Wolf Eyes, June 27th, Picador

The show was great for a few reasons. First and foremost, there was the the debut of Crackity Sax, the newest project from Kelly of Escape the Floodwater. This three-piece set the crowd of cynical hipsters into a frenzy with their completely straight-ahead take on "Minnie the Moocher" - you might know it better as "The Hidey-Hidey-Ho Song."



I have to shamefacedly admit that I was a little to preoccupied with photography to offer more than a superficial take on Trash Dog's set, but on the plus side I think I accidentally took a picture of Jeff's soul:



I think that means I control him now.

Finally, and maybe most crucially, the pairing of Lwa and Wolf Eyes really helped me pin down exactly what kind of creature Lwa is. Wolf Eyes is a serious frenzy of ramshackle energy and full-bore performance. Their guitarist - is that the right term? - really left it all on stage.



Lwa, even though they gesture towards an air of masculine menace with their single bare bulb and no shirts, are not at all the same kind of band. They're practically Japanese in their restraint, minimalism, and careful, slow development (and I'm not talking Merzbow here). They're also really coming into their own - this was easily the best set I've seen from them.

Altar of Flies – The Creeping Unknown

I just got a completely kickass trade package from Matthias, the man behind both the Swedish Hasten & Korset label (sinkorswim61@hotmail.com) and the Altar of Flies project. In exchange for an old CDR and a zine, he sent me three tapes, two buttons, and a completely kickass sticker – I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about who got the better end of the deal.

Even better, the tapes are really good, particularly this Altar of Flies record. It’s just the sort of nasty, crunchy, but strangely soothing low-frequency shit I loved to go to sleep to when I first started getting into noise, and would have gotten huge play on the original sleepnotwork radio show I did in college. It’s perfect 4am listening. There is no melody; primarily it’s low-frequency tones with a nice bit of grit to them. This is going to sound a bit too wholesome, but it’s the sound of eating granola – That is, of course, if granola occasionally started resonating at high frequency in your skull. There are small animals mewling in the boulders.

Review: Trash Dog “X-Dog”/ Zero Aggression “Anti-Life Equation=You Don’t Get to Live” – Detrivore Cassingle Series

Trash Dog are utter fucking garbage, with obvious intent and possible malice. It’s like that Marcel Duchamp thing where he wrote “R. Mutt” on a urinal, except this time around Duchamp is pissing in your ear while you look at it. The vocals here (by Witcher?) sound like Corky from Life Goes On covering some lost 60s bubblegum gem, while Darren Ho manages to sound like he just picked up a guitar yesterday, which I imagine took some genuine de-learning. Basically, this is for fans of the Shaggs, if they went to art school.

Zero Aggression may seem like the same deal on the surface, but is in fact a fundamentally different beast. First and foremost, Jack Gilbert is a dangerously demented freak, so hearing him screaming about how “you don’t get to live” is enough to send a chill down your spine – but meanwhile, thanks to some tight, sunny riffs, there’s such a pure optimistic epicness to it that you really want to be in a convertible with the top down.

Then we get a second movement, an unaccompanied disquisition about Horse Transport and Plank Manufacture, Gilbert’s menacing innocence turning some series of technical specifications into compelling Dadaism. By the time he shouts “Is everyone ready . . . for the transformation?” you believe this fucker can deliver, and you pause a little as you wait for the Rapture or . . . whatever this next-level shit will be. Then we get a tantalizing little treat at the end – the Stereolab-ish “remix” of the track, with a computer voice doing Gilbert’s vocals over an analogue(esque) wash of sickly-sweet glowing rainbow tones. The individual parts are great enough, but the movement between them makes this completely essential.

Review: Nimby “Flotation Device”/Dubdrip “Smoke-tinged Perception” – Detrivore Cassingle Series


Nimby is Brendan O’Keefe, who is also the man behind Detrivore, and therefore could have easily put out any old totally weak piece of his own. Instead, this track is about three minutes of damn-near-godliness, especially on a good system that lets the warmth really shine. Kicks in with a slightly echoey, laid-back groove, out of which blossoms these incredible bell tones sketching a melody loop. The melody throughout this is totally sublime, and I’m pretty unsure how he does this, since the entire project is based on drum triggers made out of margarine tubs. Anyway, a few moments in and suddenly there are some monstrous booms, like the rocket’s leaving for Marz – and congratulations, so are you.

Darren Ho is a friend of mine, and I love his work with Racoo-oo-oon, his techno-ey stuff (with Nimby) in Cuticle, and, based on what little I’ve heard, his Drip House solo tapes. He’s a really talented guy, and a dedicated artist. Sadly, this side as Driphouse does not represent him well. The Nimby side takes some of the best parts of dub –the echoes, the warmth – and puts an intriguing spin on it; by contrast, Dripdub pretty much takes off from the idea that reggae as a whole is a punchline; from the weed-joke title to the repetitive casio-preset baseline to the absurd fake-Jamaican accent of the vocals, the outcome is pretty tough to listen to. The track just feels incredibly tossed-off, and is frankly a bit of a disservice to the brilliant work that backs it up.

When I listen to this tape I pretty much just rewind the Nimby side repeatedly. It’s still totally worth owning.

Review: Lwa “A Softened Focus”/Secret Abuse “Release You Away; Towards Greater Pig Shit” - Detrivore Cassingle Series

The highlight here is definitely the Secret Abuse side, which really hits my sweet spot of slowly unfolding melodicism drizzled with a sheen of static dressing and punctuated with the occasional crunchy nugget of insane grinding feedback. The ascent from eno-esque melodrone to gently screaming banging-on-a-sheet-of-metal squall is absolutely sublime.

Lwa’s aesthetic hasn’t generally appealed to me as much when I’ve seen them here in IC – but this side has grown on me after a few listens. There’s only a minimal sense of progression or tension, but that’s got its place. These very ambient tones and echoing snippets of conversation will be the bees knees to some folks – it’s much more of an atmosphere than music. Very subdued, very analog. A heartbeat pulse, bells, cawing crows outro . . .

As you can guess from the name, the Exodus festival started life as an event for filthy hippies, but after losing a step and not happening for the past two or three summers (because I got high?) Exodus came back this year with a decidedly leaner, younger, and quite frankly cooler bent. The highlights of the show were, in ascending order:

Cuticle, which consists of the combined forces of Darren Ho (Drip House/Racoo-oo-oon) and Brendan O’Keefe (NIMBY). The outdoor setting wasn’t quite right for their brand of trippy, tribal, noisy techno – I wish they’d gone on a lot later, in the dark. Also, I can’t believe Brendan got that sweet vocoder out of a dumpster.



Twelve Canons are a band who have played in Iowa City for as long as I’ve lived here, but until last night I’d never seen them. It’s a heartbreaker, too, because their brand of otherworldly roots-inspired music is right up my alley. Their weird funereal wailing, intricate but battered fingerstyle guitar, and brutish, foot-pounding rhythms will make them the darlings of any fans of Clarence Ashley or Roscoe Holcombe. The show was augmented by two things – another local artist, three sheets to the wind, muscling up onstage to sing along, and a local idiot nearly setting himself on fire by carefully pouring lamp oil from the tiki torches into a pile of grass. These, plus someone behind the stage setting off fireworks, lent the set an eerie tension – something was going on, but no one knew just what it was. (For better or for worse, my camera ran out of batteries just as all this nuttiness was going down.)



Then came the indisputable climax of the whole festival:



That’s right, fire breathers. And juggling:


All with, as you can see, a band providing backup. The band played a series of hilariously over-serious Aerosmith covers. There was a sneer built into the gesture – those hard rockers aren’t nearly as hard as us fire-folk.

And that was, in a nutshell, the dichotomy of this year’s Exodus. The programmer/organizer was a young hipstress, and she invited a mix of her underground friends and the previously traditional jam/reggae acts to play. So there was a bit of a split identity going on. That’s inevitable in a festival, I guess – no one wants to see everything. But in this case the split was pretty clear, and the shift of focus (plus the hiatus) seems to have hurt the Festival – I’d say at best a third of the Magger’s farm capacity was used, and by the end of the night our hostess was soliciting donations, so I imagine she took a (relatively small) bath on it. Maybe it’s that pale subterranean hipsters were less inclined than dreadlocked rastas to go out to a farm and see music while worrying about rain and bugs. Hard to say, though – some of these Iowa hipsters are pretty hearty.

Whatever was keeping people away, I do hope the fest happens again next year – it was a great time - though that's partly because it was so sparsely attended. The porta potties were clean almost the whole 24 hours.