http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/arts/music/21nois.html?ex=1337400000&en=d12d740d3354f68a&ei=5 088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
May 21, 2007
Music Review | No Fun Fest
Tough Territory in the World of Experimental Music
By NATE CHINEN
A lot of the sounds heard over the weekend at the Hook in Red Hook, Brooklyn, came with the force of an assault. There were whipsaw screeches, scorching blasts, solar-plexus-socking rumbles. Also ominous whorls and scabrous wails. It was all part of the fourth annual No Fun Fest, a transnational summit on the state of extreme experimental music, mostly electronic in origin and industrial in tone.
The festival, organized by the Venezuelan-born electronic improviser Carlos Giffoni, courts a hyper-specific subculture. But the crowd of several hundred strong on Saturday, the third of four consecutive nights of programming, reflected an impact beyond the realm of the cloistered connoisseur. And at its best — as in the performances of the evening’s two headliners, Merzbow and Keiji Haino — the music tempered its aggression with discipline, and even the suggestion of a clear design.
Mr. Haino, who went on shortly after midnight, presented a figure as spectral and inscrutable as his art. A longtime hero of the Japanese noise-rock scene, he has drawn deeply from sources both futuristic and folkloric. He began his set with a passage involving a mandolinlike stringed instrument and a vocal torrent, backing his own brackish growls with a plangent, wobbly twang.
Eventually he switched to guitar, unleashing a wave of barbed static. Through the haze there was occasionally a beam of something almost normative — pure amplifier feedback, or a drone processed through a ring modulator — but the general effect was a relentless hissing sludge. Near the end of his 45 minutes he started vocalizing again, in full freakout mode. His cackle, sampled and looped, sounded more mischievous than sinister.
Merzbow, a k a Masami Akita, adopted a calmer demeanor, though the results were more turbulent. Presiding over two laptops and a dial-covered console he turned a low-frequency churn into something disorientingly palpable. Shapes and textures kept mutating within the din. There was a metallic threshing sound, then something that resembled the roar of pummeling surf from an underwater perspective. The overall effect was visceral as well as artful, and the crowd responded with some scattered moshing.
Catharsis has become a mandate of this wing of experimental music, partly as a result of its association with doom metal and other sludgy variations. Masochism can quickly become part of the deal. During an abrasive set by the electronic artists Tom Recchion, Oblivia and Ju Suk Reet Meate, this point was crystallized by the appearance of a stage crasher, who somberly removed his shirt and then toppled to the stage like felled timber.
Sickness and Slogun, playing consecutive sets, attacked the audience with derision, as if antagonism were the only reception they could withstand. Chris Goudreau, who performs as Sickness, paced and sulked for a while before cutting his performance short; John Balistreri, who goes by Slogun, spent a few minutes glowering with his arms crossed. Eventually they were onstage together, along with an inexplicable entourage, spraying the crowd with insults and beer. It was sloppy excess but probably necessary; without the hostility there would have been nothing there.
In this atmosphere Religious Knives stood out for several reasons. They used conventional instruments: guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. And their set brushed up against rock and dub reggae, though not in any tuneful way. There were some not-quite-intelligible vocals — “When the lights go out” was one refrain — and some big, bare-bones riffs.
Before they began their set Michael Bernstein of the band informed the sound man that a microphone was “feeding back a little bit.” He didn’t give any indication of realizing how funny that sounded, in the context of the night.