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Trepanated Mindramblers
Corsano's Heathen Shame
Plastic Crimewave
Comets on Fire
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Four bands' worth of freaky, freeform sonic experiment landed in sleepy Easthampton, MA's Flywheel on Tuesday, and if you had five bucks, you were in for one of the loudest, most mindbending nights of your life. The Flywheel, if you've never been there, is a tiny space, owned and operated by an artists' collective, furnished with cast off couches, threadbare carpeting and folding chairs, and decorated with shiny faux-gold streamers hanging behind the performance area. There's a family feeling there -- clearly everyone knew everyone else and at least two people, one of them Thurston Moore, appeared to have brought their kids. There's also more than a touch of that VT/Western MA '60s peace and love aura. Except for the stage out front and the impressive collection of zines, you could be in the break room at the Northampton Coop. You can even buy granola bars and herbal tea at the alcohol-free bar. But homey and unassuming as the Flywheel is, they get an unbelievable array of just-about-to-break bands, literally shaking the walls of its maximum-occupancy-80-people space.
Tonight's show ran the gamut of psychedelia, from Eastern-tinged acoustics to rocked out, electrified improv, from feedback-fuzzed experimental pop to atomic explosive frenzy, in more or less that order. Opening act the Trepanated Mindramblers were local guys and girls, incorporating three guitars, a violin, drums, ethereal vocals and what appeared to be a hand-made, single-string sitar-ish type instrument whose base was some kind of metallic canister. Softer and less electrified than any of the acts that followed, the Mindramblers created an eerie, mystical shimmer of alt-tunings and ethnic-flavored percussion. Dreamy, haunting and full of hanging overtones, their two songs filled the space like gently undulating waves.
Next up was Corsano's Heathen Shame, an improv supergroup of sorts, which joined Northampton-based drumming powerhouse Chris Corsano to Boston-based Heathen Shame. Heathen Shame is one of the Twisted Village bands; its two guitarists, Kate Village and Wayne Rogers, also form the nucleus for a half dozen other improv groups including Crystalized Moments, Magic Hour and (!!!) the Major Stars. In Heathen Shame, they are augmented by Greg Kelley on trumpet. Now, when I say trumpet, you are all probably picturing some sort of jazz flavor -- a little swing, some bright brass tones. Forget it. Kelley plays the trumpet like Jimi Hendrix played the guitar, distorting it and amplifying it, running its sound through effects pedals, even playing through a piece of sheet metal. It almost never sounds purely like a trumpet; quite often you can barely hear it because of the ferocity of Kate and Wayne's guitar attack. The first song started with just Kate on guitar, magically drawing a single note into all kinds of swirls and flourishes, facing the amps and backing away into the audience, thumping furiously on her guitar to create a weird tonal drumming sound. She was joined by Corsano, who led the band effortlessly through a dizzying array of tempos and time signatures, smacking the shit out of the skins in the process. Wayne Rogers on the other guitar was a force of nature, wailing and spinning and falling to his back to play, Jamerson-like, from the floor. The effect was sort of like Kinski, but turned up to 12 and absolutely freed from the constraints of a traditional song. Amazing stuff. It was hotter than hell inside the room by then, and the waves of heat seemed to be emanating from Corsano's Heathen Shame.
The third band was Chicago's Plastic Crimewave, a four-person act led by sometime Acid Mothers Temple collaborator and zine publisher Steve Krakow. Tonight the band pushed its fuzzy, darkwave sound popwards, layering mountains of feedback onto verses and choruses. Often echoing Dead Meadow's hypnotic groove, and on other occasions the sinister murkiness of the Jesus and Mary Chain, and at still others the bass-driven heaviness of Black Sabbath, the group's sound remained more accessible, more easily processible than the other bands, but was never quite as mind-blowing.
After the break, Comets on Fire took the stage, surging and rocking back and forth as they churned out white-hot metallic sound topped by the crazy highs of Ethan Miller's voice and the insane distortions coming from Noel Harmonson's echoplex. It is brutally heavy, this sound, wave on wave of fractured, twisted sound, pounding and morphing as it hits your ears. It will remind you of all the heavy psychedelicists -- Acid Mothers Temple, Circle, Dead Meadow -- but it's just a touch wilder and more chaotic than any of them. At one point, the mandatory drunken asshole started heckling the band, yelling out things like "Play harder" and "Western Mass will kick your ass." It's hard to imagine, though, that anyone could play harder than Comets on Fire were already playing, or that there was an ass anywhere, in any state, that they couldn't kick, musically at least.
You can't underestimate Comets on Fire's sheer unrelenting heaviness, but the band's sound is also irresistibly rhythmic. Everyone in the band was moving to the bulldozer beat, sweat pouring off in buckets. A crowd that had spent all night on its collective ass now began bobbing and jumping, weaving dangerously close to the stage, where the pure surge of noise was enough to blow them back. I'm not sure which tracks, if any, the band played from its two existing albums, the newly-reissued self-titled first album (now on Alternative Tentacles) or the second, more diversified Field Recordings from the Sun. I would not be surprised, after hearing both, if Comets on Fire's work changes from week to week, show to show. It felt entirely improvised -- razor sharp, but constantly skirting disaster and dancing away triumphant.
It was the kind of night that people walk away from stunned, ears ringing, heads buzzing, loaded up with stuff from the merch table. Outside, Easthampton looked like any other small town on a Tuesday night -- utterly unpopulated, totally uncool and completely not the kind of place that music could crack your brain right open not just once but four different times on a summer night.
Article and photos by Jennifer Kelly.
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