The Glimmer Blinkken Tinker Shop///Wood Shed and Blank & Blissed Out Bob Bucko Jr and a cast of his Dubuque cohorts form The Glimmer Blinkken, or did as of at least 2010 anyway. Music like this probably only survives in places like Dubuque where trying to impress anybody with your hip-and-current-ness is pointless. Many of the songs vamp a bourgeois funky groove over which the singer invests his touch of the absurd lyrics with exaggerated arty-kid enunciation and glissando, trading off with wild jazz-dissonant keyboard and sax parts, and there are some tasteful jam sections that get either a bit psychedelic or just rowdy, especially on the live versions on “Blank & Blissed Out”. I could see myself getting down to this at a house-party show, especially if it was in, say, 1994 — it reminds me of an early 1990s college-town band with a strong Talking Heads influence, so the feeling it gives me is a fun and pleasant one if a bit nostalgic. “Feelin’ (I Think I’ve Got a)” gets more of a hard-rock feel from its emphasis on a big rhythm guitar, and it’s followed up on “Tinker Shop///Wood Shed” with the show-tune-ish “(It’s a) Wonderful Day in the Tulips” and a couple delightfully weird instrumentals. I’m not sure if this band is currently active (I think David Morrison moved away somewhere) but I imagine them being in high demand for live gigs because this really feels like it would be great party music: it’s charismatic, has broad appeal without being bland, and no doubt got the girls up and dancing. “Tinker Shop///Wood Shed” is the studio album and “Blank & Blissed Out” is the live one recorded January 2010, both put out on tape by something called Ruix, whose website ruixzine.com seems to be perpetually “coming soon” but you can definitely get them from me here, because I have some distro copies. For lots of other nifty Glimmer Blinkken stuff, (the lathe-cut 5″ square plexi split single with Legal Fingers is an especially nifty item — Legal Fingers should definitely play gigs with The Mighty Acceleratör), check out Personal Archives.

Aural Resuscitation Unit / I Like You Go Home Arid/Storm ARU continues in the vein of its “dub” concept with the three-part “Dubbing An Arab”, built around exotic looped samples and a hypnotic and danceable drum machine beat with the bass hits coming out all overdriven as if this was being pumped out of an aged, overworked PA onto a mostly empty dancefloor at 4AM some sweltering night in a small middle-eastern town. ILYGH fills up its side of the tape with a great noisescape in the classic style, “Lost in the Storm of Translation”, tape-saturating low-end distortion explosions like massive industrial machinery banging and humming and reverberating through metallic subterranean caverns. A dark and surreal tape on both sides.

Noring/McGee Cross Contamination Hal McGee lives in Gainesville, Florida and has been making noisy experimental music since like the early 1980s, has put out more tapes and digital releases than you can likely believe, and is just packed with awesomely gonzo ideas and creative energy. These days he seems to be on a quest to do duo collage mail collaboration projects with as many people as possible, wherein the MO is that each participant separately records some stuff (without hearing what the other is doing, you see), then the one that is not Hal mails theirs to Hal who mixes them together. (In fact, he recently did one of these with yours truly, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out — see a couple posts below this one.) A few months back Hal did one of these projects with Brian Noring, and this one can also be procured from Hal on cassette tape. Hal and Brian have collaborated a lot of times before since 1996 but this is their first since ’03. Noring is a sometime experimental musician from here in Des Moines and is the guy indirectly resonsible for my finding my way into the lo-fi/homemade cassette music scene in 1993 when I bought a copy of his zine Friends Of The Draft Resistance on my first visit to the Ames location of Co-Op Records after moving into the dorms for an ill-fated year as a music composition student at Iowa State University. He had an excellent tape label, F.D.R. tapes, responsible for what I consider to be some of the most important noise and “lo-tech industrial” music (a term I coined originally for my own project in those days, Flight Attendants) of the era, including his own personal recording project E H I. When I moved to Des Moines in December ’08, Brian Noring was one of the first things I wanted to try to find here. However his musical/recording activity has been very light the past several years and he doesn’t care to hang out online either, so it wasn’t easy and it was eventually Bryan Day (instrument-inventor and proprietor of Public Eyesore Records) that got us talking by email; so it’s a pretty great occasion that he’s releasing stuff again. Hal & Brian’s album “Cross Contamination” is a midrangey hour-long cacophony of twangy broken-necked two-string acoustic guitar, electric bass and feedback through mini-amps, radio static, woozy tablehooters, household items and clatter that’s simultaneously meditative and assaultive. It’s a whole lot of sound to try to stuff into your earholes for sure, very abstract, as lo-tech as they come, much more varied than your average noise album. Here’s a bandcamp below — check out Hal’s website and you can probably find a way to contact him about a tape copy if you’re interested.

Third I Reaching Toward the Light Dark ambient sounds, low rumbles, wind through distant tunnels, icy synthesizer drips, gorgeously tranquil and desolate. Between these guys and Djordje/Raven and a couple other things I’ve caught wind of here and there, Serbia seems like quite the place these days.

Forget The Times Ver Dis Pond Wild, noisy, cosmic instrumental free-rock from Kalamazoo. Fetal Pig played a gig with them at The Space For Ames and I probably wrote a post about it. I bought two of their tapes and one by Kyle Landstra, all on the tape label one of them operates, Already Dead, which is no longer exclusively a tape label since the release of a Forget The Times LP, “Soul Music”, which looks awesome but I’ve not yet had the pleasure of hearing. I’m thinking of ordering one, though. This sort of guitar and drums jamming is along the lines of some of my own past works in Bwang! but with less of a noise/outsider aesthetic and more actual skill and decent equipment and production in its place. Most of the time the instrumentation is two electric guitars and a drummer, but at times they are joined by, or perhaps one of them switches to, saxophone or some crazy electronics (which might just be effects pedals too). These guys just blast off into space and you have to hold on as best you can. The tape comes in this cool screen-printed bag of heavy fabric, no liner notes or song titles or anything.

Loud Silence My Beginnings (Compilation 2011-2012) From an ethic that seems to proceed from underground black metal, Loud Silence presents something more like a series of overlapping motifs in a depressive bedroom lo-fi vein. Different guitar and keyboard parts, spoken word poetry bits, whispering, some black metal vocals, simple drum machine parts, singing birds, wind, thunder, a stream, joining in and dropping out and tape-manipulated and coming together in different combinations, even tape hiss becomes an instrument. Elements recur later in new contexts. It’s very strange to me that the track listing and title suggest that this is a collection of demos and compilation and split-release tracks, because it’s impossible for me to collate the sounds with the track listing; rather it plays nicely as a single multi-part collage piece, most of it somber and conveying a profound sadness. The liner notes say “Made in solitude. There is nobody to thank. Hate it.” But I’m sorry, I can’t hate it, in fact I really like it. It’s beautiful. Available from Smell The Stench.

Devin Dart/Thunder Bunny See It In Color I just love it when somebody can take hokey keyboard and/or drum machine tones and make something really epic-sounding out of them. It always ends up being a touch cartoon in a really cool way. Devin Dart is particularly good at this. He starts out this short split with just such a track, and it’s in a similar vein to what he opened with on his split tape with Bob Bucko Jr, sort of symphonic in intentions, charging and triumphant, theme music from a postnuke film about cyberpunk gnomes. After that he noises it up a bit with a sort of vacuum-cleaner drone, then finishes up with a bass guitar led rock instrumental. Thunder Bunny does much the sort of awesomeness anyone familiar with them will expect by now, first a tender lo-fi chord organ tune and then one of their huge hazy shoegazing psych-rock burners. Grab this from Felt Cat.

Small Hours Kate Definitely truth in packaging here. Liner notes claim that this “wall” (far less loud and harsh, however, than most things I’ve heard that term applied to) is a mix of recordings of a cooling fan (overdriven, it seems), a rainstorm, and audio samples from the film Titanic, introduced by the song “What If” from the soundtrack. That’s exactly what it sounds like and what it really is. The title and cover photo refer to Titanic star Kate Winslet. My wife loves Titanic and runs a fan at night because the noise helps her sleep because her ears ring; I told her she ought to try putting this tape on instead. It’s co-released by Smell The Stench and Park Bench Records who also have a new Raven tape coming out soon. Speaking of which…

Everybody and their dog is putting out a Raven tape these days, including myself, and I’m trying to grab lots of them if I can because Raven is really good. Raven is the project of Djordje, a fellow from Serbia who also does an amazing noise blog called Dead Tones. Some Raven stuff is more harsh noise and some is more drone and some is more ambient, and all of it is excellent. My first time hearing Raven was this from Darker Days Ahead:

He also has a couple tapes out on Worthless Recordings that I definitely very much want and plan to order or maybe see if I can trade for. Worthless is one of the best quality noise-oriented tape labels going, for real.

Recently I myself put this out on Centipede Farm, you should definitely get it:

Raven’s latest, however, is this one on Lava Church: (here’s their storenvy you can also order tapes from)

Here is the official Raven website and here is the Raven Soundcloud.

A little over a month ago I trekked up to Minneapolis for the Minneapolis Noisefest 2012, having heard about it via the Blogspot site of the Darker Days Ahead label, which itself I’d heard of by way of its having released a recent Marax CD-R House Of Malice (much recommended, by the way). Just before leaving I tried to nail down just where to find the venue, and found various confusing conflicting information, but eventually, thinking I had it figured out, I set off. Midway through the drive I received an email from Cory of Darker Days Ahead giving me directions to somewhere completely different than I’d intended to head for. An attempt to bring this new information up on my phone’s navigation app crashed the phone beyond any usability, apparently sending it into an endless loop of rebooting itself. I resolved to hit up one of Iowa’s fine rest stops, since we have wi-fi at those things, and try and work out directions on my iPad from that, but I missed the last rest stop in Iowa along the route and had to stop at one in Minnesota instead, where they don’t have this particular modern convenience. The whole rest stop annoyed me. Even the doors seemed to open from the wrong side. I had to call home from the pay phone in the cavernously echoing lobby occupied by a family loudly shouting at each other, to get Leah to read me off directions from Google.

The directions didn’t even go to the actual location where the show was going down, but rather to a cafe about a block away that it was supposed to be “across the tracks” from. I found the place, apparently an underground DIY sort of spot, which in retrospect makes perfect sense. The grubby, disheveled building looked like it may have formerly been a gas station with a service department in back, and was located on a dead end street directly behind a Metro Transit train station. I’m not sure if it even technically has an address. I arrived around 7, the time I had heard the show was to start, and found the place quiet and locked up, the only person around being one of the scheduled performers (Skin Horse, as it would turn out), leaning against his car with his gear piled up in the back seat, also wondering what was going on.

Eventually someone opened up the gate to the yard and the overhead door at the back of the building and more people started gradually filtering in over the next couple hours, including one whom I recognized as Emil from Cock ESP. I wandered around trying to amuse myself among strangers, making microcassette recordings of the trains. I found it amusing that the trains sound an recording of a tram bell. I wondered aloud to a couple of people as to whether perhaps they had initially used an electronic beep but then some manager decided that it didn’t have enough “soul” and asked for something more “vintage” sounding. The joke was lost. After a couple hours some people showed up with a PA and a shopping cart full of beer. Then there was a long period of setup and sound-checking.

It was at least 10, possibly later, when the show got going. The delay concerned me since there were so many names on the bill, though I had already figured on each of them playing for somewhere in the 10 to 15 minute range, but then again, it didn’t really matter: there was really no “closing time” and no neighbors to complain. The decaying industrial vibe of the building and general old-school punk way that the show operated gave a really cool vibe to the whole experience; I felt as if I had might have just been transported to the early 1980s industrial scene.

Most of the acts were one-man power electronics units getting harsh drones out of a table full of pedals and maybe a mixer or some object with a contact mic attached, with some intermittent hardcore-style vocals. Beyond those common elements however, each had their own distinct approach and sound.

A few artists utilized equipment or methods of particular interest. Cyrus Pireh’s setup involved two guitar amplifiers, one with a cruddy old guitar feeding back through it, while he manipulated the dials, controls, and patch cables of an honest-to-goodness old hearing test tone generating machine set up on top of the amps. I certainly don’t remember hearing sounds like those when I got hearing tests in school as a kid, but maybe he had the thing circuit-bent or something. The ending of his set took on a performance-art aspect as he repeatedly asked a member of the audience “what do you want to hear?” louder and more agitated each time.

Another of my favorites was Skin Horse, who stood onstage behind a kind of small workbench with an old boom box and a desk lamp and who knows what else on it, casually smoking and drinking beer in between angry shouts while coaxing some wonderfully dark mechanized sounds from his setup and generally having a tough “don’t fuck with this guy” vibe. I don’t know what sort of drum machine or whatever it was he had making those rhythmic pulses but it had a really great heavy thunk sound to it. At one point it seemed to be laying down a pretty straightforward industrial dance beat, but then with just a tweak he would knock the rhythm lopsided or speed it up to the point of a loud buzz.

There was a two-person group somewhere in the middle of the show, whose name I never caught and does not appear in the video set above, that employed a large gong, which may have been contact-miked, meshing a drone from the gong with some electronic stuff. The crowd seemed to really like the gong, coaxing them to give it one more good whack before tearing down after their set, and cheering when they obliged.

I also wandered the venue a bit and got into some interesting conversations with Emil, Cyrus, a guy running the merch table, some guys that were supposed to be part of Cock ESP that night, and a couple random show attendees. Everyone was super friendly and cool. I’ve been to very few live performances dedicated specifically to noise music in my lifetime, but if noisers are this friendly in general then I’m glad to be among them.

Upon viewing the above video set I did vaguely remember seeing at least some of Cory Schumacher’s set (he of Darker Days Ahead, though at the time I didn’t connect this) — at least I remember that shirt with the Process cross on it, but I was fading out pretty bad by that time from the combination of the unaccustomed late hour and the beers I had drank so I slunk off to my car for a nap. I awoke well after the show ended and made my way back home. All in all it was a great time, would do again.

So I’ve got a Distant Trains tape coming out soon, as soon as I can come up with a good cover design for it anyway, inspired by this trip and this show, titled Minnesota Is Uncivilized. It will be the first exclusively noise-oriented Distant Trains release, though if you’ve been following my various compilation and split release material of late you are probably aware of these ascendant tendencies. Oddly enough, this release leapfrogs Explortation, which has now been in-progress for several months. The cassette of Minnesota Is Uncivilized will be 90 minutes, in an edition of 12; side A will be two long droney noise pieces, and side B will be made up of microcassette recordings made at this very show, including excerpts of the performances themselves. Will post here when they’re done.

EDIT: The two guys with the gong were Swine Wave. A video of them was added to the set later.