June + July: The Wherehouse [Part 2]

This is the second venture into the Wherehouse in the past few days.  This time we're going to look at some of the sounds that echoed around in here for two months.

In addition to fireworks being set off and painting Warhol flowers for the covering up of rundown houses, a lot of people, both scheduled and unscheduled, played music at the Wherehouse.  A lot of the bands and musicians usually were friends of the artists being displayed that week, but sometimes they were just friends of Dean Cercone or others attendees that decided to stave off boredom for a little while.

During the art show of Seth LeDonne a lot of cool bands played.  First we had the always unusual, Jim Storch, or Burnout Warcry as he calls his strange project.  Playing all sorts of household/kitchen/gardening objects and some actual instruments Burnout Warcry is usually a very interesting racket.  You can experience it for yrself right here right now.

After Burnout Warcry, new project Buoyhood started up.  Buoyhood is Zach Katonik, from somewhere far away in the South Hills, playing droning, krautrocking keyboards.  It's a cool sound and is pretty similar to my own project Satyr/Elfheim according to mine and his standards.  Buoyhood sounds a little more like a UFO flap than a chance encounter with faeries or a haunting by the devil, though.  After meeting Zach here for the first time, and despite him looking like a street fighting man, I found that he was a super nice guy.  You can check out his tape on NNNCO here and his other release on NNNCO (with RJ My Tao) here.

 Satyr/Elfheim was after Buoyhood.  I used Zach's amp and was sort of similar to him.  I played a song called the Pine Barrens and smacked a contact microphone on the hard Wherehouse floor.  Here are those sounds, implemented straight from the Jersey Devil(?):


Dean Cercone himself played after me and he did a short 23 minute set; usually he goes on for over an hour.  It was a good Dean set.  Concise > too long.

One of the strangest, most stripped down, awesome sets happened next.  Brian DiSanto, with only his trademarked microphone and the often used Zach Katonik amplifier, sang an awesome a cappella set of his weird, manic pop songs.  He jumped and ran around, waved an American flag, and confused a very drunk woman.  You can listen to half of the chaos, and some singing by RJ Myato, on the official release on Wild Raft Records.  A cool guy recorded it.

 

The third drone set of the night was RJ My Tao, alter ego of NNNCO head of state RJ Myato.  It was much noisy (or maybe just more dissonant) than the last two.  Playing some clarinet, twisting some knobs, sort of wearing a shirt RJ excited everybody in the room before Dean's amp overheated and started to smoke.  Sigh Meltingstar was nervous about the smoke and kept pointing at it.  I wasn't sure what to do, but ended up telling RJ about it and he stopped to a semi-humorous (not for Dean) end.  Nothing was actually broken.

The night started to wind down at this point.  Lucy Goubert, the second to last act left, started to read some of her poetry and attempted to use an overhead projector.  Not a lot of people payed attention and there were issues with the visuals (I can't remember what happened), but it was okay.  She was distracted or bothered by something (probably in no way related to the lack of interest and technical problems).  The reading at Quiet Sound Night VI that I have available in an earlier post is the one to check out if yr interested in her awesome poetry.

Finally reclusive singer-songwriter Joe Mruk played.  Other than his first song, an original that sounded like a Tom Waits cover accompanied by a drum, the Dead Refrain played relaxed experimental folk music for around half an hour.  It was a good way to end the night.  After a little while longer everybody went home, but there's still more to come next time.