Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.

Photos courtesy of Richard Ramirez

Who? Richard Ramirez is one of Houston's finest noise artists under the monikers of Black Leather Jesus https://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-Leather-Jesus/117719674921150, Werewolf Jerusalem, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, and many more. His work is dark, terrifying, and full of the sort of sounds that you'd expect to emanate from beyond the doors of Hell itself. He got started in the late '80s after listening to experimental music broadcasts on KPFT and KTRU, then haunting Sound Exchange and Vinal Edge for albums by Merzbow, The Haters, Nurse With Wound, and the like.

Ramirez just returned from a tour that took him all up the West Coast of the United States and Canada, and is planning for a European jaunt next year. In addition, he has an upcoming collaboration with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer scheduled for a vinyl release soon, as well as works with Smegma, Nihilist Assault Group, and Andrew Liles.

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Courtesy of Nameless Sound

Tom Carter with Charalambides in 2003

Rewind: Charalambides Guitarist Tom Carter On the Mend

Some local musicians are rallying to help out one of their own this weekend, and it appears that some good, weird tunes will be a happy side effect for the rest of us.

Tom Carter, guitarist for long-running H-town expatriate avant-gardists Charalambides, fell seriously ill while on tour in Germany earlier this summer, and his recovery has been difficult. A pneumonia-like infection turned septic and spread to the musician's heart, prompting doctors to place him in a drug-induced coma.

Carter ultimately spent 40 days in intensive care in Berlin, and the long-term cardiac complications that resulted remain rather grave. I caught up with him via email this week for an update on his health:

"After the hospital, I entered a three-week physical therapy program to regain enough physical strength to fly back to New York City, which is where I am now," Carter says. "I am much stronger than I was when I entered therapy, but my heart is still far from fully functional. Thus, my abilities to travel, work and perform basic household tasks are limited."

Carter lost his job due to the long hospital stay, and although he has health insurance, it's still unclear how much of his hospital bills it will cover. Luckily, Carter has a lot of friends, and many are springing into action to help.

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Rosie Flores, known these days affectionately by many as the Rockabilly Filly, has had several careers: Punk rocker, cowpunk alt-country badass, potential country star, rock and roller, and rockabilly queen. Born in San Antonio, she spent her teen years in San Diego before striking out to find a career as a performer, writer, and guitar player.

Over the last four decades, the Bloodshot recording artist has released 14 albums and is set to release her fifteenth, Working Girl's Guitar, in the next few months. As a producer, she has just finished an album on legendary early rock and roll singer Janis Martin, known as "The Female Elvis."

Flores' trio will be rocking the Continental Club Friday night. Rocks Off caught up with her at her home in Austin.

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photo courtesy of Sean Horrigan

The Celebrity DJ" Fridays at Leon's Lounge take a turn from the secular to the sacred tonight when Father Sean Horrigan, pastor at Christ the Redeemer Church, commands the turntables.

Horrigan, whom we ran into last Saturday night at the Wagoneers show at McGonigel's Mucky Duck, was the music editor at the Daily Cougar at University of Houston during his Eighties college years and says his set will be primarily an '80s revue.

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Several weeks into June, there's no escaping summer: the sweltering season's here in all its flickering-horizon, bathed-in-sweat glory -- filthy, glaring, suffocating. Which makes this the perfect time for psychopathic burr-stuck noise blurts like Roman Showers' Show Me Your Stomach Contents.

The joke, of course, isn't so much that Roman Showers are ordering listeners to puke on command so that they can examine our collective evening repast; it's more that they'd like to examine that steak tartar as we're actually digesting it.

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[Ed. Note: Rocks Off would like to thank Ray Cummings for abusing our eardrums with all this delicious noise these past few months. He has decided to move on to other things and we wish him well.]

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Merzbow & Richard Ramirez, "Nails as an Enema, Pt. 2"

Back in late 1994, the respective kings of Japanese and Houston noise met in unholy collaborative congress; The Science of Dissecting Society (Praxis Dr. Bearmann) was the outcome. Unlike a lot of noise-world team-ups - and there have been a lot of them; too many, really - Society doesn't shortchange the listener by diluting what's unique about each performer: simply, Merzbow remixes Ramirez's bolts of raw, poisoned silk, and the result sounds exactly like what one would expect, in the best possible sense.

You would expect pulsating torrents of scabbed-over fury, wouldn't you? With buried screams? And it wouldn't come as a surprise that ol' Merz, like, superimposed a bunch of tracks over a bunch of different tracks, and that listening to the two halves of this LP is a lot like being whooshed and propelled through a black hole for almost 40 minutes... would it? Given how prolific these two were and continue to be, it's easy to overlook their many and sundry artifacts. Don't you dare sleep on this one.

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Here are Friday Night Noise's favorite ten 00s noise albums, in no particular order. Was this an easy list to make? Fuck no.

1. Various Artists, Women Take Back The Noise (UBUIBI) Roughly 10,000 noise compilations were issued in the 00s, but how many came with a noise-making device? How many came packaged in a clear plastic case (pink, blue, purple, or orange) with b&w bio cards? How many were wide-ranging, three-disc sets of woman-generated subterranian internationalized awesomeness?

2. Lightning Bolt, Wonderful Rainbow (Load)

A strident statement of noise-rock purpose as enraged and ear-damaging as it is coherent - and the reason that Lightning Bolt are the only noise band your square friends have heard of aside from maybe Wolf Eyes.

3. The Dead C., Future Artists (Ba Da Bing)

For the 1,500th time, hey're not a fucking noise band, you whine. But FNN would argue that these uncomproming new Zealand experimentalists switched sides for this album, forgoing Michael Morley's slovenly vocals to concentrate on unusually cryptic, extended-play sonics capable of transporting listeners to nightmare countries that can't be found on existing maps.

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Megafauna

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Not counting today, there are roughly 13 or 14 shopping days left until Christmas. In that spirit, this week's Friday Night Noise offers a rundown of the best ten noise recordings issued (or re-issued) in 2009 so that you, dear reader, can hook friends, family and despised co-workers up with the latest, finest brain-rot currently available on the underground market. Got your credit card handy? Yeah? Then let's roll:

1. Jason Crumer, Walk With Me (Misanthropic Agenda)

Meticulously hypnotic, orchestral noise blooms that eliminate the need for laxatives.

2. Acidic Jews, Clean Rigs (self-released)

Uglified shards of fused, blackended glass that are (for the most part) barely recognizable as music. We're as stymied about how Emmy Collins created these arsenic-laced tracks as you are.

3. Aaron Dilloway, Chain Shot (Hanson)

A relentlessly looping-cum-loping - for real, this tour-de-furnace sucker seems to go on for hours, in the best possible sense of that phrase - swirl of clashing/crashing horns, sheet metal, and incidental industrial sounds that may make you wish you toiled in a warehouse or a factory instead of a soulless gray cubicle farm.

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Richard Ramirez, "Removal Off...(Live)"

​Now this is the sort of noise that plasters a big dumb 'ol smile on Friday Night Noise's normally dour mug. How can you hate this sort of stuff, this all-over-the-place, sliding-around-in-oil roar where the crud flies here and there with absolutely no strategy whatsoever, where a piercing bit of feedback could theoretically turn out to be a perverted scream, but maybe it isn't? Where the artist's aim seems to be to super-soak you with as much distorted video-game scree as he or she can muster, psychotically, preferably as loud and looped as possible.

In this case, we're vividly reminded of Carlos Giffoni's Welcome Home. This is dangerous noise, you know? Reality-eclipsing noise. Given that this track - from 2002's Past Buildings That Have Fallen (Spatter) - was recorded live, the mind boggles at what the experience of hearing this in a crowd at deafening volume must have been like.

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Werewolf Jerusalem "Cruel Kidnapping, Part I"

​Friday Night Noise wonders: is Mom to blame for our present-day fascination with/lust for noise musics? As a boy, Mom used hydrogen peroxide solution to loosen the wax in FNN's oft-clogged ear canals, and anybody who's been through that - sitting at a table, head on a folded towel, waiting patiently while this over-the-counter drug-store staple is carefully poured into the ear - is familiar with the seemingly infinite crackling, hissing sound the solution makes (as though a trillion wet, tiny explosions are happening just within earshot), with the chemical hint of warmth, with the slightly noxious odor that lasts all day, with the experience of having whatever's happening on an ambient level blotted out for a short period of time.

It takes some getting used to, but ultimately a sore neck and a tingly ear are a small price to pay for the ability to hear better. Anyway, that's almost exactly what this Werewolf Jerusalem track sounds like, only without the whistling whine of Mom's tea kettle or the damning roar of her vacuum cleaner in the background. Thanks, Richard Ramirez! Who says you can't relive your childhood?

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