Uncle Dave's House of Useless Crap

Good Vibrations at Buckham Alley Theater

Played at the venue mentioned above, which is located in Flint, Michigan on Friday, April 15th. de fenestra appeared with about 5-6 other bands on a big, multiband extravaganze organized by Adam Moakan, who is of course one of our members. There were some rather long set changes - not like in Cincy where bands can change the set in five minutes or less. So we went on about an hour late, still played the 25 minutes alloted to us, and yet most of the people came right after we were finished.

But it was a really good performance. This time we were joined by pbk (a.k.a Philip B. Klinger), another pre-techno pioneer whom Will Soderberg interested in our musical enterprise. I get the impression pbk had a really good time playing with us. I have only heard about the first ten minutes of the show itself, which Will has entitled "Solarii," but it almost orchestrated sounding, very full and with an almost constantly shifting variety of texture that, almost by accident, shapes up into a reasonable facsimile of psychological form.

Realicide traveled all the way from Cincinnati to play the five minutes that they usually do. But they were just awesome. I don't know the name yet of the fellow who performs with Realicide when they are just a two man operation as this night, but he's really effective onstage even when he isn't playing an instrument - just shaking around nervously, playing air guitar, whatever. I'd like to pause at this point and mention that it was often said about the operatic soprano Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) yhat even when seh wasn't singing, she was making music, because you could see that she was **thinking** about the music she was hearing internally.

One thing that is amazing about Realicide is the almost total lack of gear onstage. Robert hooked a portable cassette machine, of the kind anyone could buy for $2 at a flea market, and let it wail away as he screamed his lungs out in an Artaudian expulsion of righteou, almost saintly, anger. The other guy mostly slammed away at a small table covered with a checkered tablecloth that had a scattering of things on it I couldn't see. SLAM! and you got a barrage of percussive noises like gunfire, SLAM! again and it was off. SLAM! sometimes and you'd get 60 hz, and then the guy would plug in the cord that got loose and continue. It was such an exciting performance to me that I have been writing about it here longer than it took for the perfromance to happen.

Also I wanted to mention an excellent band from Flint that played, Girlscout Handgrenade. They have a female vocalist, blonde, onstage looking like she's 17 but I think she's a little older, singin' like the guy in Napalm Death. Allisyn thought she might be using an electronic gadget on her voice to get it into such a low range, but I had the impression that at least part of what she did was natural and that other parts may have been treated.

Anyway it doesn't matter how it was done, what matters is that it is so effective. And the band was very well coordinated with a good drummer, able to stop and start together on a dime. I've seen many a shredcore band in my time, and usually you can follow their fingers to find out what kinds of licks they favor - there are only a few in shredcore, honest! But these guys were kind of all over the map in terms of patterns, so that the total effect was a sort of slate-like atonality which conformed, nonetheless, to a very distinct rhythmic pattern. In some cases it was clear that they were combining widely divergent melodic ideas to give the impression of a recognizable pattern without actually playing one. Outstanding. They have a well-organized website at www.girlscouthandgrenade.com

Spencer Yeh wanted me to stay and check out Wolf Eyes, who did play, as he wanted a report. I would have liked to have stayed, but I promised Keith Larsen I'd have him home by midnight, my daughter was wiped out, and we still had a hour's drive ahead of us. Besides I was tired myself. So we left at about 10:30. If everything had been on time as planned, I would've seen the whole show. That's not Adam's fault by the way - he was working his ass off the whole evening long.

Remy's Very Short Story

Remy was assigned to write a "very short story" in school. This is what she came up with:

"If money grew on trees, then people would probably find another kind of currency."

More soon.

Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com