Tickets are now available for the Yip-Yip show @ Sweat Records on Saturday, February 27 2010. 

You can get them at Sweat Records (buy em at the counter) and through the Roofless Records website. LIMITED TO 60. If they sell out, Yip-Yip will perform a matinee show at Sweat earlier in the day. 

Buy tickets through PayPal (scroll down to Feb 27) here. 

Paypal adds 50 cents. You will be emailed a receipt. All sales final. 

We’re distro-ing the new Bill Orcutt LP, A New Way To Pay Old Debts. Bill played an exquisite set at Churchill’s a few weeks back and this new record is a major favorite from 09. The album fits perfectly within the lineage of Harry Pussy ’s noise/hardcore shred onslaught while elaborating on and further developing the sonic dialect developed by that legendary trio. Check out the catalog section for more information. 

skeleton warrior - pornographic hologram (Obsolete Units) 

We’re going to be so bold and call Skeleton Warrior Florida’s Sun City Girls. Much like the Bishop brothers and the late Charles Goucher, the Warrior has long treated genre as an endlessly replenished buffet of possibilities and directions. What started as a two-piece (Throbbing Gristle + Suicide influenced) “noise band” (‘we wanted to play pop music but noise was easier’ an early wry aside) has gone through so many waves and cycles that everyone paying attention ceased long ago to attempt predicting the next move.

Pornographic Hologram a cassette released by NYC’s Obsolete Units is rooted in material recorded toward the end of their heavy rock movement and at the beginning of what would turn out to be an exploration of dark dance music. While much fits right in with the one-long-sesh of Summer 07 (from which their side of the Pharaoh Faucett split 7” “Sister Hologram” and “Too Much For One Brain” on the Over/Bored comp LP), the beginning of their sleaze-disco tendencies can be heard forming, not to mention some splatter that is reminiscent of their earliest CD releases.

During that 07 Summer the Warrior released an uwieldy and ridiculous 2CD-R set featuring a track per disc, each about an hour long. These were culled from extended jams in the group’s summer basement (the same basement in which they brewed their excellent dark harsh opus Black Logan). Much of the material on this tape is remiscient of that 2CD-R collection, and is thankfully edited for your consumption (maybe one day we’ll re-release the double disc in a more palatable format because everything on it is gold).

Pornographic Hologram is bookended with tracks featuring MLU drummer J. Plotkin (a.k.a. Outmode). The songs recall the breackneck pace often inspired by E. Gressman’s (of Tyger Beat) percussive contributions. Warrior James Francis once drew a comparison of playing with Gressman to the relentless speed of Husker Du. Noise-psych “New Day Rising” fuck yes. The signature Whitaker guitar style is prominent: heavy rock, sometimes nearing metal, other times sounding like a snake charmer’s melody. The synchronicity between this trio is striking: they build it up, they break it down, they follow each other’s cues like experts in their field.


“Fiberoptic Fur” is the most obvious fulcrum of rock to dance music. It’s a jam but you can hear how cacophonous experiments like this one could be later refined into pop. You can hear them developing their dance music vocabulary. It features some great unintelligible creep vocals, like a diseased Devo, and often sounds like early, cacophonous Warrior with a dance beat behind it. Noise-psych served with electro condiments.

On the B-Side, “Star Clit” continues the fusion of psych and dance with a porny opening guitar riff that slowly morphs into plodding riffage comparable to some of the best Ex-Cocaine jams. Their set on NYU radio is some Grade A noise, sounds like various crafts taking off and landing, as well as all the hovering in between, kinda like that one Cabaret Voltaire record that sounds like the band testing out their synthesizers.

Chronicity - s/t 7” (Obscurist Press) 

 Does a political punk band like the UK’s Chronicity hope to spread ideas, or are their lyrics meant to be encouraging and motivational for the already radicalized? Fortunately, this ex-Red Monkey quartet backs their sermons up with dead serious chops. “War On The Poor” sets the stage: mathy jazz punk resplendent with funky/heavy/Gang of Four bass. The guitar is tinny and reminiscent of various Steve Albini projects. You can also hear a bit of late 90s/early 00s Dischord (Faraquet, most specifically). The second track is practically spoken (ranted?) word reminiscent of Crass, only instead of looping minimal-noise-punk the instrumental is comprised of the aforementioned ingredients: the speed of punk and the intricacy of math rock. “Banned From The Academy” calls to mind The Minutemen with a well-timed, heavy jazz breakdown and frenetic race to the finish. “Elvis Prison Guard” calls to mind the security guard from Detroit Rock City. An overall scorcher. 

Our buddy Dave Rodriguez (drummer for Gainesville’s Carbs, singer for Sarasota-Bradenton’s Resi Noth, lone mage capable of summoning the deity known only as La Fours) sent us a recap-critique of Jacksonville’s inaugural Cinema Sounds. As explained below, Baby Dave is a bit of a CS veteran, and we highly value his analysis (informed equally by his regular contribution to past editions and his current pursuit of a Masters in movies (the actual degree is much more prestigious)) of the night.

text by dave rodriguez / video by dana bassett 

The fifth installment of Cinema Sounds series left the quiet nest of Sarasota’s Burns Court Cinema, tucked away in a tropical back alley of Laurel Park, and leapt to that liminal metropolis between Florida and the rest of the country: Jacksonville.  The venue chosen for the event was the grandiose and elegant 5 Points Theatre.

This reviewer has had the distinct privilege of performing in the four preceding nights of synesthetic rampage, either as a solo performer or with a larger ensemble.  That being said, this most recent lineup of acts offered the remarkable pleasure of almost no exertion on the part of the audience.  To say I feel blessed being privy to this type of event registers high on the spectrum of sappy-ass shit I could say to articulate how fascinating Cinema Sounds’ lineage has been … but there you have it.  As the event continues to unfold across performers, venues, and filmic and musical genres, it will only carry on this sense of fascination that I can only imagine captured the early patrons of popular film technology.

Bright Orange, a spooky duo hailing from South Georgia, opened the evening with the climatic scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, accompanied by minimal whirring punctuated by unpredictable synthesizer blasts.  The style of the score - its flat, droning topography not unlike the drive to Jacksonville across Highway 301 – unfavorably clashed with the dynamic and pivotal narrative sequence being projected.  This disparity didn’t become apparent until later in the scene, when the score’s unwavering persistence seemed to almost totally disassociate with the action on screen.  The stunning blues and purples of the cosmic landscape jive well with this style, but much of the sequence is composed of interior shots arranged by dramatic and somewhat stilted editing.  The music shows no regard for Khan’s arduous setting of the self-destruct mechanism or Spock’s similarly portrayed sacrifice.  This lack of musical-visual symbiosis fosters an adverse sense of estrangement, as opposed to a sense of wonderment, with the moving image.  Contrarily, there is a strong argument to be made in favor of this alienating effect, calling to mind an assortment of critical texts, performers, and filmmakers from across traditions.  The fact that the score refuses to merely supplement the action of the film is perhaps where we may locate its value, that this performance questions the fibers holding sound and image together within the film projection.  Does that all seem like we’re reaching a bit too far?  Perhaps.  Maybe this reviewer is resisting that kind of viewing because it seems overly academic and out of touch with the perceptive immediacy of the filmic-musical experience that Cinema Sounds offers its patrons.  In that spirit, this performance inspired a provocative discussion into the multiplicity of ways one can go about “scoring” a film: a critical conversation that can only evolve in tandem with the event itself.

bright orange live @ cinema sounds 5 

Jacksonville’s own Diamond Hymen took the stage next, sporting a light theremin and a damp fur coat.  She opened with watery undulation that eventually morphed into an upbeat dance track that seemed unusually appropriate for the Palm Sunday sequence (songs: “This Jesus Must Die” and “Hosanna”) from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.  This performance marks the first time that such a film has undergone an auditory revamping, a creative decision we can either attribute to laziness or progressiveness but most likely both.  DH’s dark revamp of the glamorous original strikes relevant and penetrating chords.  Her voice (dropped a good number of octaves via the theremin) speaks of a maligned Christ and political assassination, but also keeps the party going.  The performance abandons the notion of holistically re-scoring a sequence (a trajectory taken by nearly every other performer in the series) and instead sonically transforms it into a disco opera; one that the dancers on screen ecstatically take part in.  The style of the score combined with the live elements (the single performer zealously swaying in the corner of the giant screen, the glow of the theremin rising between her fingers) produced one of the nights more charming and clever performances. 

diamond hymen live @ cinema sounds 5

Wudun gave what I felt was the strongest performance of the evening.  Their choice of such a visually dazzling and compelling film, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, played into this strength a great deal.  This act also provided another first for Cinema Sounds by collapsing key scenes of the film into a new sequence specifically for this performance. This is brilliantly executed.  It appears to have been done from an older print of the film and did not share the same sharpness of picture enjoyed by the other performers.   I mention this because the low quality of the print creates a more lasting resonance between the movement of the film and the live musical performance.  The mechanical, rusty drumming accented by unsettling, inorganic sounds and rich guitar textures cogently teased out the grim dystopian mood of Lang’s images.  The mechanized humans on screen seem to be creating the industrial cadence exploding in the theatre.  The score excitedly follows the dramatic peaks and valleys of the fragmented narrative.  We see, in this performance, a great artistic accomplishment.  The music thoroughly captures the aesthetic and socio-political themes and motifs of the original, effectively processing a kind of modernization easily grafted onto silent film.  But rarely is it done this well.

wudun live @ cinema sounds 5

The final performance came from Civilization, a personable pair of punks dealing some heavy shit.  I like this band. I’ve had the pleasure of playing shows with them before, most notably at the enjoyed-by-all 305 Fest in Miami this past March. Their brand of sludgy brutality powerfully filled the cathedral-sized auditorium, but the overall performance was disappointing.  What occurred was a band playing their songs with a moving projection behind them.  It is important to make the distinction between what I have just described and performing a live musical score.  In this critic’s opinion, this latter activity is the premier substance of Cinema Sounds. The unique essence and appeal of the event is born out of the direct correspondence between live music and the narrative film image (which is inherently bound to the very choice of venue in an actual cinema) and the opportunity (perhaps, expectation?) given to the performer(s) to create something equally unqiue, or rather, singular or special, for the event.  These have always been the more absorbing and successful productions.  The film chosen was actually an assemblage of found video footage, described online as “a bracing collage of pop culture detritus,” Destroy All Monsters.  I think the project to attempt to score an art film such as this, one that already contains a kind of free-standing practice in radical or challenging aesthetics, is doomed from the start.  There is a precedent for this from Cinema Sounds III (11/13/08), when Sarasota’s Skiffle performed to a similar self-made installation video involving a steady, uninteresting series of televisions followed by a verbal pedagogical rant about how nobody reads books, or something like that.  Both of these pieces were equally ineffective in breaking form and showed a lack of ingenuity in the practice itself.

We ended the night with a barrage of group photos and discovering a make-out pit in the balcony. The next installment of Cinema Sounds will take place in Miami sometime this spring.  

all photos by yates family / flat file projects

Wudun

Civilization

skunk ape @ sweat records (11/14/09)

self & other @ sweat records (11/14/09) 

slashpine @ american legion (12/18/09)

LA CUEVA 

COOL WORLD

SLASHPINE