A night of industrial art-damage bands at The Pirate Art Gallery in 1985
Intro by Duane Davis
Editor’s note: For those uninitiated, our Resonance article series recovers a music piece from our past (often from decades-old, dusty Wax Trax zine) with a reflective, modern intro. The following covers a 1985 Westword article Duane wrote about Denver’s 80s noise scene, as great as it was small, including a couple of bands that played at the Pirate Gallery in 1985. Start with his intro, written 40 years after the Westword article, below.
Noise operates as an auditory field test for the nervous system. Every generation gets the test. The conditions change, the volume rises and falls. The signal stays the same: can you still hear the world you are living in, or have you learned how to tune it out?
In the early and mid-1980s here in Denver, there were a handful of bands experimenting with what was coming to be called Industrial music or Art Damage music. At Wax Trax, we were ordering in a lot of this music, mostly on imports from the UK and Europe: Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Nurse With Wound, Cabaret Voltaire, Einsturzende Neubauten and seemingly dozens and dozens more knob twisters, pots-and-pans clangers, bone-conduction screechers and howlers. A full range of ototoxic risks just waiting for you to drop the needle.
This sort of hearing test didn’t begin in the 80s. It goes back a ways. Somewhat arbitrarily we could say the test was administered in 1913, when the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo published “The Art of Noises.” Luigi didn’t theorize quietly: he brought in factories, engines, crowds and airplanes and sped it all up in a whirlwind of astonishing cacophony: sounds he claimed that the modern (circa early 1900s) ear had already attuned itself to. By 1914, Luigi’s ‘intonarumori’ machines and devices were already roaring onstage, contraptions built to imitate the city’s own nervous breakdown. Audiences recoil or lean in. Both reactions count as results.
The exam had begun.
In 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, poet and provocateur Hugo Ball dismantled language into phonetic fragments, performing sound-poems made of syllables and stutters because words have become accomplices to the powers-that-be. After the 300,000 dead at Verdun in WWI, grammar became suspect. Ball’s answer, Dada’s answer, was to smash sense into nonsense, order into chaos. If civilization speaks fluently while murdering itself, then fluency becomes part of the problem.
In 1933, Edgard Varese tinkered with the test. “Ionisation,” written between 1929 and 1931, organizes percussion and sirens into a disciplined form. Alarm becomes structured. Impact becomes logic. The listener is asked to recognize urgency as composition, not disturbance.
Pierre Schaeffer, in 1948, introduced tape as a diagnostic instrument for the test. Trains, motors, household sounds are cut, looped, displaced. The listening task shifts from source to attention. Sound is no longer tied to gesture or intention.
John Cage turns audiometry into play. Prepared piano in the 1940s inserted screws and bolts into a piece of bourgeois drawing room furniture, turning the piano into a percussion rack. Then in 1952, 4’33” forces the room itself to perform. Coughs, furnace blower hum, nervous laughter. The ear is asked to register what habit usually screens out. Listening becomes ecological.
Then in the 1970s, the test turned hostile and threatened to induce hyperacusis, a condition that makes sounds painful to the ear. Post-punk noise bands abandon subtlety and move directly toward confrontation. Throbbing Gristle turned performance into a crime scene. SPK (Surgical Penis Klinik!) presented emasculation and mutilation not as metaphor but as reality. In America, New York’s No Wave scene stripped rock to bone and wire. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks played short, violent bursts that sound more like alarms going off than songs. DNA turned guitar into chalk-on-blackboard squeaks and squawls and rhythm into an unstable suggestion. Chrome and Factrix dissolved rock into effects, distortion and futurist paranoia.
The studio became a weapons bench. The test now asks how much instability can the ear process without shorting out into auditory brainstem meltdown.
The ear adapts or collapses.
The patterns follow history: Futurism reflects intoxication with machines. Dada recorded the breakdown of meaning. Postwar experimentation retrained attention. Late 1970s and early 1980s noise responded to surveillance, deindustrialization and media overload.
***
And that brings us back to the bands reviewed below from a performance I wrote about for the April, 1985 Westword.
And, if you want to hear what the bands sounded like:
Not surprisingly, Big If and Human Head Transplant are long gone but it was fun while it lasted: “The music howled and we all changed heads.”
HEAD FOR MUSIC
By Duane Davis
[Originally published in Westword, April 1985]
Big If plays music that invades the ear with disorganization and chaos. But that doesn’t mean the band doesn’t know how to have fun. At a Pirate Contemporary Art Oasis performance, Patrick Bower squeezes eccentric but toe-tapping rhythms from his minimal drum kit, while John Sheehan and Neil Feather raise a ruckus that veers from incoherence to rousing passages of lock-step power chording.
John, who on occasion dresses in black Chinese peasant pajamas and hard hat with great clumps of broccoli affixed to it with silver duct tape, coaxes the Big Vibration from a couple of wires strung along a railroad track (and he does this with all the solemnity of Pablo Casals sitting in with God).
Neil is the sporty one attired in an outfit that would not look out of place on a teenage hot-rodder in The Giant Gila Monster Eats a Drag Strip. Neil also cultivates tufts of facial and neck hair that spring from the most unlikely areas—a look he cryptically describes as making him resemble a marital-aid device (a cosmetic strategy he feels will have a remarkable subliminal effect on the opposite gender).
Neil’s instruments are a two-string guitar, a sheet of curved rolled steel with a couple of wires strung across it, and an odd derrick-like structure with two battery-operated dildos suspended within its frame that undulate over a guitar pick-up hidden beneath an open-weave rubber mat. The electrical oscillations from this random and tangential interplay feed into a little black box that generates rhythmic shudders and groans.
These guys are obviously out for fun.
This constant shifting between the comic and the serious, between music and noise, between the normal and abnormal, is Big If’s greatest charm. At once amusing, instructional and fascinating, Big If has the special talent of making the avant garde entertaining as well as strange.
Human Head Transplant rearranges the building-blocks of music in a much different manner and to a far different effect. They remind me in a way of the Glenn Branca piece John Cage angrily described as musical fascism.
Big If might be said to explode music—HHT implodes it by pulling rhythm and melody deep into a dense, singular structure of overwhelming power and concentration. The sound virtually absorbs the listener, saturating consciousness with an all-consuming central experience. Cage found this systematic denial of options fascistic—I find it tribal, or at least collective: One man’s mob is another’s community, after all.
Together since September, Human Head Transplant is currently working on a tape to be called Sonics for Manics and hopes to arrange a midwest tour sometime this summer.
HHT depends on rhythm and volume to pull up the audience into a single moment, a single movement, a single dance. That this is dangerous is abundantly clear; that this is dangerously attractive is even clearer. The music makes you feel—intensely—a bond with the others in the room. The trick, as always, is to sort out who’s in control: Whose head is being transplanted onto whose shoulders.
Bert Beaudin, Kelly Cohen and Sheri Van Decar use a constantly shifting combination of synthesizers, guitars, drums, bass and trumpet to make their music. They also rely on a variety of tapes to fill out the sound to its extraordinary dimensions—for three mere mortals, they make a hell of a lot of noise.
But HHT don’t ignore the other senses. The first time I saw them, they lit big piles of incense that filled the room with a near-choking cloud of smoke. The room was dark and a rather tame S&M film played on the wall at a canted angle. The booming noise, suffocating air, and the film’s wretched creatures zipping one another into rubber suits became not a Grand Guignol but a petite one: A comic diminishment of the very strangeness supposedly promoted by the Avant Scene.
At the Core Art Space on April 7, the room remained well-lit and the film highlighted the even grosser topic of self-improvement through sales. The incense again parched throats and eyeballs, peeling off epidermal layers like confetti. And a wall of TVs promoted entertainment through our true humiliation: Advertising and prime-time idiocy.
The heat and the crowd were oppressive. Seventeen-year-old kids drank cheap champagne from enormous bottles, passed around warm beer chasers and tried desperately to look like they were having fun and knew what the hell was going on. A sudden rope of rhythm would pull them into a brief, intuitive dance, then go suddenly slack.
In back of the band, a woman with a haircut that must have been styled with a meat cleaver clutched a bottle of wine and performed a dance that consisted mostly of running into the wall.
The music howled and we all changed heads.
EXCELLENT AND SURREAL!