Bhob Rainey
Official Site
MySpace

Greg Kelley
Official Site
MySpace

Bryan Day (Shelf Life, Platform)
MySpace

Howard Stelzer
Official Site

The first band features a mummified man with beaded hair and an earnest young aspiring (noise) rock star with a too-perfect goatee. They both hold, of all things, guitars, though the use of these guitars is unexpected. The old man sits and wails into a microphone, telling stories as incomprehensible as your war hero grandpa’s, flailing at the guitar on his lap only occasionally. The young man plays guitar and a host of instruments including the vacuum cleaner: The quintessential experimental instrument, prized for its great volume and recognizability. Did you ever think of the guitar as a percussion instrument, the vacuum as a woodwind? Now you might.

And with noise comes sight for a full experience. The visuals begin with a man performing martial arts movements on the street, cars passing by as though no art is taking place. He’s near a fire hydrant. The band screams. The man extends an arm. The noise-music bleats. The video cuts to someone huddled on the ground. To a woman sitting on a bench, gesturing wildly with the music: I want to get out. I want to be. I want to become who I am. You understand that the noise is nothing but the soundtrack to everyone’s inner turmoil. Rocking on a bench. A plastic bag blows into the huddled man. Nothing happens but the inner noise, now realized in concert. The video changes scenes frenetically, from martial arts man to huddled man to the woman in distress. The music keeps up, keeps us alive.

Cut that group; Pan to another. A nice bearded guy with glasses, the type of guy you’d smile to see your sister date, sets up on a table filled with synthesizers and pink ice cube trays. The first part of his act involves distributing ice and other objects (dirt, leaves, batteries) into cups, then handing them out to the audience. You wonder if this is sort like a Flaming Lips boombox experiment. Will everyone shake the cups to make “music” in unison? No, that would be too participatory. Instead, everyone simply holds the cups and listens. You wonder if the ice melting in your cup makes a noise loud enough to be heard, to be part of the show. You wonder if the dark substance in the cup under the ice is dirt, as it seems, or if it’s something else entirely. The musician walks his fingers up and down a platform, making noises. There are no visuals for this show, only tactiles: everyone is a silent orchestra, cups in hand, motionless.

Examine the dirty slush, a reminder of sounds past, as the next band sets up: Electronic equipment on a long folding table. The noises are all screams, groans, Halloween without the treats—just digital tricks. Washed-out pastel fluctuations, mostly circular, grow on the wall like mold spores made of light. The noise is loud but it leaves you blank—wondering, wishing, unsure of where or what you are. It’s one way to cleanse your musical palette—no other songs can run through your mind when listening to this. It’s almost a physical sickness, a shortness of breath; you get a little dizzy with the drama. One musician is nearly still; the other taps and moves his feet as though he’s using a pedal to manipulate his noises—even though he’s not. Maybe all of us have invisible pedals we use to influence our environments? This place starts getting to you after a while.

Image of Bhob Rainey from his official site. More after the jump! Post contributed by Kerry Skemp.

Cut to Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley. All right—these guys have real names (first and last!)—even if one is questionably spelled, and even if they play together as nmperign (part of a Latin phrase for “the unknown through the more unknown.” Count on experimental musicians to worry about the more unknown). They also have real instruments—you recognize a soprano and a trumpet, both done up in the golden brass of grade school band. This you can deal with. You know what to expect: Screeches, squawks. How experimental can you get with a trumpet?

Very. Rainey and Kelley remove their mouthpieces, scrape their instruments with metal, use mutes to manipulate instead of silence, and in general make every single sound but those their instruments were designed for. You hear crippled crickets, cars that won’t start, domestic disputes, whispered secrets, sticky windows that won’t open (or close), dying swans, helicopters, danger. You hear sirens, too; perhaps those came from outside, but considering the other noises these men have made, you have to wonder. The audience’s shuffling and shifting on foot or in chairs creates a subtle rhythm behind the noises that can’t be called melodies, reinforcing the idea that this performance is space and time specific: It will never be replicated again. Toss your recording-based concept of music; this is the real thing. Or is it?

After nearly three hours of absorbing and reflecting various ambient noise experiments, you’re finished. You’ve run a mental musical marathon and your interpretive muscles have cramped. There’s another band setting up, and they look promising—a measuring tape is draped over a stand; surely it will make an appearance as an “instrument” of some sort—but you can’t listen to another noise you can’t easily categorize, easily understand. You just want to step outside into the familiar blare of street sounds, insert your earbuds, and select a delicious pop song to digest easily—to sing along with, maybe. You want to get home, slide the key into the lock, hear it click open, thump down the hallway, fall into bed with the bang of instant sleep.

And you want to do all this without analyzing each noise as though it’s intentional, as though it’s anything but the byproduct of a particular action. You don’t mean to sound this way walking down the street; it just happens. Sure, it could be interesting to record it, to vary it, to speed it up, to slow it down: crescendos of streetwalking, of personal movement, what a walk sounds like when removed of where it’s going. Perhaps surprisingly, what you crave most after an evening of aural experiment isn’t silence, exactly: it’s noise you can categorize, noise you understand.

It’s like putting down Proust to read People. It’s giving your mind an easy way out. We can’t exert ourselves all the way all the time, so we have pop music. But listening to sweet sounds alone will rot your brain just as much as sugar rots your teeth. So eat your crickets for dinner and put on some noise rock today: Your brain may not thank you, but it will work some mental muscles in places it didn’t know it had.

Ready for a workout? More info about these artists is available at the top.