Houston Music Blog

[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.

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?

​There's no nice way to say this, so Friday Night Noise will just say it: MySpace is not enough, and if you are at all serious about making music and serious about building an audience of fans/listeners (be it 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 or 5 million) - and by "you," FNN doesn't just mean noisers, we means rapper, rockers, twee-pop imps, dulcimer soloists, 17th-wave punk upstarts, vegan/freegan hardcore nihilists, beardo folkies, classically-trained cellists, scatters, R&B hopefuls, beatboxers and everybody else besides - you've gotta think bigger than MySpace. Launching a MySpace page to rep yourself, your scene or your set should represent a mere component of a larger online promotional strategy - it shouldn't be that strategy's alpha and omega.

Look, FNN totally gets why musicians love MySpace. It's free. (Or "free.") To a degree, you can customize your page. It allows you to keep up with friends and fellow travellers, and you can plug in your upcoming tour dates, stream MP3s and YouTube clips, accrue admirers and allow random strangers to relentlessly plug their wares/shows in the comments. (Which, admittedly, has led yours truly to some significant discoveries.)

Status as Rupert Murdoch's property aside, it's a pretty awesome tool - FNN will give it that.

This week, Friday Night Noise begins an ongoing effort to review a track by each and every one of H-town noise gangster Richard Ramirez's solo or group projects. No, really. Does FNN claim to be a Ramirez authority? Not at all; FNN would need an entire lifetime to track down, ingest, and get familiar with everything this prolific malcontent has had a hand in. So consider this more of a survey course series.

Black Leather Jesus "13/13"

​Two thirteens? That must mean twice the usual measure of bad luck. "13/13" is the Black Leather Jesus half of a 1994 split titled Sex Acts on a Child in a Full Body Cast (Deadline), and it's a crispy, crawly doozy: 21 uncoiling minutes of hissing, murky static dosed with what sound like severely distressed vocals and just-short-of-unrecognizable movie dialogue. This track isn't so much a destination as it is a furious, undulating journey through a psychic minefield where the mines shout shortwave-fractured gibberish at you before whistling like industrial fireworks, blowing you to pieces, reconstituting themselves, and continuing on with the grim and grisly task of killing as many people as possible.

One of the distinct pleasures here is the unyielding, free-for-all scree, which sometimes hints at hall-of-mirrors funhouse anti-melody but generally is just content to slink, contort, confront, and menace at any given moment. The louder you crank "13/13," the scarier it is, but there are harsher noise realms out there.

Ramirez appears to be one of the constants in this particular project, which dates back to the first Bush administration and continues to the present day.

​In civilian life, Randa Golub styles hair, Nathan Golub works as a surgical technologist, Matt Coffey toils as an IT manager and the mysterious Alex C. isn't "into paying taxes." As Ascites, these four Austinnites like to fricassée eardrums with rending, no-holds-barred noise blasts.

If the quartet's first, noxious act - self-released debut CD-R Incisional Drainage, which comes packaged with the equally corrosive C-6 cassette - was a formidable slab of plutonium, new, synapse-fusing cassette Fluid Excess (Fonofobi Tapes) indicates Ascites has a lot more to offer. And guess what? You can buy Excess from the band - who kindly took some time to answer questions by email - when they rock Super Happy Fun Land this evening.

Rocks Off: Handling the packaging for Incisional Drainage - the biohazard bag, the CD spray-painted orange, the violet see-through cassette - makes me wonder: should I find a decontamination shower or have someone check me with a Geiger meter?

​How I Quit Crack: "PREGNANCY SCARE 2008":

So for part of this week, FNN is home alone on staycation, which means only one thing: I can finally spend a few minutes checking out noise-rock YouTube videos. Namely, Houston's How I Quit Crack, a name that keeps popping up in the emails FNN exchanges with other H-town noise fixtures; apparently, everybody loves hitting this particular pipe. My guess is that HIQC (not sure of her name) operates as a strictly performance-only artist, because I can't find any traces of recordings for sale or even mp3s - it's YouTube vids or bust. Such is life, I guess.

"PREGNANCY SCARE 2008" offers blood-engorged she-stew - yeah, I said it again, put that in your Valet CD-case and shut it - fuzzy-navel vocal murmurings massaged and subsumed by synth washes that suggest kaleidoscopic, fish-eye lense acid-trips and college-dorm screensavers. Now, FNN has never popped a Quaalude. But let's say FNN found himself in a plush pink mansion full of fucsha beanbag furniture, lava lamps, and incense burners, and FNN was sleepy and slightly gone on Godiva chocolate liquor, and he happened to pop two Quaaludes and collapse into a beanbag, only to hallucinate himself immersed in a pink-tinted, strangely oceanic-yet-breathable world ala Abyss, full of friendly cartoon mermaids and crustaceans and seahorses singing FNN an aria? FNN would hope, if that happened, that said aria would be "PREGNANCY SCARE 2008." (In the YouTube comments, somebody refers to this as an "ethereal warble," which is probably more on-target than what I just wrote.) Anyway, why was HIQC scared of pregnancy? She already had, in this song, one dynamite lullaby in the can! Why there isn't a How I Quit Crack album available for sale already I don't understand, like, at all.

​In The Land Of Archers "I Am The Monster That Walks On All Fours": Friday Night Noise is not even gonna try to decipher this Houston crew's web site - which suggests that they're still a going thing despite being entrenched in different projects - because we're way more interested in talking about the unhinged lunatic noise they're capable of making. (Hint: this is a prime opportunity for clued-in readers to get us - and everyone else - up to speed in the comments.)

"I Am The Monster That Walks On All Fours," sounds, basically, like a softened splice-edit of a recording of someone taking a bandsaw to a big-screen television playing videotape of demon-possessed whackjobs wilding out on shrooms at a sinister campsite, with demented guitar feedback piped in for good measure. Got all that?

The crime, here, is that "Monster" is only three fucking minutes long, and we're not ashamed to say that we could happily and contentedly do with a full hour of this kinda misanthropic crud, which is like Coldplay for psych-ward patients or Wire Orchestra gone completely haywire.

Ascites Update!

​Last week FNN took on "Soft Adult Contemporary" from Ascites' Incisional Drainage album, all the while bemoaning a dearth of background and label information. Well, turns out that Ascites read the post; members Nathan Golub and Matt Coffey reached out to FNN via email, filling in some blanks. So here's some stuff you should know about Ascites:

• They're from Dallas! Besides Golub and Coffey, the members are Alex C. and Randa Golub, who is Nathan's wife.

• They're playing Super Happy Fun Land October 9 with Rosemary Malign, Last Rape, Zahava, Murex, and other ne'erdowells. So clear your schedule, mark your calendars, and start Googling Napalm recipes.

• They aren't signed to a label just yet, though they're working on that now. If you wanna buy their albums, write to Nathan at txnoiz@gmail.com.

• They know people in Sweden. Do you?

​Tchrite, "Casahdt": Houston duo Tchrite - don't ask FNN how to pronounce that - are an experimentalist train wreck. They sew samples (No Doubt's "Don't Speak," the sorta public-access sound scraps that The Books go gaga over) into woozy patches of static tone. They puree and smush and smash samples together. They chop breakbeats into bits. They go in for disorienting-yet-forgettable laptop electronic wave modulations that aren't quite "techno" but aren't totally IDM, either - even if a lot of their unsexy song titles would give Autechre wood. All of which to say is that listening to the Tchrite albums FNN could find online (for free!) - Inner Sanctum Mysteries and Echoe Mae - is never, ever boring.

FNN nominates "Casahdt" as a standout for several reasons: it's not excessively schizo, it's not long and it's noiser than every other Tchrite out there. It's 29 seconds of pulse-pounding, take-no-shit ecstasy: an out-of-control algorithm beating the tar outta smooth, air-traffic controller chatter with manic, mescaline-drenched drums, wipe-swipe synth effects, and the unmistakable tonal whine of a 747 rising slowly into the sky.

Dear cherished FNN party people,

Is there a Houston-area noise act that we haven't written about that you go apeshit over? Are you a Houston-area noise artist who would like to featured here? Then we really, really need you to email FNN links to your non-MySpace/Facebook Web site where we can sample your wares without pesky firewall interference. Or just send MP3s! (Live MP3s even - the rawer, the better.) Thanks.

Love,

FNN

​Pechuga, Hovering Sparks (Track 5)": These days, Houston's Carlos Pozo operates the Pitchphase label and performs as half of Endless Blinding Sunshine; until a few years ago, he unleashed considered, roving photo-scanner noise under the Pechuga name. The fifth track from Hovering Sparks - which, sadly, is out of print - quietly shifts in and out of phase, its micro-level malevolence throbbing so consistenly and balefully that it's easy to lose track of if an outside-world distraction arrives.

Remember Issac Asimov's various "Multivac" stories, about a humongoid underground artificial intelligence contructed by people in the future to govern humanity? When FNN listens to this, we imagine ourselves lost in Multivac's gleaming corridors, tripping out on the hum of millions of computer servers working overtime. But we're weird like that.

​Satin Hooks "Trinity School Road": Houston's Satin Hooks are a noise-punk band in the same sense that Liar-era Jesus Lizard and Incesticide/Bleach-era Nirvana once were: torture-slurred, aggrevied vocals, gunk-gummed stop-and-start guitars that wanna beat you bloody while sneaking an earworm melody in under all the crunchy grit.

The whole thing's over in just under three minutes, but leaves a lasting impression, from David Gomez's laser-focused, yet somehow imprecise,m drum fills to Lucas Gorman's inky bass rumble to Kerry Melonson's relentless, steel-cable axe slinging - dig that shredtastic solo showcase about two minutes in. Whew! Can somebody get these dudes a 7-inch in the Sub Pop Single of the Month Club, already?

 B L A C K I E, "Pink and White Ice Cream Trucks": Noise-rap? Sure, why not? Acid-rap, electronic-rap, and rock-rap are all pretty well-established - if not equally, universally respected - so there's no reason MCs shouldn't be dropping magma-hot 16s into distortion vortexes and bottle-rocketing the results out into the public sphere.

Enter Houston's own multi-HPMA nominee B L A C K I E, a twentysomething who flouts a fierce, meter-disdaining flow and a name that, given its racial self-identification and unusual spacing, grabs one's attention immediately. While tracks like "Let It Ride" are fairly conventional - bristling, clear-as-crystal vocals, a stark, horrorcore synth motif that could double as a ringtone, artificially militaristic beats - "Pink and White Ice Cream Trucks" is a hot mess.

Earn, "She Could Only Remember"

Snaggled-drone unit Earn is a solo project of Houston's Matthew Sullivan, who also records under the name Privy Seals and has his paws in a slew of outfits, including Deep Jew and Vague Apology. As Earn, he's all up on the "disturbing ambient with interruptions" tip, presenting a rougher take on what fellow H-town noiser Swanshit has to offer. Debut EP Down The Well (Monorail Trespassing) scans as a melange of Animal Hospital's orchestral drift, any number of Merck Records artists, and the blurry-sunspot organ blare endemic to James Ferraro (of Skaters infamy) and Ducktails.

"She Could Only Remember" was FNN's personal fave from Well, probably because it just struck us as really grimy: bloodshot, machine-tooled scrapes looped unevenly, shortwave-y crackle hissing through cracks, chopped-up blare - just a profoundly uncomfortable, trapped-in-a-sewer-pipe-while-life-rolls-merrily-along-above vibe happening, here. Listening to this while fighting off a hangover might prove fatal.

Endless Blinding Sunshine, "VUout02": Like every other noise act in the universe, Houston's Endless Blinding Sunshine has a MySpace page, but they also have this admittedly minimalist site, which made it possible for FNN to get a handle on the sun-flecked instrumental dross-floss Steve Matis and Carlos Pozo generate. Google them an the bit of MySpace info one can glean (without visiting the site) identifies EBS as being "primarily a live performance outfit." So it's possible that concert-going is the only way to experience these guys.

"VUout02" is a thing of churning beauty, all ruminative, thermal-updraft drones that expand and contract, beckoning- self-cannibalizing geysers of distorted elegance. In the path of these soothing, radiating sound waves - this guitar/effects pedal meditative zen - one feels almost immortal, blessed, validated by proxy. FNN is reminded of The Yellow Swans or Mouthus at their calmest and most contemplative. Endless Blinding Sunshine are more than worth whatever price you have to pay; as it happens, they're playing Super Happy Fun Land's Dead Audio Music Fest next Saturday. You'd better be there. Resistance is futile.

Indian Jewelry, "Seasonal Economy"

At its gnarliest, Houston's Indian Jewelry reminds Friday Night Noise of that brief period a few years back where James Toth was transitioning away from being part of being the "Wooden Wand" part of the "Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice" equation, towards the "serious, for-real singer-songwriter" dimension he now occupies. We're thinking of Harem of the Sundrum (Soft Abuse) specifically - a clutch of distorted noise-folk dispatches from an exodus in the desert, or so it sounded.

Toth still sounded like a unorthodix, peyote-popping preacher, but while on his own introduced a welcome structure to his songwriting, which set it apart from the general WW&VV aesthetic of getting ripped, jamming aimlessly for hours, then editing the results into oodles of super-limited edition ephemera.

Anyway, Indian Jewelry are on a similar journey, except that their shit's either really burlap rough or really lo-fi spacious.

Caddywhompus, "Fun Times at Whiskey Bay": If nothing else, this Houston/New Orleans noise-pop unit is a prime contender/offender for an international "worst name imaginable" contest. Singer/percussionist Sean Hart and singer/guitarist/keyboard player Chris Rehm are certainly more plugged-in than the vast majority of noise-related enterprises, updating their blog with a regularity that puts even pro bloggers to shame.

Some readers may cry foul, here, smacking Friday Night Noise down for championing a genre-confused band in its infancy as a noise outfit. Indeed, Caddywhompus sweeps a fuck of a lot into its tent: catchy-as-swine-flu indie-rock, post-Battles dynamic tantrum-throws, Sonic Youth scree, a touch of hardcore, even the late, lamented KARP in spots - and on some weird level, they remind us of HEALTH, albeit less committed to a single avenue.

Swanshit, "Fluorescence": Forty-five minutes of linguine-layered, ascending drone, "Fluorescence" strikes me as a more intense, fully-realized stab at the kind of digitalized, etheral illusion-of-statis Aquarelle pursued a few years back on Of Memory and Momentum. With "Fluorescence," it's as if a million tiny ball-bearings or drops of water on a hot, enormous frying pan were being shaken into quivering blurs, driven hither and yon to form then abandon Valhalla peaks, gaping ravines, and raging surface-of-Neptune storms that stretch on for infinity. I'm reminded of that flight-of-directorial-fancy scene in Trainspotting where Ewen MacGregor dives into The Filthiest Toilet In Scotland to pursue a pair of suppositories, of arctic blizzard footage, of the ebullient snap and fizz of ginger-ale.

On his site, Swanshit - the work of a Houston gent named Chris - offers this composition (among many others, though none are quite as stunning) gratis, and you'd be well served to pay his harddrive deliverance a visit.

Anthony Pirog, "Budding Peonies": On Beginning to End (Sonic Mass), his debut album, NYC-based guitarist/composer Anthony Pirog offers an aural Whitman's sampler of his core competencies: sunkissed tone poems (think John Fahey), pitch-shifted glimmer, meditative squalls, discordant piano frowns and various noisy flavors. While End's odds and, er, ends hang together quite nicely, I'm predisposed to the uglier bits; singling out just one to highlight was something of a struggle.

Dug "Screaming Sun," with its halting, gargled scree and through-a-collander electronic pops, and how "Sixth Of One" was in a constant state of metamorphasis, never content to settle for straight fuck-you blare or straining-at-harnesses seethe or heavy-lidded chordal strum.

But ultimately, "Budding Peonies" won the day. It opens with a maudlin, wavering drone and cryptic, rolling clacks, letting you get accustomed to that synthesis for a moment or two before allowing the clacks to swell in volume and - crucially - shuffling in increasingly belligerant, detuned string manipulations, rivulets of static, and the sort of buckling groans one might associate with the shifting of heavy furniture on a warehouse floor.

John Wiese & C. Spencer Yeh, "Pink Pyramid"

Noise dudes do love their collabos, huh? Sometimes, I love 'em, too. Often these meetings-of-the-messed-up-minds produce muddled junk. Laptop-power-electronics-psycho Weise and violinist-electronic-twiddler Yeh have crossed circuit boards more than a few times, and Cincinnati (DroneDisco), their latest Marvel Team Up, doesn't disappoint. Electronics, synths, voice and base guitar are the ingredients, but this is the sort of album in which method rules all; which is to say, whatever sounds eked were rudely swept into a digital vortex and cranked hard. "Pink Pyramid" stands out here because it's so darn liquidy, an arresting cross between tongues snapping the insides of cheeks and oodles of saliva bubbles emerging, then popping, one after another. A happy programming accident? A titular giggle at sexual proclivities? Your guess is as good as mine.

Wolf Eyes

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Friday Night Noise, a weekly Rocks Off column in which I'll take you by the hand and lead you through the often unpredictable, harsh, and (perhaps surprisingly) varied netherworlds of noise music. Noise-rock. Noise-pop. Noise-core. Droning noise. System-shutdown noise. Ultra-minimal noise. Experimental noise. Sample-heavy noise. I could go on and on in this vein -like Bubba babbling about ways to prepare shrimp in Forrest Gump-but I'd rather lay out the ground rules this feature will operate under.

Each week, we'll hone in on three tunes, each by a different noise act. One of them will be from Texas. The other two will be from somewhere else. We'll hook you up with (last.fm or MySpace) links, because we're totally down with sharing the discordant wealth. Remember: discogs.com is your friend in a lot of cases. (We encourage you to join and help keep that site current.)

Noise releases - vinyl, CDs, lathe-cuts, 7-inches, cassettes, etc. - often fall out of the sky without any forewarning whatsoever, resulting in noise addicts discovering that new Dead Machines or Zaimph or Idlness Distribution shit is available weeks, months, or years after severely limited-edition conception. Thus, Friday Night Noise reserves the right to hip you to gnarled insanity issued 18 to 24 months earlier than a given publication date. Will this mean that you'll be a bit behind the curve in some cases? Probably, but if you're desperately into noise, chances are you won't care. Plus, sometimes it takes awhile for a Merzbow, John Wiese, Yellow Tears, or REACHING. composition to really zoom into focus such that one can explain it in words.

And finally, this ain't an MP3 column! What fun would this whole reader/columnist co-dependency thing be if I did all of the work for you?

With all that outta the way, let's get noisy!