Great Pitchfork Festival this past weekend. One of many highlights for me was Lightning Bolt. I’d never seen them live before, and I knew it would be slightly different than most of their shows because they played onstage instead on the floor with the crowd. But the energy was awe-inspiring. This video is from that documentary on them from a few years back.
I’m fascinated by the imagery of a Lightning Bolt performance: the mask, the microphone in the mouth like a ball gag, the headphones, Brian Gibson barely moving while Brian Chippendale goes insane on the drums, the people crowded around and the sense of risk from having performers and audience so close together.
Talking to a few people at the Festival this weekend, I was trying to get at why Chippendale’s masks are so compelling to me. Plenty of bands have used this sort of theatricality, from Kiss to Slipnot on down, but somehow it works differently for me in this context. Part of it is that Lightning Bolt live signifies danger in a way that these other bands don’t: the stack of amps might fall over, Chippendale looks like he could hurt himself or someone else because his playing is so physical, in a moshing crowd, someone could be injured at any time. So the presence of a scary dude horror-movie mask in this content actually kind of seems “real,” somehow, like it fits in with something that is happening right now at this moment in this space, rather than just pointing to some external media that we’ve all internalized (Chainsaw Massacre, etc.)
There is also the specific construction of his masks. The fact that they are torn and pieces of fabric are flying around suggests that some a dangerously unstable person made it. You think of Hannibal Lecter in that protective mask in Silence of the Lambs, and the mask is precisely constructed and clinical to go along with his deeply crafted and deliberate sense of evil (not to mention that someone else put it on him). Michael Myers and Jason, their masks are off-the-rack things used for play (Halloween, hockey), which speaks to their damaged childhoods, maybe. A mask like Chippendale’s seems like the work of someone who wanted to make something more orderly and symmetrical but was too fucked up to pull it off. So he winds up with this ragged thing that he jerks over his head before doing his evil thing for reasons we can’t understand. This is probably a very personal interpretation that makes no sense at all.
Point being: Lightning Bolt rules.
“Let’s be honest, indie rock: The only differences between Lightning Bolt and Slipknot are the neon guitars and the absence of more masks” (rawkblog)
“Three things Pitchfork 2010 proved the festival needs more of in the future: dance pop (thanks, Robyn!), nihilistic noise (ouch, Lightning Bolt), and punk bombast. Titus Andronicus delivered that during a frenetic afternoon set that dismissed the oppressive heat with rowdy abandon.” (The A.V. Club)
I guess I’m naturally far more in favour of ‘punk bombast’ (oxymoronic as it may seem) than Slipknot-esque metal masquerades, but anything that can be described as “nihilistic noise” makes me want to reach for my Metal Machine Music. It clearly suggests emptiness, a vacuous hole of volume and repetition (MMM is different because it starts off that way, as a tabula rasa, and mostly remains so). In that sense it matches my dislike of masks, because of their intrinsic emptiness as faces; a flat, discordant image obliterating the human features. I’m starting to like Adebisi Shank by comparison - and there, the red hood is less of a mask than a shroud, a way of preserving the mystery without resorting to theatricality.
I’m not sure if I’d agree with Lighting Bolt being described as “nihilistic noise,” as I’ve always felt that the duo’s music was, in a sense, celebratory, a celebration of the wonders of amplification, distortion and playing really fucking loud. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that Lightning Bolt can’t be nihilistic (which, in turn, kindof makes the sentence before that quite pointless), but I find it difficult to consider Lightning Bolt’s music as being particularly nihilistic, a feeling perhaps borne out of the fact that I just don’t consider Lightning Bolt to be the sort of noise that I’d consider using the term “nihilistic” on in the first place. Metal Machine Music, perhaps (even though I really don’t think it’s all that good, even from a noise perspective), but not Lightning Bolt. But maybe that’s just because I have quite a soft spot for Lightning Bolt (and Brian Chippendale’s other projects such as Mindflayer and Black Pus, both of which I actually rate higher than Lightning Bolt).
But even then, perhaps Metal Machine Music loses out in the “nihilistic” stakes to that incredibly polarising sub-genre of noise known as (the?) harsh noise wall (HNW, as those in the know call it), as practiced by acts such as Vomir, Werewolf Jesus and so on. More often than not, a HNW “track” consists of nothing more than an over-long, unchanging wall (thus the name) of distorted static (rumblings). There’s really nothing to it other than that. The beginning is identical to the middle is identical to the ending, even though such terms are often irrelevant when discussing HNW, where length is limited only by external factors (often, the maximum allowed length for the format of the release). It goes nowhere, says nothing and expresses nothing. In a sense, you could say HNW is pure, nihilistic sound. It’s akin to listening to a blank tape, except noisier. Much noisier.
I’m really not the biggest fan of HNW you’ll ever interact with (I barely listen to any of it, in fact), but since we’re (kindof) on the topic of “nihilistic noise” and all…
(And, once again, I come to the end—or something resembling it—of a post not knowing whether I’ve actually said anything. I’d like to blame the medication, but I find myself doing this a lot, recently … which is partly why I haven’t been posting much these days.)
Notes
-
secretshorts reblogged this from markrichardson and added:
The very excellent Mark Richardson blogs (far more eloquently...Pitchfork. It...
-
strangefire reblogged this from markrichardson
-
peachycrotch liked this
-
kecelakaanjalanraya reblogged this from hardcorefornerds and added:
I’m not sure if I’d agree with Lighting Bolt being described as “nihilistic noise,” as I’ve always felt that the duo’s...
-
fairest liked this
-
bwall05 liked this
-
tomewing liked this
-
hardcorefornerds reblogged this from markrichardson and added:
honest, indie rock: The only differences between...more masks” (rawkblog) “Three things...
-
anythingcouldhappen liked this
-
agrammar said:
For me, the masks seem almost ritualistic. (Maybe because they’re patchwork and brightly colored? Or because he plays drums?) It’s as if they’re leading some very physical, ceremonial, Animist celebration. Either that or just sorta Tank Girl.
-
markrichardson posted this
