 "Photo: Jordan Gomez")
Deciding to listen to noise-heavy filth-rock does not just come to you in your sleep. Just like anything, there are things to listen for and things to get excited about and plain old boring repetition that you can bitch about with your like-minded scum-rocker buddies. This brand of rock is the destruction of pure tone. It is an opportunity to elate in your ears' awesome ability to pick out a chord progression or a guitar solo even when someone has run the original tone through fuzzers, phasors and flangers, then fired it through an amp whose overdrive has never been turned off.
The goal of getting onstage and powering through a set, mistakes and all, often results in an inspired and energetic performance with a collection of imprecise tones laid over a rhythm section that touches one's primal desire to run into battle to the beat of war drums. The Friday before school started, I had my own spiritual revival at Mohawk on the corner of 10th Street and Red River. The lineup included the Koreans, iKiLLCaRS and Black Panda. Inspired by the war drums, I asked the bands to meet up with me and tell me where all this goodness came from. Over a feast of Chinese takeout, I met with the Koreans and one of the members of iKiLLCaRS.
iKiLLCaRS is a trio with Johnny Law on guitar, Lanyo Bourgeois on bass and Robert Davis on drums. The band thrives on the chaos of a live show.
"Shit is going to happen, and our main goal is just to get through it," Law said. "I don't care how many strings pop. I don't give a fuck if the PA falls over; we're going to keep playing the show." This chaos is apparent in the music as a rhythmic crescendo of noise is suddenly destroyed by Bourgeois' throaty screams.
When it comes to producing noise, the four-piece Koreans are specialists. With guitarist Kevin Lee, bassist Sean Cox, accordion player Jaron Heinze and drummer Jeff "Dew-Bear" Dumont, the Koreans manage a unique mix of bayou and garage rock with a serious guitar sound. Lee runs his guitar through seven effects pedals, ending at a Fender Deluxe Reverb, an old tube amp that might give out any day now.
"I play through four fuzz pedals, a wha and two modulators - a flanger and a phaser," Lee said. "They make the music
loud and nasty."
"Loud," "nasty," "sloppy" and "chaotic" come up in many descriptions of the sound for which these bands are aiming.
"We were inspired by the music we listened to as kids, like Alice in Chains," Cox said.
"Also Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and lots of metal. One of my major guitar influences is Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine," Lee said. "They would play shows so loud they would make
people sick."
Black Panda delivers a more decisive punk sound with Yoshi Okai on vocals, Austin Moore on guitar, Ayaka Koyamagi on drums, Dan Hoekstra on guitar and Frank Carroll on bass. At the Showdown Saloon, the band discussed their influences and musical philosophy. They like the term
"splatter-punk."
"It describes a sloppy, trashy, super-loud band," Moore said.
The guitarists in Black Panda do not use any effects pedals.
"We just turn the volume all the way up and use tons of distortion," Moore said. "Really, when you drive the amps that hard, the pedals don't seem to do much for our sound."
Again, the inspiration for playing this music came to most at an early age.
"I was into a Japanese punk band called Blue Hearts, and in eighth grade I sung in a Blue Hearts cover band," Okai said. "I didn't know it was punk, but I liked it."
A resurgence of garage rock is occurring in Austin right now, Moore said. "A lot of bands broke up around 2006, but the scene has been growing for the last year
and a half."
"This town provides a stage for pretty much any band that can make it to a club. This is a great town to cut your teeth in," Law said. "Even if national tastes don't give way to Austin's noise rock, Austin does give a lot of artists the chance to make noise on a whole lot of stages."
On Red River, between Sixth and 10th streets, is a good place to find some nasty rock, the kind of fuzzed-out rock that comes from heavily overdriven amplifiers, a myriad effects pedals and singers who aren't afraid to scream their guts out. Each of the bands reminded me why rock should not be heavily produced by highly skilled musicians (I'm talking to you, Radiohead). Overproduced radio music long ago left behind what is inspiring and
gut-wrenching about rock 'n' roll.
Be the first to comment on this article!