It was a full weekend of avant-garde sound gigs in the city, with January Hunt / Parasite Nurse / Omei / Drumloop & Scant on Scholes St on Saturday, Robbie Wing / Mark Cetilia & Eric Wong / Iris Our at Figure 8 Recording on Monday, and this in between. It was the only one I was able to make it to, but it was more than enough to take in. It was the second in an ongoing series organized by Stepien and Kieran Morris (Negation) at Stone Circle Theater, the after-hours arts space alter ego of Ridgewood Presbyterian. It’s always a pleasure to attend shows there; it’s a nice change of pace to sit in the pews and see artists play facemelting sets in front of a full stained-glass fixture, even if gets chilly during the colder months.
NEGATION closed out the first installment of the series back in May, so to switch it up he played first this time. Those who have had the honor of witnessing one of Morris’s sets (they’re few and far between, and sometimes not even then) know that each is unique, exhaustively prepared and adapted to the given atmosphere. His last was powered by a rare sampler-based approach that yielded one of his most impressive performances yet, so I was eager to hear what he came up with this time. Though it was back to the tried-and-true modular setup, Morris played an especially reserved piece, beginning with a stripped-down sine drone and rumbling sub bass. The way he sowed crawly, feeler-like textures that eventually took the stage in a signature stereo-jumping cut-up web was mesmerizing. The end was abrupt, to the point that it seemed like he might have cut it short, but still excellent.
BERGSONIST, the moniker of Selwa Abd, is a name I’ve heard but I’d never seen her play. A quick skim of her formidable discography led me to expect some techno-ish rhythmic electronica, so I was pleasantly surprised at her free-flowing electroacoustics. After a distorted chant-sample overture Abd transitioned into an extended meditation on tactile sounds that sounded like processed field recordings, lots of synthetic trickling and shuffling that gradually became more organic, but always threatened by harsh electrical hum and buzz. As the slow fadeout brought everything to a close, I realized I’d been in a sort of trance with no idea how much time had passed. The near total darkness probably helped in that regard. Great stuff.
It was lovely to finally meet LA-based phenom ELLEN PHAN after many years of online correspondence. It was her first time playing in the city since 2017 and it did not disappoint. She cut a striking silhouette against a bath of deep red light, a color scheme that made her performance seem all the more hellish. Much of her previous work is very pure, neutral glitch, not sterile by any means but also not imbued with a particular emotional slant. This, on the other hand, was vicious and confrontational, drawing brutal force from dense spectrum distortion and punishing, machinic repetition. We had talked about the work of contemporary and fellow Angelino Sunik Kim before the show, and I feel like I heard some influence in the intentional momentum disruption and stubborn circuitousness. A highlight was the use of voice samples from her young son, an uncanny moment of harrowing irreality. A spectacular set that I’ll be thinking about for a while.
The collaboration of KIRAN ARORA & MADELINE STEPIEN concluded the night and was the best set I’ve seen from either artist, clearly well composed and representative of each of their styles. There were times at which you could discern the two strands, writhing and rearing peripherally, and then there were times when they would weave together in a single mass of heavy digital noise. The challenge of making visceral computer music—a pursuit that interests both Arora and Stepien—is processing and structuring your material in such a way that it transcends the tradition’s inherent abstraction and becomes a grounded, truly physical experience, and they definitely achieved that here. Here’s hoping a CD is in the works.
One of several promising artists emerging from a wave of new blood in the DMV-area scene, Will Graham’s adventurous solo project Vasterian is still in the process of defining his sound. His first tape Static Dreams employed heavy use of radio to conjure a sputtering soundscape full of dead air and hiss, a stark contrast to the inaugural live set I saw him play earlier this year that consisted of bracing, bellowing power electronics. Though his output thus far doesn’t display a consistent style (far from a bad thing, to be sure), there’s certainly a consistent level of intent and execution. Brand new C44 Turn Around plays like an attempt to flesh out the middle ground between the disparate extremes of the debut release and performance, and a successful attempt at that. Graham structures the two sides around texture shifts between the garbled warbles of intercepted transmissions and the screech of analog feedback, opting for a patient freeform progression with plenty of room to breathe. The A-spanning “On Plummer’s Island” [sic] blooms slowly and steadily, with wounded, barely legible speech giving way to oscillating static rent with high-frequency slice ‘n dice. When the track hits its peak it’s thrilling, so howling and unstable that it feels like the tape is going to burn right through your deck. The facing pair of the title cut and “Tracing the Spiral / Smooth Character” are more pensive. Both feel fragile and vulnerable in their raw simplicity, especially when Graham flips on the vocal mic at the end of the latter and lays down some agonized shouts over a seething mass of minor harmony, a more elegiac take on the cathartic aggression found in his work as Comfort & Critique. It’s a strong and haunting conclusion that offers a late anchor to the preceding potpourri and pays off the snatches of vocals heard throughout. Turn Around may have worked better as, say, a C30 (“On Plummer’s Island” especially starts to drag toward the end) and gets a bit bogged down by its own eclecticism, the abundance of creativity and passion make it memorable—and replayable.
When it comes to performances I take part in, I try to often gauge how the audience is feeling about things both during and after the set. With EVIL BONG
Between takes, microphone feedback would shriek like a drunken sailor beginning to hurl as song titles that took shots at New Brunswick, the audience, the bands playing and more came out of the mouth of their jackass drummer (side note: that guy really is a jerk). By the end of the set, with the audience in a frenzy, several members of the band just began to throw themselves directly at the audience. Hey, if hurting them emotionally won’t break their spirits, why not try physically?? By the time the band finished their crowd-pleasing closer, “Fuck Scronch,” there was simply nothing more they could do than to cheer and submit to the power of Evil Bong
To simply shower praise towards PENIS GEYSER 
The new blood of New Jersey closed the evening’s happenings, as SPLOOGE RECEPTACLE 
For nearly two decades now, Providence-based artist Tomas Bennett has been making some of the most uncompromising harsh noise in the game as Tinnitustimulus. In addition to following through on the project’s eponymous promise—most of his work features frequencies that will shred your eardrums if you’re not careful—Bennett has always been inclined toward long, droning compositions that induce a punishing kind of hypnosis. You can hear this interest as far back as 2015’s Roquefort, but it’s especially present on recent releases like 
There are several aspects of Scenes that make me feel nostalgic, starting from the moment I first held the physical edition in my hand. It’s a classic black jewel case CD-R with inserts straight out of the turn of the millennium—everything from the fonts and typography used to the specific shade of blue reminds me of early Troniks or Crionic Mind designs, or even some forgotten shoegaze disc on Projekt. The music itself also evokes a fondly remembered West Coast era, albeit in a fresh and unique way: this ambitious debut by brand-new local project Lily (Keegan Bonds-Harmon) stands out from the pack with an organic all-analog approach, echoing such classics as Instinct & Emotion and Blind Frenchies and Pork with its quiet mastering and glassy crunch. The two extended recordings (running thirteen and thirty-three minutes) sound like they underwent little to no editing, instead embracing the freeform drift of exploratory rehearsal sessions. “Stinging Air” is an impressive start, steadily growing in intensity as squealing tones twirl and twist around each other, with well-timed effects distorting and eventually shattering them into crystalline shards. The heavy use of mixer feedback makes Scenes right at home on the Robert Fuchs roster, but what sets this material apart is its psychedelic spaciousness; even at moments when there’s a lot going on, there’s still so much room to spare. Much of “Dreams Collide” is quite sparse, with a few almost noodly bits that strip the action down to the simple turning of a knob or two—and even what sounds like some FM radio scrubbing—before the track follows through on its title and an icy hell breaks loose. This is noise that deserves rapt attention on a good stereo or set of headphones. Each listen has me eager for another. Bonds-Harmon has a level of clear vision and intent on his first release that some artists are still searching for on their tenth.
