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Donna Parker plays electronically modulated electronic feedback. Kate Village, kicking it more old school, plays electronically modulated electroacoustic feedback. It is a match made in heaven. They start out with growling, pulsing electronic feedback and squalls of nothing very note-like from the guitar, which builds slowly and fades slowly to a single, piercing tone and a fake ending before roaring back. This second part is much more active: swooping, cascading weirdness from Donna, while Kate attacks the guitar and plays like Thurston Moore ate the brown acid. There's a transcendent moment where she's entirely off the floor, standing with one foot on the wah pedal and one on the distortion pedal and playing the noise by teetering. My one complaint, and it's a serious one, is that they don't play NEARLY long enough. Maybe ten minutes, tops; after teasing me with that level of awesomeness, it's just cruel to cut me off so soon.
Horse Sinister begin by variously sitting and lying down on the stage, before threatening to put us to sleep. It's a threat they very nearly carry out. This is in part because I'm pretty tired, but their take on improvised noise is mostly very, very mellow and quiet and low-key. Things get briefly interesting when one of them starts poking at his guitar with a pencil, for a cool chimey effect. I think you might enjoy this a lot if you were looking to chill out in a very extreme way, but I mostly feel that it's been a very long time since I've been stoned enough to get into this.
UV Protection are much more interesting. Musically, I more or less hate everything they stand for, but they put so much effort into putting on a show, and achieve such a bizarre effect, that I'm thoroughly bemused and occasionally enthralled. There are five women, a three-piece band and two dancers, each wearing a variety of textured foil headgear, collars, and cummerbunds. (There are numerous wardrobe malfunctions as the set progresses, and I am charmed when one of the dancers, unable to repair her collar, removes it and immediately removes the other dancer's collar as well, so they'll continue to match. Attention to detail is so important!) The music is radically simplistic synth-pop, but all three musicians are solid at what they're doing, and the lead singer's soaring, obviously operatically trained voice is a powerful treat. The dancers' affectless postmodern hand-jive is fascinating.
Last is B-Lite, the Blind Rapper. (He's not really blind.) He raps goofily about how, blind as he is, he'll still steal your stuff and fuck your woman, accompanied by pre-recorded drum machine and keyboard tracks and a series of hilarious videos in the form of slide shows (which include the lyrics, which I otherwise wouldn't be able to make out) showing B-Lite inserted Zeligiously into various scenes, ob- and otherwise. It's really, really funny. However, there's just the one joke, and after four songs, I've heard it. Since I hate the backing tracks quite a lot, and I feel like I got what I'm going to get out of it, I leave.
