no fun fest- day one. who still alive?

[user_1454]

like, really punching people and beatin on them with a table leg?

i don't get it.

What don't you get?

PS: Your avoidance is weak. Email me.

[user_1453]

yooo, i hear ya vegatable minds
i can't talk about this with anyone at my high school! they won't get it and ill look like an ass.

[user_688]

cheryl, it seems that you are a tortured soul unable to identify with 99.9 percent of the population because Noise took you by surprise. who woulda thought? good thing

anyways, Carlos is a fucking madman. This fest must have taken many days to organize and the fact that something like this exists completely blows my mind.

The music
1) twigg harper=master throat singer! honestly, one of the best, more captivating performances of the night. the dynamics, the body movement, the sonic sculpturing of his vocals were just incredibly intense.

2) Daniel Menche= I have been religous about finding all daniel menche recordings and I have done a pretty good job. I can safely say he is one of my favorite artists but personally, i found his live performance lacking a bit. I would have liked to see him extend himself beyond the grunts and growls.

3) wolf eyes= rockstar noise gods delivered.

4) prurient= insane intensity. super low drone, processed/reverb drenched vocals. reminded me of the swans.

these were a few that i thought i'de touch upon.

[Jacques Oger]

for people, like me, who were not there : a link with some harshnoise music recorded live :
http://www.noisemp3.com/artists/macronympha" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;
Maybe there are others somewhere else.

[Alastair]

i can't talk about this with anyone at my high school! they won't get it and ill look like an ass.

Aha.

[bryan]

As I sort of hint above, my post was designed to annoy a few people into explaining what they enjoy in this music in a little more detail than a list of sets followed by single word descriptions of how 'awesome' they were.

Certain people are their own "genres" - and the important thing is not if they choose to work in noise or bluegrass - it's what they're doing with the sounds.

I think there's alot of variety and invention within noise, and plenty of recorded material out there to back that up.

[user_173]

i wish i could live in a commune with everyone that was there.

This sounds like the worst idea EVER.

[snailed]

Best performance = GRAVEYARDS!!!!

Wolf Eyes with Dilloway was a close second. Also the video feedback + manipulation downstairs was GREAT the last night, especially for The Beast's set. More detailed show report to come later, promise.

Danny, (spaceglob), I agree with you on Menche's set... I love his recorded material but I actually went downstairs in the middle of it cause I wasn't really digging it.

[user_10]

mammoth...

i think my girlfriend and i were right below you during the dilloway set. i'm the mess of greasy black hair parted down the middle with the olive jacket in one of your pictures. i was just staring captivated by the spectacle.

[user_583]

from lee ranaldo:
"You would not believe the insane and fearless, amazing
solo set by Dilloway last night at No Fun---just unbeatable---all the rest
of the wolf eyes crew--olson, nate, mike and about 6 others--onstage from
the outset, arms in the air, goading him to heights of more an further
insanity---just astounding---by his set's end there were maybe 20 people on
stage, all roaring and shoving at him while he did this crazy pantomine w
the mic cables in his mouth---astounding!"

damn -missed friday- besides Dillo the buzz was all about Bone Awl destruction.
saturday:
*hive mind: greh, hoods up, takes his sweet time to unleash the devil - three
beers get
slurped and it's hell heat - fucking cool as shit. *only thing caught downstairs
was
Tarantism - creeped out horror web with rock n rol Jackie from Smegma dead
center
smiling - she rules always- missed harmonson , damn -- *bloodyminded -- insane?
yes -
squealing microphone "this next song..." introductions longer than actual songs
all of
which rule - lotsa confusion. *white rock - gutter drone abstraction, amorphous
and high,
cool -- *twig -- intense, dude is dealing w/ concurrent burned shelter scene
back at
tarantula hill, kix out excellent jam 100% twig and lays out non-mic'd
declaration of love
for the kids - young n old - there's like 300 or more of us here and we love
this dude.
carly comes out and hugs the giant YES-power to move on. -- *Daniel menche -
dude is
bonkers, climbing across the ceiling like noise spiderman - *Macronympha -
steals the
night with jutted jaw super-inebriated date-rape vibe - something fucking
horrible is
gonna happen - dom brings the power slurping topless ice queen black tape on
white
nips, sarah cathers in red bra and fishnets metal whomping and getting sex
grabbed,
olson-connelly-giffoni-et al chaos jam, metal table upended and passed over
audience
head gouging dudes , sends two to hospital -all the while the fucking jam sounds
awesome - totally killer noise aktion. --*Sutcliffe Jugend --- classic UK rant
and hyper
intense gtr/tape state-of-alert mania -- incredible - best guitar playing seen
in long time
- maelstrom jammmer - SJ is mindblowing, * wolf eyes - new shit is heavy! like
burned
mind melting on rusted carcass -- dillo/nate double mic attack - 3:30 am time to
die. But
thanks to Carly's excellent chow, survive. SUNDAY - actually get to check out
awesome
color at 2pm at Glass House and they rule, michigan/brooklyn rock mantra hybrid.
get to
4pm soundcheck. twig/carly have split back to b'more to scope fire scene.
American tapes
party in basement, total place to be w/ Connelly and Olson in lawn chairs
jamming Merkin,
Saccharine Trust - BEast (smegma/wolf eyes) is pretty hot, particularly Connelly
bass
string intensity, john and tovah bang-gonging reed-bleeding between hugs/kisses.
crazy.
boss visuals by AA all night. Raven Strain is AWESOME - totally nails it with
heavy, focused
suitcase junk-pedal genius. motherfucker ruled. Sick Llama - same deal - throws
down
two jammers, the 2nd one ultra-gnarl. basement is balls out killing. PRURIENT
upstairs is
best live prurient EVER. you can tell Dom is ready to rip ass. black hair, black
shirt, black
pants, black shoes, black gloves. slow sick build of dark doom and hiss to pain
vox to
damage rampage to microphone discarded like used/abused insane/violent entity.
Over.
Dom did it dude, the musical Prurient from the CDs fused with the live aktion
hell-scape.
Shit was awesome. **Ex-Cocaine, - caught the last 2 rockers - hella good with
Grateful
Dead tune at end -- total rumble. Everyone's drunk. time to go on - set up -.
Keffer starts
off with 5 minute noise bed then we jam duo and Keffer grabs the mic and creepy
crawls
the crowd - shit gets frenzied nonstop. audience rules. -- *Astromero is jet
engine music
actually cures Christina Carters back ache (3 hour car ride home listening to
Spine
Scavenger cs uncures it). **missed Lambsbread bumrush set, missed it at
Hampshire
tavern the other night too and will miss it this friday at flywheel cuz gotta be
outta town
-- am doomed not to see LB ever GODDAMN - Zac rules, dude likes a toke now and
then,
LB van is ultimate potmobile - Corsano said they kicked excellent ass -- ***The
supremo
mashdown was Graveyards w/ Corsano + Spencer Yeh -- hands down -- drum duo intro
to wicked reed fry and throat death -- perfect ending regardless what the real
ending was
- packed up split - woke up at 7:30 am hit the road home w/ Carter/Gown - hoping
keffer
locked the apartment door behind her - Giffoni rules 100%, in the face of stress
mania
dude keeps it steady and positive. thanks dude - The hook owner-dude also gets
props -
in the face of getting shut down by head - gouged punks or ripped heat electric
pipes is
cool and supports the madness. next year: tower heat lamps in merch shed.

[jkudler]

Dead tune at end -- total rumble. Everyone's drunk. time to go on - set up -.
Keffer starts
off with 5 minute noise bed then we jam duo and Keffer grabs the mic

so, this is thurston?

macronympha steals the
night with jutted jaw super-inebriated date-rape vibe

!!!

-jesse

[user_1453]

"This sounds like the worst idea EVER."
hahaha, maybe. but it's still an interesting idea and i know i would enjoy myself

---

chrisn - i'm glad i got a shot of you and i think i may have remembered you, too. we'll meet again somedayy

---

snailed (steve) - i can come up to NY this Fri if you need me to play violin and i can bring a viola if you need it, too. i couldn't find a cellist, though.

[user_661]

so did "man" show up or what?

[user_688]

thurston dropped out in the 7th grade.

[user_353]

I had an amazing time, almost everybody rocked my bones. Thanks a lot to Carlos for all the time and effort he put into the festival. Way worth it!

[sevenarts]

ok time to attempt a rambling night-by-night set-by-set recap, hope this addresses some of the people who wanted to hear descriptions of actual sounds, although i must confess my memory of some sets may be a little hazy, esp. for the first night.

night 1, showed up in time to catch the beginning, zaimph who i've never even heard of before doing a pretty good if standard guitar-drone thing solo, enjoyable enough. i missed the first few basement acts while i was still getting used to the format & wandering around, but i did catch deathpile, and his set was really killer. i'm not a fan of his records at all, but live it was just the perfect intensity, some crackly start/stop electronics from connelly and DP's raging vocals. 16 bitch pile-up was second upstairs, dense wall of noise with echoey screams from all 3 girls.

next up was jessica rylan/can't, which was typically amazing. jessica's sets always leave me with a really happy feeling. she started w/ an acapella song i've heard her do a few times, i think she said it was a caroliner cover (?), really cute quiet lullaby. for some reason whenever jessica sings unaccompanied, she can shut-up ANY crowd, even rowdy no-funners. then she went into a pair of voice-through-synthesizer songs, the first one delicate and spacious, with warm bloops between melodic, distorted singing, the second song much heavier, feedback squeals shredding through the synth rumble and jessica screaming and lurching around the stage. mesmerizing stage presence, totally shy until she breaks out into a freakout moment like that. deeply affecting set w/o being all that noisy at all -- just enough grit to add some edge. she closes with another pretty acapella song.

now i skip the ranaldo set (saw a couple seconds of it i guess) and at some point i get nice & close to see Bone Awl rocking the basement. atmospheric metal trio, the bassist standing absolutely still & creepy, the singer/guitarist screaming & thrashing, really pounding drums. sections of expectant feedback drone with slowly spaced riffs, breaking out into absolute explosive metal. after them in the basement i saw most of grunt later, but i was tired & in the back so it didn't feel quite as powerful as it probably should've. only problem w/ the basement sets -- low visibility & somewhat quiet PA meant if you weren't up close, a lot of these sets were a little underwhelming.

next (approx) was karkowski/giffoni back upstairs, totally amazing. everyone seems to have forgotten this early set after all the craziness that followed in the next 2 days, but this was a definite highlight. they each played solo sets, followed by a duo, perfect structure, perfect length, and totally overwhelming intensity. giffoni started with an explosive synthy spacenoise set, one of the best i've seen him do, karkowski followed up with a more textured, dynamically abrasive set, very organic processed sounds clanking and scraping through a sea of harsh digital static. then a duo that redefined intensity, each of them playing at full blast but without turning into chaos; they just blended together almost perfectly.

ahhh then must've been grunt downstairs, and after that i came back up & caught the second half of zeena parkins & ikue mori. stuck out like a sore thumb at this fest, of course, but it was still a pretty good set from what i heard. very thin, metally sounds from parkins, who had giant sheets of aluminum foil and bell-like plucking sounds from her harp; mori doing washes of chopped-up digital samples flying around parkins' percussive sounds. much more delicate & improv-y than anything else this weekend, i'm glad i caught it for the contrast.

and after that i'm sorry to say i was exhausted from working all day and wanting to be back in top form for saturday night, so i split before solmania & smegma. night 2 coming soon.

[sevenarts]

night 2... showed up nice & early again, one of a handful lucky enough to see spider compass good crime band play a looooong set in the basement to start the night. bossanova keyboards and harsh noise outbursts from two guys dressed up as birds pretty much says it all. funky and funny. i missed pretty much everything else in the basement saturday, except for hearing noel von harmonson's set of nice textured tapenoise from the very back of the room -- couldn't tell what he was doing, but it sounded cool.

meanwhile upstairs, OPC started the night (despite their billing being changed on the website to CPT?? to avoid the parents finding out i guess?). anyway, they were visibly nervous but totally destroyed anyway. equipment troubles tripped them up a few times, but they steamrolled right over the interruptions, doing wild frantic start-stop pedal-noise, rough and spastic w/ some screamed vocals. ended abruptly, then started again after shouts for more, gave up after a minute and wrecked their gear. total teen noise.

hive mind up next, you know what to expect. the bones in my throat were rattling, i could feel my heart keeping time with the bass depth-charges. greh totally calm and spacing out to his own sounds, drinking beers amid the slow-building bassy drone.

bloodyminded, what can i possibly say to do it justice. totally ridiculous set, the band coming on with the vibe of judas priest and mark solotroff doing song introductions that dwarfed the length of the actual songs. each song short & fast, brutal harshnoise fury with screamed vocals and much stage diving and pit antics. i'm half convinced that a few of the guys weren't making any sound at all, they seemed to be there exclusively for the visual spectacle.

white rock was next, merging of double leopards with mouthus and it worked beautifully. metallic scraping drums creating an industrial clattering rhythm behind the slow shimmer of guitar and delayed vocals -- a vaguely psychedelic vibe, like a less enveloping version of a DL live set. very nice.

then twig from nautical, doing a really bonkers solo set. before he even got to play, the no fun dj (roger from monotract i think?) played a recording from Mothers Against Noise, berating us all for listening to this crap. cut off midstream, twig went to play, and the mom promptly started back up again. haha. then twig started, and almost immediately ran into equipment difficulties, shades of no fun year 1. lurched around for a bit, cursed at his gear, played some lathes, then said fuck it and did some absolutely amazing vocal work using just a contact mic, all stuttering gasps and gross burbling. finally got his gear working and charged into a frantic, super-fast-paced noise set, densely layered electronics and clarinet squeals. ended with cheers & twig giving a motivational speech, DON'T YOU EVER GIVE UP. awesome.

randomly heard cellphone conversation outside on the patio: "i'd love to but i've just had my mind blown like 27 times." yea, that about sums it up.

menche, doing his soccer hooligan thing. sonically, i was into it, deep vocal drones with rhythmic pulses from his contact-mic'd wooden slat and shouted vocals echoing over the top. simple but effective. his running around and fist-pounding was kinda distracting and at the end when he was hanging from the speaker i was just worried for poor bridget squished under his big-booted foot. after, club owner came over & started randomly telling me all about all the work they were now going to have to do to restabilize the speakers. seemed bemused and only slightly annoyed, and like a very cool guy.

macronympha, i guess everyone knows about by now. i forgot there was music going on after about 10 minutes, but before that it was a pretty good wall of noise thing with clattering rhythms and a really dense, dynamic roar from dom, joe, & tim.

SJ was (besides nnck) possibly my only genuine disappointment of the weekend, guitar-and-bass drone with shouted vocals, kinda boring, maybe wouldn't have seemed so mediocre if everything else this weekend hadn't killed so hard. left before wolf eyes, probably shouldn't have but oh well.

[sevenarts]

night 3 showed up a little later but everything started late too so i was just in time to get nice & close for THE BEAST in the basement... made up for missing wolf eyes & smegma by seeing them both together, and it was great fun. at least ten people playing together, a constantly shifting wall of noise with different sounds stepping out, sometimes things veering more towards the harsh electronics of WE, sometimes more towards Smegma's jammy vocals and horn sounds. connelly spacing in the middle of the action with droney riffs, olson and tovah banging gongs and laying down sax wails, crazy babbling vocals from the smegma woman, and wild drumming throughout. amazing w/ so many people it never became a total mess, everything just layered really nicely.

while this was going on i think eloe omoe played upstairs, b/c i missed them, but i did see the end of shackamaxon, which was pretty standard lo-fi hissy drone with some rattle-and-scrape free-folk improv sounds crackling against the surface. then i went back to the basement for a while and missed fat worm of error. raven strain i heard from the very back, nice electronic set but suffered the usual back-of-the-room problems, so i made sure to get right up front for sick llama, who totally destroyed. a series of tape recorders lined up in front of him, a clarinet (what is it with noise musicians playing reeds??), and a pedal, and he created a shifting wall of heavy noise, burst of high screeching feedback, rumbling lows, indiscernable lo-fi muck from mangled cassettes. played a hard, fast track, ending with a bit of piano and a quick fadeout (didn't want us to hear what was really on those tapes, i guess). the crowd demanded more, and he played a second piece that was somehow even better, harsher, more satisfying. definitely my big discovery of no fun, i gotta get some of his stuff now.

then i went back upstairs for most of the rest of the night, just in time to catch a really amazing prurient set, completely different from anything i've seen him do live before. started standing completely still in front of a box of electronics, creating a creeping bass drone that was clearly just building anticipation for the inevitable explosion. then started in with brutal reverbed vox, screaming and pacing around the stage, adjusting his equipment to amp up the intensity, feedback bursts racing around atop the bass rumble. translated the physical intensity of dom's usual prurient sets into a completely new sound.

john wiese followed this with a great set of his own, more deep bass but this time no explosion seemed imminent, and indeed the set was more of a slowburn rather than a rapid burst. digital clicks and sputters danced across the bass, occasional rhythmic clanks and pops, and a slow loud engulfing towards the end. after him, leslie keffer & thurston moore, which i don't think anyone was expecting to be quite as good as it was. started pretty unassuming, with thurston's usual feedback guitar and some noisy high electronic sounds from leslie, but things quickly got crazier from there, with leslie screaming through contact mics, stage-diving, and amping up the sound into high-energy full-on harsh noise, thurston looking increasingly silly as he ran through the SY guys' usual gamut of things-to-do-with-a-guitar, but the sound remained totally compelling.

borbetomagus next, not as loud as i'd expected but then my ears were probably pretty dulled by this point. still really brilliant set, overpowering wall of noise with the sax alternately soloing over the roar or blending into it in a processed haze. and then astromero, as if the weekend hadn't had enough mindmelting sets already, romero laying down his usual organ-squishing bass, and astro doing spacey synth sounds on top, total mind-altering psychedelic music. looked like astro was having equipment difficulties, screaming into a mic that didn't seem to be doing anything, but the set was still killer, and astro is clearly the world's first modular synth rock star, jumping up on the table and shaking his synth like it was a guitar. went on maybe a bit too long, but that was kinda the point anyway: total excess.

stuck around for a little while of nnck's set, which didn't come together at all while i was there; really aimless & plodding. but forget that, the weekend was amazing, so much great music.

[vegetable mind]

you shouldve stayed in the basement for skaters and ex-cocaine

fucking sick jams from both of them. ex-cocaine was definitely my no fun find, bought their tape immediately and love it...live set was incredible heavy psychedelic jams with bongos, ending with a grateful dead cover that was amazing....awesome jams

[edwin]

anyone else stay in the basement after Skaters for the reggae dance party when everyone shouldve been upstairs getting a spot for borbetomagus?
im pissed that i missed their set but i had a fucking blast dancing to the fucked up reggae olson was putting on down there. i tried to leave once but then they put on "Nice Up the Dance" and i gave up