved himself, we packed up and shipped out; stopping once at a Waffle House for food (our waitress was unfazed when Mike lifted his leg to show off his new tattoo). Once again, broken only by naps on the mattress we had brought with us, we arrived home exhausted- but in our minds triumphant.
The noise shall never stop, and in our hearts it never will.
On behalf of C'NC I would like to thank Michael Patrick Welsh and the noise community of New Orleans for showing us one of the loudest, exceedingly warm-welcoming, and definitely the most interesting of times we've had as artists and human beings. Oh, and thanks to Chauncey for helping me realize that goats can be pretty cute.
