- The brainchild of promoter and Hot Releases founder Ryan Martin, three-year-old Savage Weekend is a key cog in America's small rotation of festivals showcasing sounds from the country's sub-underground and noise network. And as with likeminded events Voice Of The Valley, International Noise Conference and Ende Tymes, it revels in sonic overload. This year's bill boasted more than 70 names over two evenings at Nightlight, a small art space and bar down the road from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each performer set up his or her gear in alternating spots, which enabled them to unleash a round-robin succession of 15- to 25-minute sets that blasted into the wee hours. Power electronics gave way to technoise, which bled into harsh psychedelic squall, which stepped aside for minimal wave, which succumbed to freeform feedback destruction... and so on.
Yet amidst the frenetic turnover (which nearly tumbled into logistical bedlam on several occasions), a handful of musicians emerged who transformed the many onlookers milling about into a single, captivated audience. The two most compelling were Form A Log and Humanbeast. The former consists of Ren Schofield (Container), Noah Anthony (Profligate) and Rick Weaver (Dinner Music/Four Hands). They manipulate tapes exclusively in order to whip-up a ragged electro-tribalism with scraps of noise-rock, deconstructed hip-hop, motorik and sound collage.
Humanbeast, meanwhile, are a Rhode Island duo that over the last two years has undergone a stunning evolution from performance-art cacophony into what they unleashed upon Savage Weekend: sumptuously propulsive darkwave. As a live act, they were enthralling. With Eli V Manuscript programming thick, static-gnarled grooves, Maralie Armstrong delivers lyrics both surreal and romantic in a voice that soars with the authority of an air-raid siren. She even feeds select shrieks into electronics that morph them into walls of screaming fuzz. The tune to really put the crowd over the top was "Chandelier," due to appear on Venus Ejaculates Into The Banquet, their forthcoming album for Load Records.
Photo credit: M.P. Lockwood for NO-CORE
But Humanbeast weren't the only musicians stained in goth and industrial. The most outré was Viszk, an intense performance artist who explored the intersection of monochromatic art song and actionist ritual (including the threading of amplified cotton thread through skin). Farewell My Concubine, the solo project for Angels In America co-founder Mark Iosifescu, was equally harrowing, with roots in lurching, lo-fi rock and dark ambient. Far more rhythmically inclined was Tampa, Florida producer Sean Halpin (AKA Craow), who filtered electronic body music through dub atmospherics and cruddy feedback. Lambskin explored a similarly entrancing sound even though she preferred striking a balance between ethereal-creeps and boot-to-the-head beats. And then there were VVAQRT, a decidedly invigorating voice in modern minimal wave for how they temper European-style dystopianism with American synth-punk bop (think Units or even Xex).
As for technoise and related beat-based permutations, Savage Weekend proved just how varied the movement has become within the last year or so. In addition to well-established producers Unicorn Hard-On, Lazy Magnet and Chemtrails (all of whom betrayed considerable compositional progression in their impeccable sets) the festival featured numerous names not yet known outside the noise milieu. These included Outmode (deep house devolving into microphone-stuffed-in-the-mouth hysterics), i_like_dog_face (madness-techno with lysergic lighting), Housefire (acid soaked in grinding distortion) and PVRE MATRIX (whose heavy use of breaks and manic syncopation was absolutely refreshing). But the most telling evidence of technoise's increasing diversification arrived with Saturday's back-to-back sets from S.P.Q.R. and Sharlyn Evertsz. While the former summoned a lazy wave of four-track house replete with treated melodica, Evertsz opted to mangle her Tempest drum machine the way a free-jazz musician would his or her horn, the end result being an unusual fusion of freely improvised fire music and gabbercore chaos.
Of course, as with any decent sub-underground/noise festival, Savage Weekend also contained a healthy dose of artistic oddities too insular to be hitched to any one prevailing trend. Both Yohimbe (aggro freak-rock drone) and Unguent (dude dressed as Oz's Wicked Witch Of The West while crafting bubbly tonal chatter with what looked like a tiny xylophone) definitely stood out in this regard; so did Russian Tsarlag, who is considered noise simply because noise fans are the only weirdoes who can truly appreciate the genius embedded in his conflation of dream pop, brooding duende and Gong Show schmaltz. But the best of the lone wolves surely was Haves & Thirds, whose narcotic cocktail of hip-hop funk and melancholic guitar shimmer sent just about everybody at this year's Savage Weekend into a deliciously thick fog.