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Yellow Swans and The Cherry Point, "Live at Camp Blood"
Chuck Palahniuk's meditation on silence and noise gave me an idea last night while listening to this disc—all those harsh noise providers out there must be afraid. They sit in front of their equipment and they come up with ways to drown the world around them out of existence, at least for a little while.Troniks
If this is at all possible, then the collaboration between Phil Blankenship and the members of Yellow Swans might be the most arresting and peaceful space ever created under the name of noise. Coil did something similar when Constant Shallowness Leads to Evilwas performed live: they claimed to provide a space where the listenercould wrap themselves in the most protective blanket ever and, fromthere, contemplate the world around them.
Seeing how harsh noise almostalways confuses me and ultimately turns me off, approaching any musicof that kind in this way is helpful. This roughly nineteen-minuteone-song recording was performed live at Camp Blood in 2004. I'm notsurewhere Camp Blood is, but if this was actually recorded in the woodssomewhere, the entire scene must have been terrifying. The name "CampBlood" immediately reminds me of nightmares I had when I was little,when Jason would chase me around in his damn hockey mask until I rippedthat mask off his face and he disappeared altogether. In the comfort ofmy room, however, this recording sports the following benefits: itdrowns out the noise my roommates and their friends make in the nextroom. All the noise tends to blur together and take on the propertiesof a drone, it has reduced my frustration on several occasions and hasalso managed to put me to sleep when played at low levels. I know thisisn't what harsh noise intends to do. I know it is supposed to befrightening and I know that the sudden shock of squeals and improperlytuned radios are supposed to repulse me and somehow remind me of allthe silly conventions normal music adheres to helplessly. But thisharsh noise stuff is beginning to sound like a weird mirror of all the"drone" music I'm in love with.
Even when played loud, music like thestuff that's on this particular release sounds likeattention-hungry sound manipulation. Not that a Colin Potter releaseand this one have anything in common other than their inherent distancefrom most of the musical world, but there is something to be said ofconstant sound and unrelenting density when mentioning drone or harshnoise. Both are present, but for the most part are used for differentends. When the noise first hit my ears on this release, I was slightlyshocked and I almost turned it off. After ten minutes of its continuouscacophony, I was almost unaware it was even playing. Listening to itover and over again has alerted me to the fact that sometimes harshnoise isn't what it claims to be. It's a sort of oxymoron.
Okay, soPrurient's last release really is a harsh piece of noise work, buteventually noise just drops off into the background and becomes ashield, just like Coil said it could. Once someone is comforted bynoise and made to feel its positive contributions, can one really callsuch a thing harsh? That's exactly what this little release does, itstarts out as a disgusting figure of impending doom and ends up beingthat fort you built when you were little, the one that was perfect forescaping the real world and imagining whole new ones.
So the questionis, are we all noise-oholics because we can't stand the peace andsolitude of silence or is it because noise really drowns out all theother crap constantly shoved down our throats through the radio andtelevision? In physics noise is the disturbance of a signal, like adistortion of some kind. Here noise is really the same thing, but thething it's distorting is probably best left distorted. Who wants tohear their roommates yammering on in the next room or the next "clever"beer commercial anyways? Stuff like this might be the warmest blanketyou can find this Christmas. It is the season for commercials,afterall.
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