Louisville Comes to GA

On May 14th 2012 I booked a show.  This was not actually the first one I have booked, but it was more significant in that it involved touring bands contacting me to play here in Pittsburgh.  Douglas Lucas had emailed me all the way from Louisville, Kentucky about doing a cool drone show that seemed to keep getting bigger and bigger as more people ended up getting on it.

First was Poor Kitty, Seth and Lucy from Roup House, doing awesome spoken word/ambient noise soundscapes.  Lucy's vocals seemed like a "best of" of all of the previous performances that I had released on the self-titled Poor Kitty CD mixed into a new narrative, which was cool, and the set was really good.  Things started off very slow and dry, like a bored beat writer next to a big empty highway.  Things started to build up until everything exploded with crashing boxes and tools being run across sheets of rippling metal.  There was a dramatic pause and everything slowed down before fading away into the dirt-choked, rust-covered distance.

Michael Sibenac from Half-Nelson and Last Supper (which I erroneously labeled him as) played tapes and other found sounds second.  Lots of audio hiss amidst roaring tape growls and spooky echoing things hitting together.  Later everything turned into long synth sounds that droned forever while sounds swirled in the distance.  We traveled back into the ghost machine plant and then that was it.  A lot like Cotton Museum + Cut Hands and killer stuff as always.

Douglas Lucas performed third as Mu.  The black-haired Thurston Moore look-alike started with long synth notes building into a furious loop of spacey, ghost sounds from beyond.  There were lots of soaring high notes as invisible people chanted and feedback escalated as he took a drumstick to his guitar, using it to bend the strings upward forcefully.  The air was filled withthe sounds of things crashing together (books, walls, floors, beds, planes, washing machines, whatever) as his guitar generated an endless assortment of feedback and spring effects.  Mu is awesome stuff.

Ashochious looked like a the Louisville edition of White Reeves (left is Micah, right is Ryan).  They played the slow-lurching 4AM sounds of old machines and Halloween screams as ancient acetates violins created a low dance to the macabre.  Violins changed to backwards speech and watery tape sounds and then we entered a blast furnace/foundry.  The work became busier and busier until fading out into breathing in the darkness.

Manson Girls broke there contact microphone and maybe something else, but played a killer set anyway.  Kyle's heavy military drum beat was unresponsive and repetitious as Gena created distorted feedback and white noise.  They created some slow lurching songs for a while before speeding up to an end that extended into another variation.  It was so good, maybe better than at the Experimental Variety Show at Belvedere's the past year.

I played last with the still relatively new (and much harder to control) Synsonics guitar with weird built in speaker.  My was set was loud, but hard to hear for me; I ended up trying to play something else, but the volume dropped so I just turned it back up and tried to be as loud as possible.  Tons of sludged up distorted sounds with piercing swerving feedback blaring over the top.  Lots of started and stopping towards the end before I tried to play real notes, but than quit again.  I took out my earplugs because I couldn't hear myself and regretted it later.

It was fun booking a show and I've done it pretty frequently afterwards.  This was really good over all, every band was great.  Manson Girls and I also were both invited to play the Louisville Experimental Festival in June, though we couldn't get there on time, but I am hoping to play with Mu or Ashochious again.

Sounds are here.