On February 25th a cool show happened at Most Wanted Fine Art Gallery in Garfield; it was booked by my friend Dawn. A lot of noise bands played and it was like a mini-festival. This was also Dire Wolves final last show.
This is a bad picture of Maenads (Amy Hoffmann from Hunted Creatures) who played first. I got there a little late and only saw 4 minutes or so, but it was a really good set with a large similarity to certain Satyr/Elfheim or the Tchaikovsky composition Swan Lake. Looped violin and bowed objects in the shadows of the room. It was the only time that I've ever seen her play, but I hope she does so again soon.
Second up, RJ Myato tried to play, but had a lot of trouble with his setup. Originally it was far too quiet, but he quickly also realized that something else was wrong; it turned out that a cable wasn't in the whole way. After all of the comedy he dedicated his set to Dire Wolves and quickly the named beasts started to howl from RJ's iPod. He did a short set of some more dynamic noise stuff than usual, but looked as if he was a tiny child playing with toys. It was a cool dichotomy.
Next was the Dire Wolves themselves actually playing their swan song to Pittsburgh, but not at all Swan Lake sounding. Daphne played trumpet and had a tiny guitar amplifier in the back of her pants. The guitar player and her walked around the circling near me, but sometimes venturing towards the crowd. Jeffrey walked all around, bustling to and fro, entering and leaving the audience at every turn. Everything sounded great too; a late night chaos sound. I wish that they could play somewhere here again, but it appears that this is so long to Dire Wolves, at least until the farewell tour.
For the next part of this very eclectic show Margaret Cox played a set that bordered on long, but never became a chore. A lot of tiny devices and machines were carefully manipulated to produce microscopic sounds brought to our eyes by means of amplifiers. It reminded me of toothpaste, drains, drills, and brushes; the sounds of slimes oozing into a closing, rusty vent. She was really great as always.
For the fifth band/musician/whatever Notaform, who came all the way from Ontario, showed a video and played some dance/electronica/noise with an amazing video. Colors and lights fused into scenes of people and places fused back into lights and colors and stars; it was like waking nights asleep and dreaming and fit her music well. Notaform's music was slow and eerie like a growing nightmare of fungus taking over yr refrigerator. Voices, bird sounds, and instrumental passages faded in and out like so many distant ghosts. Occasionally she would venture into straight noise or would act more like a DJ, but it all worked well. I hope to see more of this collage work in the future.
Finally 8Cylinder played a laptop set of industrial noise stuff. He went on for half an hour, which was maybe too long (Notaform herself played for 40 minutes which was also a little too long). 8Cylinder ranged from hard beats with synth parts to more ambient sections of spaceship abduction sound effects and graphical glitching errors to fuzzed out computer tunes. He had an eerie sound as well, like the soundtrack to
Tetsuo: the Iron Man, but he was maybe too technical, too distant, or too cold, staring dead on into his 40K grafiti'd laptop's screen while he brought the hard edged sounds and metal grinding rhythms. It was cool though and I'd like to see more of his stuff.
Here is everyone's sets from the entire show. Have fun/check it out.
