good noise

I went to a show tonight not really knowing what to expect. It was Lampo’s first show since the spring, and the inaugural show in its new space on the near north side. The guy who introduced Marcus Schmickler quoted Phil Niblock as saying that Schmickler is (if I recall correctly) a “future kid,” and extended the metaphor half-jokingly to suggest we were about the hear “the sound of the future.” I had heard one album by Marcus Schmickler, Amazing Daze, which in my memory consists almost entirely of low drones, but according to reviews is at times fairly abrasive. The piece Schmickler played at this show was very different: roaring, howling, shrieking, gurgling, crackling, mostly with a metallic edge to it. Very “busy,” as the friend I heard it with put it; like me, he was bowled over by the complexity, density and inventiveness of the sound. The sound was produced entirely from Schmickler’s laptop. He sat at a desk during the performance, looking down at the computer. There were four speakers, surrounding the audience at its four corners.

I don’t know quite how to write about this music. It is best experienced live, I think, and perhaps part of the attraction is being able to experience it, to endure the cacophany. For one stretch I was contemplating getting a hearing exam at the university health center, wondering if I would have to go see a specialist and how much it would cost. My grandfather on my dad’s side experienced hearing loss when he got older, so I’m worried that at some point I’ll have to stop listening to loud music. His hair also went completely white in his early 30s, but that didn’t happen to my dad. I should mention that I have forgotten almost everything I learned in high school biology and the physical anthropology class I had to take at Cal. Of course there are ear plugs (they were being offered at the front table), but the sound is just not the same, as I experienced at a Rocket from the Crypt show at Bimbo’s 365 in 1999. At that show I had the plugs in for most the set, taking them out only in the last five minutes. Without the plugs the band was a revelation.

Anyway, I do not want my writing about the show to be overly hasty description-wise. There’s a risk of heavy-handedness in wanting to “explain” this music (or sound art, or whatever): to thematize it, to taxonomize it, to too securely spatialize (place-ify?) it. What I guess I’m saying is that there’s an interpretive risk of reifying an art form that aims to subvert, transgress, and/or overcome. (Exactly what the object – “object” in the sense of “a thing which is perceived, thought of, known, etc”, not “aim” – of this subversion etc would be I’m not so sure of.) On the other hand, I don’t necessarily want to posit a pre-critical or pre-rational domain of sensation in which the work operates, though such an idea has recently attained renewed critical respectability.

The sound was at times mimetic, to almost comic effect. (Indeed, a dude in front of me burst out laughing several times.) One of the dominant motifs was a tonal upswell that made me feel like I was close to an airplane taking off. After church sometimes my family parked next to the runways at SFO, just off the frontage road next to 101, mainly because my dad wanted to and he was almost always the one who drove, to watch and hear airplanes land and take off. Other sounds being mimicked: ambulance sirens, machines in a factory. The latter has, of course, been a dominant motif of experimental sound art since its earliest days. Some phases of washed out noise sounded like Niagara Falls (I went there in summer 2004), which is also extremely common in noise music. For a moment I thought of the noise torture at Guantanamo: I can’t decide if this reaction is banal, or if such an aim on the artist’s part might not be inconsistent with the diabolical character of the work.

The sound also created a sense of space, which is what this kind of sound art (if we can speak of "kinds" here) also tends to do. Schmickler creates sonic spaces incredibly well. “Sense of space” does not necessarily mean built space. In fact, it sounded more like the destruction of built space, in the manner theorized by Benjamin or in a certain sense Bataille, or Pynchon (see "Zone") or Sebald. Sometimes I felt embraced, with vibrations swelling up from the floor. There were occasional sensations of being in a natural space: underwater (maybe under the river Lethe, or the lake of fire (see also this, which has a handy glossary of literary terms)), and at the very end, in the simulacrum of rain forest full of mechanical birds and bugs.

The new space turned out to be ideal for this kind of performance. The acoustics seemed excellent, and the spareness of the décor, as is the custom in art galleries – off-white walls with green light projected on to them – provided a more or less neutral material support for sonic construction of space.

At one point in show I saw a scrap of something fall down from the ceiling. I looked up to see if there was anything above me. At the Alexei Pliousnine show at The Renaissance Society last October, the sound was so loud that it actually dislodged a huge piece of equipment from the ceiling. Luckily no one was killed. I was at that show, but left at the break, before the sky started falling.

It was snowing heavily tonight, making the trip from Hyde Park a little rough, but it was thoroughly worth it. I walked in the new snow with few people or cars around, not being able to discern the boundary between sidewalk and street, throwing a few snowballs at the trees lining the street.

p.s. Peter Margasak, the most open-eared music critic in Chicago that I know of, has a good take on the Schmickler show.