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It's a big night of noise women at PA's Lounge. I have had a craptastic day and am seriously ready for some noise women. But first, we have David Gross, "playing" the saxophone. He mostly makes a kind of high, thin squeaking sound. It varies somewhat in breathiness, and I work to find enough evolving textural stuff here to hold my interest, but really, he's just blowing into a saxophone and making it squeak.
Next up are Donna Parker and Kate Village, and the textural explorations begin in earnest. No subtlety tonight: Donna blasts right in super-loud with feedback screams and pulsating light saber noises from her setup. Kate's guitar is actually hard to hear for a while, so it's kind of cool when Donna's setup suddenly ceases to make sound and the feedback-drenched fuzz-drone takes center stage. Fortunately, the problem is quickly rectified, and then mirrored later in the set when Kate's system cuts out. She reconfigures her pedals and plugs back in with fewer effects, so the last portion of the set has more fast strumming, almost rhythm guitar style sounds.
16 Bitch Pileup are a three-piece from Ohio with a truly fantastic name. They each have a microphone and a small tableful of electronics; one also has a guitar, and one a keyboard, but it's hard to pick anything that sounds like a guitar or a straightforward keyboard sample out of the stew of noise that they present. Even the signal from the microphones is heavily processed and filtered, and so I spend the enjoyable bulk of their set attentionally pursuing fleeting snatches of voice or speech that are buried in feedback and effects.
Fe-Mail are from somewhere Scandinavian. There are two of them, on opposite sides of one long table filled with stuff. Once again, it's buttons and knobs and a fierce, noisy stew. They use no microphones at all, and their sound relies more on samples (which include samples of speech, woven hypnotically into the mix) and these very cool "electric maracas" that they have: little boxes on wires that make some sort of signal (how it comes out sounding varies with the settings of downstream devices) when shaken or squeezed. Between those and the pounding on sample buttons, there's a lot of engaging rhythm in their set. And then one of them pulls out the French horn. It's a jarring contrast to the rest of their equipment, but her tuneless meanderings on it lie comfortably in their sonic context.
