Here, Noise is the Vessel That Decants New Year Woes

WEIRD MUSIC NIGHT AT THE ELY CENTER OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Photos by dean baby

Some deaths take forever, but not at Weird Music Night. Passivity dies on the first deranged Hello! greeting you at the door, maniacally effused by Pervert Savant, borne by John O’Donnell, the omnivorous curator and Rabelaisian host of this monthly series of experimental musical performances held at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art since the spring. December’s edition started countless times, each new arrival at the gallery’s foyer being met with Savant’s commanding hoopla as if he was a toy stuck in a chain of string pulls. “Quit gatekeeping the nonsense,” he instructed, spewing iridescent observations and inchoate anecdotes, including a bowling alley death during high school that he can’t substantiate because he was “too high to remember.”

Fittingly, nostalgia misfits were this night’s opening act: 2 Fool, a makeshift folk revival act comprised of painting collaborators Kuli, on guitar, and Wilson Potter, on banjo. Beneath the gallery’s flaky ceiling, their faithfully coarse covers of mid-sixties Bob Dylan were experimental hygge inasmuch as they proved that “weirdness” was merely the event’s premise, not its promise, abandoning it before it could even be established. 

The loftiness of “All Along The Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone” sounded distinctly earthly through 2 Fool’s billow, which sometimes looked like coy sarcasm, at times like chintzy pastiche, and at others like pious heteronomy. The wallflower modesty of folk music to kick off the night seems like yet another one of Pervert Savant’s wisecracks, but to dismiss its relevance here would be to also downplay the genre’s primacy in the evolution of music technology—early folklorists’ field recordings, after all, being the progenitors of modern-day mixtapes and sampling.

Cleaving even closer to a sort of industrial folk was New Haven Noise Machine’s set, a riotous deconstruction of techy paraphernalia and utter junk. Accompanied by fledgling multidisciplinarian Gr1m G0rl, veteran visual artist Kit Young’s “instruments” on this night were largely recycled materials from his sound-sculpture tenure in California during the eighties, assembled here as structuralist tableau’s foil to heuristic curiosity, a mix that appears equally primitive and futuristic—and optimistically pessimistic about both. The performance employed a spinning, plastered head, a vinyl record of the band Boston reduced to a pulpy RPM, a talking Trump pen, a glitchy camera pointed at the audience, sheet metal, drills, a hand mixer, an electric meat carver. A maze, in other words, of our miscellaneous bullshit, an affront to private property’s sanctity almost akin to the wave of car theft that has swamped our city.

Gr1m G0rl turned knobs haphazardly, flicked switches hesitantly, Young crouched to the floor, spun chords in the air, and triggered household tools dangling from their table, idly fiddling and tinkering like inquisitive toddlers oblivious to purpose, excited only by the ancillary and accidental perks of each object and motion. The pangs of metals clanking into shreds and melodies morphing into horns may have been obnoxious but they were also weirdly cathartic in the way that the dissonant bustle of a busy café counter is too. If we understand the engine of today’s biopolitical neoliberalism to be surplus, New Haven Noise Machine’s interest in failure as nonperfomance seems to wonder how to honor surplus instead of managing it.

Now that we no longer make things like we did during the mass industrialization of the past, we make ourselves into better things instead. But techno-capitalism’s containment of risk and co-opting of disarray ensure that even in our pursuits to maximize our lives, to exert agency over the countless emotional excesses that we have available, we nevertheless are driven either to burnout, for some, and death for the rest. In abandoning this omnipresent management of chance through an aimless manipulation of the very surplus of our doing, New Haven Noise Machine’s performance offers an intervention: the erratic ecstasy of futility, or a warmth outside of utility. The tortured wall of synthetic sound that they produce with their improvised devices resembles the soundtrack of an ambivalence toward the abjection of the object.

Weird Music Night’s true humanistic apotheosis, however, arrived that night through a classicist. Or rather, the beat-less, drone-full, monochromatic ambience from experimental composer Jayden Barber—tending to his mixer and tape decks like a priest arranges an altar—emerged suddenly as a bereft soundscape reminiscent of classical liturgical music. Pulsing beneath this cathedral chain of rumbles, warbles, howls, and breezes, were gentle shifts between ominous shrills, muffled chatter, and a static tempest, summing up to a sonic rendering of the eschatological cycle of cleansing, sacrifice, and resurrection. 

I shut my eyes and this is what I saw: the swoon of a silver storm; a muddied childhood portrait; a curdled grove; a nest of touch; the morbidity that is a heartbeat; the narcotic timbre of nostalgia; back to the portrait: I’m at the park, sliding down, my mother has missed me ever since. Let’s call it this: the fugitivity of desire in its most precise hue. The catatonic spell that Barber draws here isn’t exactly post-apocalyptic; it’s a trance so much like death that it becomes something else. It’s a notion that might be distressing when found at home or within love, but in Barber’s hands it’s edifying, if not ultimately energizing for its reminder that all that the mind holds dear could be swooshed by such a light touch.

How could a performance so fraught with feeling be so devoid of any obvious human presence? Not only did Barber never speak or even gesture at the audience, he was ostensibly invisible, the room’s teeny bulbs struggling to illuminate him so that his body camouflaged into the stage like Bastesian mimicry. The bedrock of his conceptualism could be residing here. But rather than the “dematerialization of the art object,” as art historian Lucy Lippard famously prescribed to concept art, the neutrality of Barber’s disappearance works instead as the dematerialization of the artist’s identity. Buoyed by the readings of opacity within abstract art from critics such as Adrienne Edwards and Huey Copeland (whose concentration on Blackness is admittedly an awkward fit here), we might wonder: what can be expressed through withholding and darkness? In this case, Barber’s staged negative space parallels the music’s downpour of aporia and suffuses the obscurity of both with an endless abundance. What, after all, could be less “empty” than a noisy abyss? What hides underneath the subconscious nurtured by such an ethereal artwork? Self-importance? It’s a performance I could witness endlessly and cry every time. 

If Barber’s act was full of ellipses, then Doublesoup’s was teeming with interrobangs. Another cruel pairing by Pervert Savant. It is, to quote Geneviève Emery, strange how sun and death travel together. Doublesoup’s name alone offers both. Draped in an amalgam of skate gear, fantasy larp, and clowncore, Doublesoup, who sometimes goes by Anthony Sellitto-Budney, mustered effect pedals, monster masks, party props, and Fisher-Price instruments to cook a grungy, androgynous stew of absurdism and entropy—acid house theatre bedecked in the koans of a Jodorowsky. But it’s neither the dreamscape of surrealism nor the detachment of postmodernism; more like K-hole rave music for the AI-slop generation. 

Like in other Sellitto-Budney performances I’ve seen earlier this year, some in which they’ve transformed themselves into garish, life-sized puppets and merged self-help stand-up into choreorobotic autofiction, audience participation isn’t so much welcome as it is irresistible. Having interrogated then validated our syllogisms on “being okay,” Doublesoup unfurled our foremost impediment to okayness: a Ken doll—a himbo Chad metaphor for absentminded masculinity within queer spaces. A dance battle between the doll and the rest of the room ensued, and when he won, the toy cast on us all a spell that was only broken once we killed him by ignoring him through our phones. But then Doublesoup took us from circus to rave in a blink. For the second half of their act, they looped improvised shrieks and toy-instrument melodies that surprisingly resulted in the most coherent and fluid musical experiment I’ve witnessed from them so far—a sort of Pet Shop Boys meets Burial meets Bluey.  

Doublesoup’s dramaturgy, like their puppetry, is sutured by a double stitch of technophobia and identity mediation. What starts like playful prying into kitschy devices becomes a surrender to them: it’s a recognition of collectively having reached a point in which we can no longer think of what we do to technology, but should be concerned instead by what technology does to us. If this digital detritus is inescapable, what should our participation within it look like? For Doublesoup, it looks like repetitive, estranged acts of memory channeled through the manual distortion of looping tools. 

Countless layers of tongue-in-cheek surfeit are layered upon one another with these loop pedals, each new recursion sharpening the one underneath, attempting not to drown out the past but to necessitate it. It verges on what French memoirist Annie Ernaux would call the “palimpsest sensation.” The palimpsest, of course, prostrating to each overhaul and effacement above it, but also, as Tobi Haslett recently unriddled, “The palimpsest is swollen with meanings, and exerts pressure over new meanings, such that penetrability is a kind of memory—and memory a form of force.” Rather than seeking to escape dystopia, Doublesoup’s psycho-techno remembrance, made porous by an embrace of impermanence, scrawls on top of it, hopefully with enough kooky force to rattle it for a while longer. 

Here is where Weird Music Night enters the pageant of new-year idealism for me, from the desolate alley between the nave and the chancel, between the heart and the touchscreen, lovelorn for a noise that can absolve us from our complicity in the mass tech-driven deadenings that continue to rule our cities, worried that we won’t squeeze out of language enough of the inexpressible, eager for any vessel of care that doesn’t splash in the presence of meaninglessness. “Everything is broken,” quipped New Haven Noise Machine’s Kit Young during a malfunction. “I was broken,” Gr1m G0rl replied, “until my friends put me back together. Love put me back together. And here I stand.” It makes me wonder if the most meaning-making moments of this year have also been the most meaning-defying—a series of wordless, winter-choked deaths.