Noxagt, Neung Phak, etc.

Noxagt was fantastic last night. Simple, heavy riff rock that reminded me a lot of Sleep, but with the notes transformed into giant walls of noise by long chains of pedals. You could still hear some notes, but their importance was greatly minimized in favor of hard rhythmic intensity. It sounded kind of like it could've been Tralphaz up there rocking out with his pedals. I was glad to see the guitarist beating on his strings with his fretting hand grabbing the neck at arbitrary positions – he clearly has the right idea of what his sound is all about. I'm also glad that they brought a bunch of Orange (and other) amplification along with them to really make this sound work the way it needed to. The hard-hitting drummer was easily heard over the pile of amps with nothing but a kick drum mic. Certain elements seemed influenced by krautrock, in particular their occasional use of odd rhythms in a relatively simple, but effective, way. I remember really liking these guys a few years ago. I just rediscovered that I rated one of their 2003 SF shows (at Club Verdi?!) as my 7th favorite show of that year. I hadn't listened to them for a long time, and I was a little depressed when I found out their violist had been replaced with a guitarist. In fact, I think I entirely skipped playing their latest album on my radio show throughout its run in KUSF's current releases library. I say all this by way of explaining that I wasn't expecting too much, but(/therefore) they really kind of blew me away. They were probably better than when I liked them so damn much back in 2003. They're taking the Black Sabbath-Sleep continuum a step further in the direction I love.

I felt really good about the Ettrick set. Good treatment and respect from a venue and its staff goes a long fucking way. This is what we get at the Hemlock. That's the final puzzle piece in making a ton of preparation pay off. This guy seemed disappointed by the lack minstrelsy. Perhaps he would've enjoyed our rushed trainwreck set at a disrespectful venue two weeks previous.

Acre delivered his usual heavy low end drone. Sounded typically great, even though I had spent about 14 hours listening to my somewhat similar sounding Damion Romero and Waves bootlegs on Monday and Tuesday. Tour mate Marissa Magic sang little pop ditties or something over 808 beats and such played on a laptop. I couldn't understand the connection to Acre other than their shared origin from the Pacific Northwest region.

Neung Phak was so great on Monday night. I had heard their self-titled album a couple years ago, but was never really interested enough to check them out live. I really liked Sublime Frequencies' Cambodian Cassette Archive (and other compilations), and I guess I thought the American cover band couldn't quite match the originals. Maybe enough time has passed that I have a more receptive attitude, but I also think seeing them live really helped. This is party music and it's great to see a seven-piece band throwing it down on stage. Re-listening to the album after the show, I can't quite understand what I didn't like about it at the time, but that's rather beside the point, especially now that my impression has been forever swayed by the great live show. Interspersed between their weird SE Asian pop music were numerous nightmare/bad trip sequences in which band members pulled US flags out of their pants, barked like dogs and generally behaved quite psychedelically. I really enjoyed the freeform ranting with cued musical accompaniments the first time the bassist set down his instrument and grabbed the mic. I appreciated the hits: “Inside the Program”, “Cheer”, “Tui Tui Tui” and one I had never heard before, “Fucking USA”. I appreciated the drummer's MIDI-triggered synth drum sounds. Quite a production these guys put on. Almost everybody had two instruments with them. It must've taken forever to set up, but it was all very cohesive. Before this gets too boring, let me just reiterate that this set fucking rocked.

OOIOO was a different story. There were some interesting parts, but mostly it was hippy drum circle stuff to my ears. The white robes and fake amulets did nothing to dispel this impression, but they did look pretty good. There were two guitars and a bass, but their lines seemed almost entirely devoid of substance. Nothing to latch onto. Minimalist tonality and slightly polyrhythmic, things I associate with Point by Cornelius. I liked that album, but never cared to delve much deeper into the genre. Unlike OOIOO, Cornelius used many simple yet contrasting lines to build up an interesting gestalt. OOIOO's lines weren't that interesting to begin with and weren't combined in any meaningful ways. I was continually ready to walk out, but every fourth song kept my interested just a little bit. Weirder no wavey parts and other more interesting composition would show up occasionally... far too infrequently.

Sunday already seems like the distant past. Hamez (Ross Hammond and Lisa Mezzacappa) opened the Musician's Union Hall show with double bass and guitar/banjo duets. Fairly innocuous tonal improv. My favorite piece explicitly reworked traditional bluegrass. It seemed perhaps more focused on the area of their music that works the best. The Frank Gratkoski/Charity Chan duet was very good. The duo took the music to a lot of different places over the course of their 50 minute set. They opened with a piece based around inside-the-piano dark ambient stuff (something Chan frequently gets into) with bass clarinet accompaniment, Gratkowski straining to stay on the quiet side. Things got livelier as Gratkowski switched to Bb clarinet, then alto sax. I remember a particularly disjointed, jumpy piece as being particularly good. It was a nice end to a streak of seeing both of these improvisers play a bunch. Interesting to see them stretch out a bit in the absence of Fred Frith constantly fucking things up (though he was fucking things up in the best way, and I enjoyed that show even more).