The 2007 Victoria Noise! Festival

the website for yr reference.

the thing about noise is…it’s fucking noise! after a while it can all sound sort of the same. the focus of the victoria festival of noise was on harsh noise, which i find gets repetitive pretty quickly. i enjoyed it more than i expected to though.

bb gun shooting a bb gun indoors in a crowded room is a little sketchy. even more sketchy is waving it around and dropping it on the floor… but whatevs… noise is not without risk. maybe a little too repetitive, especially the violin noise. the rotate-y thing on the aluminum duct man made a really sweet hummy noise though.

ken roux seemed promising: 2 turntables and a bunch of modified records. left me feeling kind of meh though. too disjointed, not enough flow.

seagull hypnotic wall of noise. reminded me what i like about noise: getting lost in sound. good use of multiple cassette players.

eraritjaritjaka even though he only played maybe 10 minutes, this was my favorite performance. religious/pregnancy/menstruation samples with harsh noise stabs. good use of dynamics – something a lot of noise artists lack. too bad he cut himself too deep before the performance and had to stop.

the rita highlight was his homemade instrument, which sounded like wailing guitar feedback.

ryan bloomer gear was wrecked. cords were pulled out accidentally causing (relative) silence then plugged back in resulting in intense harsh noise. nice stop-start effect.

blue sabbath black cheer unfortunately i had my earplugs in too deep for most of this. the result was i mainly heard a constant noise wall. intense performance with lots of guitar flailing and screaming into multiple microphones. almost a little too intense – bearded woodsmoke smelling guy almost dumped 80% of his gear on the floor.

flatgrey highlighted one of my problems with noise: what’s a fuck-up vs. what’s intentional. obvious problems with the jack on his initial sound source. lots of flailing unplugged equipment, which took some time to figure out what got unplugged. sweet homemade instrument though – piece of metal with springs in it. almost destroyed most of his gear wrecking a heavy metal box filled with pieces of metal.

winter in osaka wow! one of my other faves. telephone receiver made into a microphone = awesome. good use of multiple microphones, screaming, and dd-5 loops. even some nice beat oriented structure.

bomber this guy was kinda weirding me out all night cuz he looks like this cashier at save-on-foods. not sure why, but he kept rearranging his pedals before he started. the blindfolds were a nice touch… reminded me of the francisco lopez show i saw a few years ago. also reminiscent of FL was his use of left/right panning and silence/full on noise. nice though.

- sin against nature