Five Free-Punk Stunts

1: thumping on wheels conductor

For those of you who want to play on the first piece, it will be a conducted improvisation led by Nick, who will be playing a bass drum and cueing in individuals and small groups. It will be very chill and relaxed.

Nick and Amy accomplished for this show something for which we always strove at old Those Darn Gnomes shows: an actual legit chamber orchestra playing weird free improvised noise without sacrificing a punk spirit. We came close with some of our larger ensembles including brass and woodwind sections, but Nick conducting nearly a dozen string players, three percussionists (hi Hubbard!) and guitar and bass from a neon green bass drum on a skateboard (“Because we’re twelve,” said Amy) definitely embodied a kind of personal ideal.

2: voice + percussion

Bread & Salt consistently fills my life with its most interesting shows: I’ve played there with Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra and blown sax in Stay Strange’s Día de los Muertos procession — hell, Nick even screened James Fotopoulos’s Dignity there a few years ago. A space which books any one of those events deserves our support; the fact they’ve hosted all of the above is nothing short of extraordinary.

A truly exceptional roster of homies turned out for this show: Chad from INUS/Vermin Class, Chet, Mattie from Make Believe DIY, Piper, Dylan from Peymaar (with good news about the recording of our last gig!), Dom Cooper, Xavier and dozens more I can’t remember — a solid 80% of San Diego’s weird music scene was either performing or in the audience. Where were you, huh?

I talk a lot of shit about this town’s lack of spaces and support for interesting and cutting edge art and every few months the universe decides it’s heard enough and needs to remind me this scene can accomplish some truly amazing things.

3: strings in atrium

After some logistical conversations with Necking and the Project [BLANK] team, it looks like it will make the most sense to do our string piece all acoustic. I think this will make it easier for everyone to be heard and make the transition to our part of the show seamless and beautiful. We’re going to do it in the atrium at Bread and Salt. That’s an open-air central space that is adjacent to the main performance room. So, the audience will be in the main room for the first two pieces, then will come into the atrium to see us. After our set, they’ll go back to the main room for the rest of the show.

I crafted a loose plan for the string piece, which you can find in the attached PDF. It’s set on a 10-minute timeline so that we can use phone timers to stay in the same place. You’ll see that it starts building texture with open strings, noise, melodies and high register contrast. Then, it moves into a round robin of trios. There, you’ll each be part of a trio that will take center stage for a little while. The rest of us will accompany and respond to the trios. Finally, we move through a dense pizzicato section and close with open strings, noise and natural harmonics. I hope this gives us the chance to build some beautiful massed sounds and to improvise together in smaller groups.

After a quick rehearsal, this ended up my favorite piece of the night. The soundscape shifted from resonant open string meditations to skittering pizzicato with a broad range of ideas in the trios. Amy’s framework gave every player a chance to express their individuality; among all the real players I have to confess I was terrified I’d out myself as an impostor cellist. Joe from Project [BLANK] set up a mic before we played, so perhaps the recording will tell… in the meantime, here’s a few clips from Hannah:

Side note: about half our string group commuted to the show from Ensenada (good news for future border crossings!) and I was the only he/him dude in the ensemble (good news for diversity in experimental art spaces!).

4: video processing audio

I’ll readily confess this particular portion of the show was more or less opaque to me, but certain sequences felt like falling into the Matrix at the Vegas Sphere, or at least an 8-bit approximation of that vibe.

5: “In Louie”

For the last piece, we’re going to do a 15 minute-long jam on The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.” Almost everyone who is playing the show will play on this so, it will be loud, loose and fun.

And it was all of the above! Eventually we felt our way into some kind of Godspeed-y groove. We celli were more or less drowned out by the wall of noise everyone else brought but I like to think our presence added some extra wash of sul ponticello scraping.

No more shows on the calendar for now, but one never knows what might happen…