Not Noise So Much as Mania

the battles are pretty hyper soundwise tho. live, they are all not so hyper, but the music is downright hyper. try wiggling your butt to it. it's a work out. reminds me of rovo.
m.

BTW, I wasn't trying to suggest that all the bands I listed are considered "noise" -- other than Animal Collective, none of them usually are. I just meant that I find some common thread that I can't quite place.

Search:
Tortoise: Blackjack
A great lost John Barry soundtrack.

Deerhoof: Rainbow Silhouette Of The Milky Rain
Oi Punk for Children's ITV

Boredoms: (Circle)
Going up and up and up and up in a helicopter. And never going back down.

Animal Collective: Who Could Win A Rabbit
The Beach Boys get lost in Woburn.

That's fine. My goal isn't to label or categorize them so much as to describe what might be a common spirit and sensibility.

Well put.

"that sped-up vibe seems like something quite distinct from the energy of american hardcore or Sonic Youth-style "noise" stuff. I think the ADHD connection is an interesting one but I also think there's a definite connection to a Japanese influence."

Good point. There's none of that brooding angst I usually associate with hardcore and noise(y) bands. The Japanese connection sounds OTM as well, though I'm only minimally familiar with current Japanese bands.

i've read nothing but negative discussion about that spin article for the last week. the term "noisepunk" seems to be really unpopular amongst those in that scene at large. even tho the music seems descended from noise and punk. there's so much variety in that scene that one phrase is doomed.

"noise is the new emo"

fort thunder rip.
m.

no wave surely influenced many of the bands. there's no question about that.

but the influences are all over the place... it comes back to a discussion about noise in another thread that i'm too lazy to find... "noise" comes from many different angles. pita is not whitehouse is not sonic youth is not rubber o cement is not john zorn is not captain beefheart. etc etc. are all of those noise? maybe. depends who you ask. but they can be. yet they all come from different places.

and that goes for some of the bands you've mentioned and the ones above. they play together. and maybe embody a similar creative ethos on some levels. but i think the attempts to catalog the scene under one banner is gonna be seen as sort of a commodification by outsiders .... "are we going to see noise on mtv? fuck!" (of course, how can music writers avoid that kind of offense? ultimately, who cares?)

m.

Fort Thunder was demolished like three years ago.
Most of the spaces that have sprung up in its wake have also been condemned and the inhabitants forced to move. Providence = sinking ship, sadly. Most of the places where punxxx/art folks/noizers live can't have shows anymore because they're afraid of the same fate. (Lots of firecode violations, people living in zoned industrial areas, etc.)

Fuck Spin in the eye.

Never gonna happen.

Where I think the Boredoms and similar Japanese bands fit in is the way they found a middle ground between cutesy dayglo Japanese pop culture (Shonen Knife, Cibbo Matto, Corneilus) and the laughably serious sadism of the Japanese noise scene (Haino, Merzbow, etc.). They (and most likely other bands I haven't heard of) managed to explore the hyper-cute dayglo overload of Japanese pop culture while maintaining an acid-soaked edge of danger every bit as powerful and exciting as the straight "noise" scene. Where is the equivalent American or British synthesis of these extremes (Butthole Surfers?)?

And I think the reference to ADHD and a hyper-accellerated video game culture is OTM as far as being an explanation for why a slew of American bands picked up on this particular japanese influence at this point in time. It's such a pure psychedelic expression of media overload that it seems entirely inevitable.

Of course I may be responding entirely to surface presentation through album art, clothing, song titles, etc. but I think this bleeds through into the music somehow.

yeah otm. i knew that the fact that the mp3s scattered around www.jamhandy.com reminded me of wolf eyes.