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While Eloe Omoe are setting up, the bassist wanders up to the stage and, with absolutely no warning, makes the hugest, loudest blast of noise ever. As we all wince and dive for our earplugs, Maurice looks bemused, wanders over to the fishbowl labelled "Earplugs 50¢," crosses out the "50¢," and writes "$12."
I love Maurice.
Eloe Omoe are a two-piece, bass and drums. The bassist makes these astonishing blasts of thick sludge, distorted and feedbacky and LOUD! It's really kind of beautiful. The drummer, I could pretty much do without. He's having a sort of ongoing spastic breakdown, and it's kind of interesting for the first minute or so, but it never really goes anywhere. When he stops, the bass starts to develop something like a rhythm, but then he'll immediately come back in and squash it. I'm not used to the drummer taking it upon himself to prevent rhythm, and I don't really think I approve. They play quite a short set, or a longish song, depending on how you look at it.
Secret Garden is also a two-piece: noise and noise. This starts out really good--a lot better than the other time I saw them. I've noticed a tendency for Donna Parker to sort of sit back and let her noisestream be relatively static when she's playing with someone else, so I'm very pleased that she has a really interesting cycle of feedback going on in the first piece, looping rhythmically and alternating between two different states. Jessica Rylan lays a bunch of rhythmic clicking and popping from her oscillators over and against that, and they add up well. The next piece starts out with more of a fuzzy roar from Donna and bleeps and squeals from Jessica, but then the PA that Jessica is playing through ceases to produce any sort of sound at all. While they screw around with it and try to get it to work, Tom shouts out, "Crickets!" and Donna dials up whatever settings on her system produce what we have previously called "the metallic cicadas." I wonder if it is the first time she has ever played a request. Alas, the PA is having none of it, so their set is declared done.
Corsano/Yeh/Kolovos was to have been a trio, but apparently Mr. Corsano is sick, so it's all two-piece acts tonight. Yeh plays violin and Kolovos plays guitar. The violin is a bit static; while he scratches out a fairly rapid succession of pitches, the tone is relatively similar across all of them and there's nothing like melody or tonality to hang my attention on, so it quickly settles into a blur of "rapid succession of pitches." The guitar, by contrast, is psychotically active, with an absurd number of effects and an array of interesting things to excite the strings with, and a whole lot of jumping around among sounds. The two of them wind up working really well together. Again, there's nothing like a tune, but the rapid-fire timbral excursions of the guitar over the drone-like violin remains interesting. After a while, Yeh puts down the bow and starts shouting into the violin; then he puts down the violin and just shouts, and then hisses and growls and gargles while further modulating the sounds with his hands in front of his mouth. All without benefit of a microphone, so it's a kind of half-heard weirdness under the guitar. It sounds like he's having some kind of seizure. I think maybe I like it.
