A kind of spiritual successor to the House of Vans shows that ran a few
years back, Red Bull sponsored a number music events in New York over
the summer. The highlight for me was obviously the one with Napalm
Death. It seems strange for bands like Napalm and Bastard Noise to glad
hand with, ahem, "
multinational corporations";
and frankly, what companies like Red Bull and Scion see in sponsoring
extreme metal events is baffling. But with extreme music being split
into smaller and smaller pieces by increasingly niche scenes, and very
little money going around any of them, metal can use all the help it can
get. I say we take their sickly sweet energy drink money and run while
we still can.
With the stages in such close proximity, overlap from one stage to
another was to be expected, with occasionally comic results. Case in
point:
Okkyung Lee looked like the world's saddest cellist as she sat on the Mirror Stage awaiting her set time while
GNAW's
screeching misanthropy reverberated from the Main Stage through her
still-empty hall. But when it came time to put bow to string, she was
more than capable of holding her own.
Even with the word "hardcore" in the event name, there wasn't much going on that night that was in my wheelhouse;
Bastard Noise
were one of the few exceptions - and they were stellar. Aimee Artz was a
commanding presence as a frontwoman, and Eric Wood wrangled sounds out
of his bass the poor instrument was never designed to make. It's amazing
how full the band sounded with just a bassist, drummer, and vocalist.
Their energized performance owned the Back Room stage and more than made
up for the pretentious navel gazing going on everywhere else in the
venue. Not just one of the best sets of the night, but one of the best
sets I saw in NY this summer.
What's an experimental music showcase without some jazz?
The Thing
are from Sweden, and ended their set with what they claimed was a
Coltrane cover. I can't picture Coltrane's session bassist hitting his
instrument quite as much as the The Thing's did, but it was a fun to see
jazz taken to this extreme without reaching Zorn-esque overload.
Meanwhile, guitarist
Reg Bloor was
on the Mirror Stage doing...something. A small crowd gathered to watch
her wail on her guitar, though what we heard we may not all agree on. I
listened intently for a few minutes, realized I've never had patience
for solo guitarists no matter what genre they're pursuing, and made my
way back to the main stage.
During my later days in college,
Wolf Eyes
were a name that resonated with music snobs and ended up on more than a
few mixtapes in my possession. What my cool art school friends never
told me is that Wolf Eyes is apparently a guitarist playing
indecipherable riffs, a vocalist screaming indecipherable rants, and
third member dancing like a scary biker version of the Happy Mondays'
Bez. With much of the musical heavy lifting being done by a DAT tape,
it's questionable whether what I saw amounted to more than noise karaoke
- but if nothing else, Wolf Eyes showed that at high volumes their
music is incredibly affecting.
Given the number of heshers who showed up to the event in their heroes' shirts (
guilty), it would appear I wasn't the only one who had a middling interest in experimental music and just wanted to see
Napalm Death grind and destroy. With a setlist that leaned heavily on their latest album
Utilitarian,
Napalm, as always, were a glorious exercise in controlled chaos.
Perhaps owing to the avant/experimental nature of the event, "Self
Betrayal" was aired in a rare showing of their much maligned 90's
material. [No "Hung" or "Plague Rages"? I cry foul!] Barney was in fine
form, bantering with the crowd and getting someone to finally turn off
the damn smoke machine
("We're not the Mission."), as well as using the breaks between songs to
proselytize against discrimination in
all its forms. Two decades after it first coalesced, this version of
Napalm Death isn't just
campaigning for musical destruction, but for marriage equality and reproductive freedom as well.
Skullflower is a band that I've been meaning to investigate as I
delve deeper into the realm of drone, but seeing them
after midnight guaranteed that I'd be too tired to take them
in... even with all the free Red Bull I could stuff in my pockets. I'm glad I got to see
them, but at the end of a full day that included jiu jitsu and Napalm
Death, and with a morning trip to Boston pending, I decided that their
formless drone would have been better served through earbuds on
the train ride home. Still, the incense was a nice touch.
