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Pan9 is another cool sub rosa performance space/artist collective thingy somewhere in Metro Boston. Tonight, after a no-budget documentary screening and a sort of solo theatrical performance, Neptune take the "stage." I had been nervous about their new lineup, since I'd heard that it was more electronic and added oscillators, and they're down a drummer, and I didn't want them to break a beautiful thing. Not to worry! All that's true, but the new instrumentation is excellent and beautifully integrated into Neptune's sound. Their concept, for anyone new to the band, is all homemade instruments. (I've heard that it actually started out as a sculpture project that took on a musical life of its own.) So the new instruments are sort of homemade synthesizers, and look like a tornado hit a Radio Shack. (The guitars and bass, by contrast, are sculpturally gorgeous pieces, all in metal, with a harshly beautiful sound. You should see this stuff, and fortunately, you can, as there are photos of the evening by Bill T. Miller here.) They make some serious buzzing nightmare noises with the synths, and channel them into heavily rhythmic, broodingly harmonic rock songs. There are drummer-triggered feedback blasts, and a highly amplified finger piano that sounds fantastic. The lyrics are poetic spoken-word fragments that contribute a lot of atmosphere.
Can't, the nom de bruit of Jessica Rylan, is more of a pure noise project. Her first piece is very quiet, spoken word over minimal synth stuff, and I can't really hear it over the crowd. Jessica does sing, but mostly it's through a microphone into her (also homemade) analog synth rig, and what comes out only rarely sounds anything like a voice. When she's not singing, it's mostly a slow, thrumming oscillation, which she modulates by twisting knobs. When she sings, it seems that the higher the volume of input, the faster the oscillators thrum. It also seems that the loudest part of each wobble lets some formants leak through from her vocal stream, so when she's screaming at the top of her lungs, I can almost make out snatches of what she's singing. The rest of the time it sounds cut up and weird. Then she ends her set, somewhat shockingly, by turning off the amp and singing, a capella and unamplified, a sort of jazzy, hookless number that might be called "Wishing Well." She's a stylish singer, and after all that volume the intensity of a quite, simple song is captivating.
Crank Sturgeon is from Maine. He's something. I can't really say what, exactly, but he is definitely something. He is extravagantly costumed (while still showing a lot of skin), with an electric codpiece. He is accompanied for much of his set by a Casiotone-style rhythm and chords generator. He sings, sort of, mostly into contact mics gripped in his hands, or between his teeth, or pressed against a large paper phallus the end of which he holds in his mouth for one song. (The sound-filtering qualities of a contact mic pressed against a paper phallus held in the mouth make for quite an interesting timbre, and the visual is striking.) He spends a lot of time touching contacts together, so there's a great deal of crackling and buzzing. For his last "song" he plugs into his codpiece. And that's not even starting on the entirely non-musical portions of his performance: the hand stamps, the poem, the leaf blower, or the lighter-and-spray-can segment that seems like a spectacularly bad idea in such a crowded and Fire Code insensible space. I don't know if I really enjoyed any of it as music, but I definitely feel like I got a show.
