Noise is the new black. The number of local practitioners of non-linear, post-everything, totally fucked-up “music” has ballooned over the past couple of years, based solely on my awesome perspective, shaped by my so-close-I-can-smell-it observations of the 817 scene.
Not only are more musicians exploring sonic chaos, a lot of them also are gigging regularly, thanks to hospitable venues such as Wasted Words Art Collective (“Wasted Words Aren’t,” March 17, 2010), other assorted houses, the unwavering 1919 Hemphill, and even some otherwise mainstream joints such as two Arlington spots –– the Sunshine Bar (902 W. Division St., 817-277-6252) and Caves Lounge (900 W. Division St., 817-460-5510) –– and, in the West 7th Street corridor, Lola’s Saloon-Sixth (2736 W. 6th St., 817-877-0666) –– two members of the recently defunct experimental-noir trio The Great Tyrant will perform there as Pinkish Black, with Ludicra, on Monday. To the gaggle of local outré noisicians –– Poison Apple, Hentai Improvising Orchestra, The Shadow, Eyes Wings and Many Other Things, Drug Mountain, Zanzibar Snails, Shortwave Death System, Breaking Light –– we can now add a Dallas-based outfit with Fort Worth connections. Two contributors to the anti-music collective loop12, Blake Hestir and Joel Zoch, are longtime Fort Worthians –– both were in Jethro Tilton, and Hestir played bass in The Gideons and Brother Tex, among others. Since loop12 formed a couple of years ago, the group has proved its commitment to “aural anarcho-structuralism,” according to the band’s literature, an “abbreviated way of stating that the group embraces free-form sound experimentation constrained only by the dictates of a kitchen timer.” (!) In lieu of rules, the band adheres to a “shared aesthetic interest in weaving often disparate, sometimes violent, sometimes satiric sonic constructions into lush Post-Minimalist soundscapes.” The results aren’t noisy by any stretch; more ethereal and trance-y. The musicians “play” various software applications on laptop computers and multiple vintage DigiTech eight-second delay machines. Songs are constructed of zounds as diverse as found samples of voiceover narration or singing (occasionally warped into nonsensicalness), digitally constructed wave forms, and metronymic clicks, bangs, and crashes. Each composition is improvised and the result of a live performance. The recorded works are often remixed and mastered digitally. However, Hestir and company say, “finality is relative since each composition becomes the possibility of further constructions.” Influences range from La Monte Young’s The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer to Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain and the “Syncopated Pandemonium” section of Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets. In short, loop12 is the sum of their “clicks, drones, and loops.” Along with headliner Katie Young and Yells at Eels’ Aaron Gonzalez, loop12 will perform on Friday at Phoenix Project Collective (406 S. Haskell Ave., Dallas).
Pink Martini’s Dan Faehnle and his trio will perform on Thursday at the Fort Worth Library (500 W. 3rd St., downtown, 817-871-7705) as part of the library’s new Third Thursday Jazz concert series. Also on tap at the library: TCU music instructor and vibe-man Joey Carter, whose quartet will perform the music of legendary bebop pianist Thelonious Monk on June 17; jazzy blues guitarist Sumter Bruton, whose quartet will include Fort Worth pianist-vocalist Mike Price of the Price Swing Masters Revue (Aug. 19); vocalist Jay Clayton (May 20); and Texas Tenor sax-man Mack Goldsbury (July 15), whose band will feature drummer Duane Durrett, founder of the Weatherford College Jazz Studies Program.
Contact HearSay at hearsay@fwweekly.com.
