Sonic Youth Gossip - Notes from a No Fun Fest Girlfriend

http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/l...s/nofunfest06/

Live: No Fun Fest
the Hook, Brooklyn, NY: 17-19 March 2006
Story by Zach Baron | Photos by Michael Muniak

If I was only half-conscious (drunk) for most of No Fun Fest, as was everyone else there old enough to do so-- the younger kids, presumably, were the ones blazing the Burning Man quantities of weed in the backyard merch area-- apologies. It hurts and things get blurry when volumes upwards of those of a house collapsing are inflicted on you every 45 minutes or so.
Comparatively, I had it easy. My house didn't burn down, as James "Twig" Harper's did in Baltimore on the Friday night of No Fun Fest, not 24 hours before he was scheduled to perform; he did so anyway, with grace and a nearly tearful speech at the end (plus an onstage embrace with housemate and Nautical Almanac bandmate Carly Ptak)-- "Don't ever fucking stop"-- though it can't have been simple. Nor, probably, was the very feat of just climbing on stage and letting loose, for oldsters in Smegma or Borbetomagus. And, as for the sea of barely-legals, with seven or eight records each under their respective arms, well, I'm sure that vinyl got pretty heavy, too. Don't ever fucking stop, kids.
Age and tragedy aside, Carlos Giffoni's three-day noise fest, now in its third year, is not passי, nor past its prime: nobody present would've accused even a single act of being tame. For an undertaking this large and cumbersome (all three nights, to my knowledge, were full sellouts, in the middle of goddamn nowhere, Brooklyn's Red Hook), the compromises were few, and those that were made proved convincing. (The whole thing shoulda been in a basement, duh, but everyone's game got upped by the amazing club soundsystem, so duh nothing, I guess.)
On stage, the fest's most visible compromise artists, Michigan-wierdos-turned-Sub Pop-signees Wolf Eyes, ruled the gathering of a scene they're seemingly responsible for uniting, even as their actual music crawled closer to rock than that of the excluded-on-the-grounds-of-not-being-a-noise-band guys USAISAMONSTER (who played elsewhere Saturday night). When the Eyes' Tibetan-exiled "actual noise" guy, Aaron Dilloway, performed Friday night, the three active Wolfs played rap-posse, waving towels behind him, inciting the crowd and eventually crowd-surfing their way off the stage, as rockstars do. For his part Dilloway, sharp and sartorial in a clean button-down, unleashed the massive drones and harsh quirks increasingly banished from Wolf Eyes' own set, though John Olson still pumped his fist. Dilloway's got the same one-drop beat his old band does, but in his set, it's a jump-off for murky exploration, not an excuse to mosh.
Wolf Eyes' own one-drop, bam, bam-bam-bam noisereggae (same riddim, different action) was Saturday night's mind-rending finale. Far better than their two nights in town with Whitehouse a few weeks back, they asked "Who's ready for a fucking jam?!!!!! AHHHHHHHH!" and proceeded, whether we were ready or not. Nate Young has added a sweet singing to his dual miced scream, John Olson has joined the aforementioned "AHHHHHHHH!" to his gong-destroying, and Mike Connelly, as always, cued the crowd to fullbody-jerk, as he did, and then we did. Our closest moment as a crowd-audience-event, they/we/it/No Fun wound down that night at the appalling hour of 3 a.m.
Michigan ran Saturday night (Sunday night too, at the fest's downstairs, American Tapes/Gods of the Tundra-curated showcase); Japan ran everything else. Ex-DNA drummer, Ikue Mori, albeit more New Yorker than Rising Sunner at this point, twirled electronics with harpist Zeena Parker late Friday night, the two thus snatching the distinction of being the fest's only entirely X-chromosomed act. If their bird-call clicky communication felt a little like filler sandwiched between monster sets by the duo of Zbigniew Karkowski and Carlos Giffoni and the handmade guitar madness of Japan's Solmania, well, call me misogynorockist. Solmania's set had Masahiko Ohno and an unidentified bandmate leading a deafening rave-up on their unique bastard instruments: guitars, topped with two string bass necks, podium mics extending off the top. They riffed till Ohno shattered two strings, as well as the composure of several gearheads in the audience: Sunn0)))'s Stephen O'Malley was on stage seconds after they finished their set, screaming ecstatically into Ohno's ear.
Come Sunday Astromero, a duo featuring C.C.C.C. god Hiroshi Hasegawa and Californian Damion Romero, ruined hearing and internal organs alike as Romero's subaudible bass-toned quicksand pushed speakers and air till most onlookers bent over queasily. They finished as Hasegawa took a gestural controller and the mixer, stood on a table, and nearly smashed them both. The 'tronics were saved, I guess, only by specter of the appalling combined cost of the gear and the plane ticket back to Japan.
Sunday's winning streak included Prurient's Dominick Fernow, clad in Michael Jacksonesque black rubber-gloves but belting a lower-pitched yelp, emitting soundwaves which collided all across the room for wave-cancellation voids and wave-addition vortexes; John Wiese, sounding as delicate a set as I've ever seen from him, a shimmery mutant crawl that trawled low-channels and restrained highnotes as a rapt room tried to follow; and Thurston Moore's duo with Leslie Keffer, in which she pumped out a bubbly glow of feedback, while Moore soloed and beat up his guitar, as he does at noise shows. Late Sunday night, shell-shocked and almost too sleepy to climb the stairs between upstairs and down (a venue that deserves its own report, though you won't get it here), I wandered into the basement to find Wolf Eyes leading a dance-party. John Olson spun Chic's "Le Freak" 45 on 33, over and over, so that it sounded like dub (or like Wolf Eyes): close to a hundred zonked kids were wildly dancing to the wrong-speed thump. Upstairs, there was Borbetomagus, whose aged-freejazz dual sax attack/embrace prompted Eloe Omoe (themselves responsible for an early but blistering bass-and-drums flailer) drummer Tim Leanse to lean over and exclaim in my ear: "Dude, I think they're touchin' bells!" I'd parse the metaphors, but why bother?