Ende Tymes Festival PRESS
:::: ENDE TYMES XI ::::
6-hour broadcast on Wave Farm / WGXC (April 4 2020)
https://wavefarm.org/radio/wgxc/schedule/ry5kbs
:::: ENDE TYMES X ::::
The Wire (Tabitha Piseno, June 2019)
Brooklyn Rail (Brad Cohan, April 2019)
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/04/music/April-Listings
April 4–7: Ende Times X: Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation at Secret Project Robot. Secret Project Robot, the staunchly DIY, artist-run art and performance space, just announced it is leaving its Bushwick space, and what better sendoff than the annual summit of noise and experimental music, Ende Tymes? The brainchild of noise composer and experimental lifer Bob Bellerue, Ende Tymes is enjoying its tenth edition this year with an epic lineup over its four-night stint including, but certainly not limited to, Drew McDowall, Bonnie Baxter, Aki Onda, Hiroshi Hasegawa, and Sandy Ewen, plus duo performances by MV Carbon and Ka Baird and Ikue Mori and Charmaine Lee.
Gothamist (Oriana Leckert, April 2 2019)
https://gothamist.com/2019/04/02/best_things_nyc_events_guide.php
10th Annual Ende Tymes Festival @ Secret Project Robot
Get ready to get loud at the 10th annual Ende Tymes, a festival of "noise and experimental liberation" featuring more than 50 musical acts over four days. Some of the highlights include the "hallucinatory, darkly experimental work" of Scottish-born, NY-based Drew McDowall; drummer and electronic musician Ikue Mori playing with improvisational vocalist Charmaine Lee; Danish experimental sound-collage artist Puce Mary; Dreamcrusher, the solo musical endeavor of multidisciplinary Witchita, Kansas–based artist Luwayne Glass; and Self Toxication, the latest solo project by Tokyo-born, Berlin-based noise and industrial artist Kazehito Seki. There will also be T-shirts from Forest Passage and zines and posters by Green Leaf Printing.
Brooklyn Vegan (April 4, 2019)
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/whats-going-on-thursday-159/
Ende Tymes, a three-day festival of noise and experimentation, gets underway tonight and includes sets from SADAF, Bonnie Baxter, King Vision Ultra and more.
Red Bull Radio / Peak Air interview with Ende Tymes curator and producer Bob Bellerue (April 3 2019):
https://www.mixcloud.com/redbullradio/peak-time-bob-bellerue-on-ende-tymes-festival/
Over the past 30 years noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician Bob Bellerue has been involved in a wide range of explorative sonic adventures in synthesis. From abstract noise music to Balinese gamelan to sound scores for dance/ theater to sound and video installations, Bellerue has carved out a niche of his very own. He has presented his work in some of New York's most important avant-garde spaces, like The Kitchen and Issue Project Room, and in left-of-center festivals the world over. On top of his own output, running labels and working as an engineer for venues, Bellerue curates and produces the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation. This weekend the tenth edition of the four-day festival will take place at Secret Project Robot, featuring Ikue Mori, Puce Mary, King Vision Ultra and many more. Today, he speaks with Vivian about maintaining a niche festival like this and who he's most excited about this year.
WFMU / What Was Music? interview with Ende Tymes curator and producer Bob Bellerue (April 3 2019): http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/85083
Tiny Mix Tapes (Mike Reid, March 14 2019)
Ende Tymes X coming in April: Puce Mary, Aki Onda, SADAF, Pedestrian Deposit, and many more plan to fist-bump Beelzebub
Eight years on, and New York City-dwellers are suddenly less concerned about a warming-induced future that’ll have speedboats replacing ride shares and coral replacing bagels in the city’s collective breakfast routine. The clarity of that future persists, to be sure; but helping to mitigate the feeling of inevitable human/global catastrophe is the annual End Tymes Festival, which has been happening in Brooklyn since around the time that Al Gore was still vaguely synonymous with both cyborgs and climate change activism.
Bob Bellerue — a.k.a. Half Normal — started the DIY festival back in 2011, and in an interview that he did with us a couple of years later, he commented on how the festival continues as a congregation of all those noise/experimental artists that he personally wants to see perform. Luckily, he’s cool with unlimited voyeurs!
Now, End Tymes X is scheduled to take place at Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn from April 4-7. And one can only assume by the no-frills website that the festival maintains its status as being sponsor and contract-free — and really, it would feel sort of paradoxical to have all these underground noise artists performing against a backdrop of Pabst Blue Ribbon posters, anyway.
Among the complete cacophonous lineup, TMT pals like Puce Mary, Aki Onda, Hiroshi Hasegawa, MV Carbon & Ka Baird, King Vision Ultra, Sandy Ewen, Dreamcrusher, and Bonnie Baxter plan to expand minds for a relatively meager price. It’s only $60 for a weekend pass!
Catch that full lineup (and buy tickets/stuff) here, and check some relevant vids below before you go
:::: ENDE TYMES IX ::::
S3rmon News (April 5 2018)
http://s3r.news/ende-tymes-ix-takes-over-brooklyn-this-weekend/
Its my favorite time of year, my favorite tyme of yearrrr..:) its Ende Tymes! Ende Tymes Fest is the brainchild of Bob Bellerue, a veteran experimental noise musician, composer, technician and organizer, that has a heart for community and the hyper creative, unapologetic artists and unhinged creations in general. Its Bob’s ninth run of Ende Tymes, a festival that’s brought together noise and experimental artist from around the world to celebrate each other’s expressions for close to a decade in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
And true to artist growth, experimentation and continual development, this year Ende Tymes has booked an all new artist lineup of noise & experimental musicians, all who have never played Ends Tymes before. This gon be goooood.
It’s an exciting opportunity to lay witness to so many expressions you’re never seen, heard or have reference for. It’s only right to line up this blaze of glory on this year, as this is Ende Tymes’ final run at their residential home, The Silent Barn, due to the venue’s closing on May 30th.
And so Ende Tymes is exiting out with a fresh bang. An explosion of genre pushing, hyper creative, experimental musicians who undoubtably will tear the doors off Silent Barn this weekend… pun intended. The three-day Festival schedule is below, along with some artist profiles you should check out
:::: ENDE TYMES VII ::::
Time Out New York
Observer Music (Brad Cohan, April 3 2017)
https://observer.com/2017/04/april-best-avant-garde-concerts-xiu-xiu/
Ende Tymes 7 Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation:
Noise music armageddon will be afoot as Downtown Brooklyn’s spacious Issue Project Room and Bushwick DIY destination Silent Barn host the seventh installment of the four-day-long, classification-defying Ende Tymes, Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation.
As the brainchild of Brooklyn-based extreme-music overlord Bob Bellerue, Ende Tymes has survived and thrived while other fests have fallen by the wayside. Once again, chief architect Bellerue has convened a monumental lineup for noise, drone, industrial and electronics junkies to feast on.
The opening night kick-off at IPR on the April 27 is headed by performances from Joe Colley, Jenny Gräf, TRNSGNDR/VHS, and a duo between Denis Rollet and Francisco Meirino, before switching over to Silent Barn on April 28.
Brooklyn Vegan (January 24 2017)
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/ende-tymes-fest-vii-lineup/
Ende Tymes Fest VII lineup
NYC’s seventh annual “festival of noise and experimental liberation” Ende Tymes will return on April 27 at Issue Project Room and April 28-30 at Silent Barn. Tickets and more info here. Check out the full lineup below…
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Village Voice (Raymond Cummings, June 1 2016)
https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/06/01/keeping-it-weird-the-best-of-times-at-ende-tymes-festival/
Keeping It Weird: The Best of Times at Ende Tymes Festival
In early 2011, a friend of experimental composer Bob Bellerue told him that, considering how long he’d been around New York’s noise scene, he should start a festival of his own. And then, later that week, so did another friend, and another one. Two weeks later, he caved. “I wrote to a dozen people, and every single one of them said, ‘Fuck yeah!’ ” he tells the Voice by phone.
He’s still going strong. From June 2–5, fans with an ear for the strange and exciting can head to the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation, which brings together over three dozen artists who work in weird, awesome ways. It’s a unique event, and that makes it easy to sustain. “I’m not having to hound people, or call agents, or write contracts,” Bellerue explains. “[Last year] everyone was saying that it was like a family reunion. They were there because they wanted to see their friends, and they wanted to perform for their friends.”
The community is both international and omni-generational. Artists featured on this year’s bill include L.A.-based noise lifer Hive Mind, whose fifteen-plus-year catalog ranges from the eerily crepuscular to the wildly out of control; Swiss outsider art collective 5chimpfluch Grupp3; and the chameleonic Maine sound sculptor Jason Lescalleet. “Usually there’s one person I haven’t met,” says Bellerue of the lineups, “but this time there’s a handful. Keeps it weird.” It’s not uncommon, he adds, for surprise sets to spontaneously arise at the end of the night; attendees are likely to get more than they’re paying for (in a good way).
Live music sets happen at Silent Barn, where a blend of Ende Tymes regulars and newcomers fill the bright space with disparate sounds. Telecult Powers, composed of Witchbeam and Mister Matthews, have appeared at Ende Tymes in various permutations over the years, interrogating homemade electronics to produce buzzing drones that can feel physically affecting; this year marks the first time they’ll play in this setup. “We haven’t had an opportunity to perform together since last December, which makes the Ende Tymes Festival even more exciting,” says Witchbeam. “We’re looking forward to turning the Silent Barn into a flying saucer one more time, and entering the pleroma.”
On the newcomer side is Spiteful Womb, the project of NYC-based artist Nora Luisa. Her sets tend toward the cryptic and murky, immersing vocals and voice samples in grinding, blackened-synth sound streams. “Ashes, an urn, knives, processed vocals, and tape loops created from old cylinder recordings” will figure in her late-Sunday performance, she says, while a visual accompaniment will draw from the “traditions of gothic and body horror and pure wound worship.”
Ende Tymes also includes an installation component, which has expanded this year to span seven pieces at Knockdown Center in Ridgewood. The presentation is co-curated by experimental turntablist Maria Chavez and co-presented with Downtown Brooklyn performance space Issue Project Room. Included are pieces by Rhode Island’s Scott Reber, whose installations include pianos and coffee cans turned into speakers. “He also has scores he might hang on the wall, and a durational performance [where] he’s going to play for four hours straight,” says Bellerue. Argentina’s Cecilia Lopez, meanwhile, has created a web of speaker wire and contact mics that will hang from the ceiling, creating continuous airborne feedback.
Last year, Brooklyn’s Julia Santoli offered a choral installation piece, and this year, she says, she’s following it up with “a nonprescriptive theme, an improvisation that is kind of like research for a new piece” inspired by the story of Judith and Holofernes from the contested biblical Book of Judith. “Festivals are amazing for the energy and collective feeling of the space,” Santoli continues. “The energy allows you, as a performer, to be really loose and spontaneous. It’s an inspiring atmosphere, an incredible opportunity to become introduced to so many new artists and sounds.”
Bellerue thinks that newness and excitement is what makes Ende Tymes special, and he doesn’t ever want to lose that sense of discovery. “I don’t like to think about the festival being established or anything,” he says. “I don’t want to think about it being significant; I think about it as being a really good goddamn time.”
Tiny Mix Tapes (Mike Reid, April 28 2016)
Ende Tymes VI: Jason Lescalleet, Sissy Spacek, Hive Mind, and more plan an aural blitz in NY
It’s the sixth Ende Tymes already? This is where I make a joke about Satan (or whomever) doing a stellar job at mucking up the ongoing Apocalypse, but really, bitterness is the opposite reaction that one should have toward another multi-day edition of noisy and “unclassifiable” tones. I suspect only world peace has a chance of being more uplifting to those who are into this type of music, and everyone knows that’s a ridiculous theory put forth by hippies that has no chance of ever happening. Guess we’ll have to make do!
Ende Tymes VI is set to take place June 2-5 at the Knockdown Center and Silent Barn in Queens and Brooklyn, respectively, and the lineup is a positively enthralling list of artists that includes (as an initial rundown) Jason Lescalleet, Sickness, Sissy Spacek, Aki Onda, Hive Mind, and Valerie Martino a.k.a. Unicorn Hard-On.
As was the case in previous years, Ende Tymes has an Indiegogo page set up to receive your worthwhile donations. Watch the video below, followed by the full lineup.
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Hyperallergic (Charles Eppley, May 21 2015)
http://hyperallergic.com/208575/a-noise-festival-makes-melody-in-strange-ways/
A Noise Festival Makes Melody in Strange Ways
Ende Tymes, the increasingly extensive “festival of noise and abstract liberation,” successfully returned for its fifth incarnation last week. This year, the festival, which was again organized by the omnipresent composer Bob Bellerue, provided five full days of noise music, sound installation, video art, and an unmatched sense of a DIY community.
The size of Ende Tymes expanded significantly in its fifth year by adding an extra day of events, and it also opened its curatorial scope by incorporating sound installations and audio workshops, such as those by CT-SWaM (Contemporary Temporary Sound Works And Music), the Eyebeam concert series founded by Daniel Neumann. Despite the intimidating scale — programs spanned three locations and across two boroughs (Knockdown Center in Queens; Outpost Artists Resources and Silent Barn in Brooklyn) — an intimacy was still palpable, bringing a collective spirit that has become an asset of an independent festival that features new artists alongside established figures.
Several artists returned from last year, including Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski, a duo that creates dark, ethereal electroacoustic music, and the infamous Clang Quartet, whose biblically themed percussion freak-outs may easily be seared into the collective unconscious of the artist’s audience. Other returning bands included Katherine Liberovskaya, who presented a video work with collaborator Phill Niblock; the brooding electronics of Bastard Noise (featuring Anthony Saunders along with figurehead Eric Wood); the electroacoustic chamber noise of the Work/Death group; and the chain-rattling, percussive electronics of Pedestrian Deposit.
There were also many newcomers who drew inspiration on the home-built stage, including the disturbingly energetic Dreamcrusher, who recently moved to New York from Wichita and is one of many young artists re-energizing the local scene. Last Thursday night, the Kansas native left a lasting impression on many in attendance: after an extended setup the lights were turned off, unsettling the ruddy glow of the Silent Barn, and Dreamcrusher (Luwayne Glass) began his harsh, noise-laden, techno-tinged set — which at times broached mid-1990s gabber music — punctuated with incomprehensible rhythmic screaming (and crowd surfing).
The high-energy performance was a marked departure from the previous set, a slow-paced and Ambien-inducing performance by Sadaf H. Nava, whose dark and warbling music drew more from minimal synth and electro-pop than punk and hardcore. The pairing, while aesthetically different (despite a mutual interest in distortion and asymmetrical rhythm), showcased the festival as stylistically adventurous and welcoming. Indeed, the schedules revealed a diverse picture: the harsh, digital noise of Facialmess against the grim, desultory reed improvisations of Dead Machines; the rough, free jazz of Don Dietrich and C. Spencer Yeh against the slow-burning, psychedelic keyboard electronics interplay of duo Metalux (MV Carbon and Jenny Gräf Sheppard); or the dense industrial electronics of Pharmakon against the simplified but still terrifying body music of Granpa (Lucas Abela), in which he played a glass shard like an instrument by rubbing it with his hands and face, making noise picked up by the mic, and cutting himself in the process.
The festival may have seemed a bit unwieldy to some due to its size, and its breadth did occasionally invite a meandering set — one Ende Tymes guest described noise etiquette as such: “It’s bad to play long, and it’s bad to play poorly … but it’s worse to do both” — yet these minor grievances pale under the sheer accessibility to new and challenging music that the event provides, not to mention the communities it nourishes. In fact, one of the most recurring impressions on social media following the event has been one of kinship, and the fact that, to performers and guests who travel from far away, Ende Tymes served as a sort of reunion.
Indeed, some in attendance saw this sense of community as a point of contrast to other events in the city, notably those sponsored by the Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA), a corporate festival that covered similar grounds. For example, RBMA hosted the drone musician La Monte Young earlier in the month, and it also scheduled a stacked bill featuring noise heavyweights last week (unfortunately on the opening night of Ende Tymes, possibly splitting the crowd). Among the performers at RBMA were the Japanese noise legend, Merzbow, the local power electronics wunderkind, Prurient, and Genesis P-Orridge (formerly of Throbbing Gristle). Sharing the schedule were celebrated musicians Aaron Dilloway (formerly of Wolf Eyes), as well as Pharmakon (who also gave an impassioned performance at Ende Tymes). The event was surprisingly large and densely packed, resembling something more of a club than an experimental music show.
As noise music continues to grow in popularity it will increasingly rub elbows with corporate sponsorship, something likely unimaginable to many even just a few years ago. Accordingly, the tensions might increase between independent communities, where artists find freedom but where funding is scarce, and the larger companies and institutions that might capitalize on experimental music via lifestyle branding. The tension between experimental music and its institutional support may have been exacerbated last week during Ende Tymes, but the criticisms were also somewhat lighthearted: the local synth musician, Mister Matthews, kicked off the second evening of the festival by pausing shortly into his set to gulp an entire can of Red Bull.
Village Voice (Raymond Cummings, May 13 2015)
Ten Artists to Catch at Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation 2015
Last May I had the privilege of covering the Ende Tymes Festival for this publication, after years of previewing the annual event. It was a life-affirming assignment that had the effect of simultaneously redeeming festival culture for me, and probably spoiling me for all other festivals. Ende Tymes feels like a community or a family; plus, there’s very little of the bullshit that happens at most live events, refreshment rates are eminently reasonable, and the merch-table ground game is ridiculous enough that it encompasses tapes, LPs, and discs by artists who aren’t even featured on the bill.
This year’s event runs from Wednesday, May 13, through Sunday, May 17, at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, at the Silent Barn in Bushwick, and at Outpost Artists Resources in Ridgewood. You can find the full schedule of Ende Tymes 2015 artists here. I can’t make it this year, but if you’re reading this you probably can, and if you have the time and wherewithal to attend this and you don’t, you should probably be ashamed of yourself.
Why?
Because prodigal scrape mavens Metalux, who don’t play out anywhere as often as they once did, are performing. Because Pharmakon — who firmly nailed down a wicked aesthetic on last year’s underrated Bestial Burden — is performing. Because the Clang Quartet are returning to save souls and Pedestrian Deposit are back to blow minds.
If the aforementioned aren’t reason enough, check our 10 Ende Tymes picks below.
Wednesday, May 13
Timeghost
9 p.m., Knockdown Center
On record, Timeghost is represented by dense, not-quite-fractal swarms of bleeps and blips caught in the act of devouring themselves while Providence, Rhode Island’s Adam Morosky calmly proffers tangentially related narration. On stage, the music’s pre-existing vibe of temporal dislocation and strangeness is ramped up via intense light shows and a lit candle that he sings into, the effect seemingly changing his voice into the garbled jabberwocky of a transforming Decepticon.
Thursday, May 14
Sterile Garden
9 p.m., Silent Barn
If, like me, you find yourself gravitating toward noise that is earthy or terrestrial — as though someone buried a running cassette deck underground in a plastic bag in the morning, then dug it up in the afternoon and cut the results to vinyl — then you’ve got room in your life for Sterile Garden. Tough to pin down an exact location or lineup for these guys, but their palette flutters between treble-y, low-frequency roars, field-recorded growls, and hazy feedback sheets, with loops, crescendos, and recognizable instruments poking out of the melee on occasion. Be warned: Once you start down this rabbit hole, it’s difficult to reverse course.
Sadaf H. Nava
9:20 p.m., Silent Barn
Grasping what New York’s Sadaf H. Nava gets up to is something of a fool’s errand. There’s some outre performance art, some coruscating electro, some sonorous singing, and a whole lot of pop-circling abstraction at work. I’ve been camped out on Nava’s SoundCloud and YouTube videos for a couple days now, and I still don’t fully get what she’s about — which, in an era of easily digestible and disposable mainstream culture, is probably a really good sign.
Dreamcrusher
9:40 p.m., Silent Barn
Hailing from Brooklyn, Dreamcrusher traffics in the sort of rattling, claustrophobic scuzz that exists to defy categorization. There’s fricasseed acid house, but it’s no-fi enough to pass for noise and so hook-stabbed that one can pretend to hum along even on a crowded subway at rush hour. (Remember Japanther? Anyone? No? Well, this band is like a digital hardcore Japanther to the tenth power.) Anyway, this set is liable to scorch anyone loitering too near the front, so don’t leave your volunteer fire gear at home.
Friday, May 15
Arcane Device
11:30 p.m., Silent Barn
Last year’s Noise Matrix (via Generations Unlimited) marked Arcane Device’s return to the experimental scene after an extended hiatus. There’s a tentative, exploratory feeling there, as New York’s David Lee Myers teases coiled, psychedelic loops and cosmic quasars from his machines. The new material marks a stark contrast to this project’s comparably abrasive, postpunk late-Eighties/early-Nineties origins, but both Arcane Device iterations bring something special to the noise table. It should be noted that Myers kept quite busy during Arcane Device’s hiatus.
Jah Excretion
12:30 a.m., Silent Barn
Jah Excretion is Tokyo’s Yu Iwasaki, formerly of Brutal Terrorism and Zothique. Her metier? Long, loping washes of euphoria flooded with nature samples that are capable of turning insular and depressive on a dime. Call it mood-ring ambient. Any of her more recent Meditation releases are suitable for full-on psychological oxidization, packets of balm that expand into synth-fed canopies. Expect magic.
Saturday, May 16
Postcommodity
8 p.m., Silent Barn
The politically minded work of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Postcommodity encompasses video, still photography, installation art, music, and more. The collective’s growing discography — new album We Lost Half the Forest and the Rest Will Burn This Summer saw its release this week — fuses drone rock, avant-garde extremity, and spoken word into cerebral, apocalyptic soundscapes that evoke the ancient mystery of the American Southwest.
Xome
9:50 p.m., Silent Barn
Sacramento’s Bob Scott has been recording as Xome since 1994, scaring up platter after platter of broiling, spastic noise cut with brusque samples. 2010’s Separation Anxiety (Negaton Heavy Industries) — the project’s most recent release, despite a steady string of festival sets over the last few years — shuffled Scott’s characteristic scrawl blare with pastoral field recordings and absurdist monologues.
Dead Machines
11:30 p.m., Silent Barn
Literally a marriage of two minds, East Lansing, Michigan’s Dead Machines finds husband and wife John and Tovah Olson doing, well, whatever feels right in the moment. A searing musique concrète suffused 2005’s Futures (Troubleman Unlimited), the pair’s most widely available release, but their surrounding avalanche of live and studio recordings explore almost every permutation of noise imaginable, from the whimsical to the annihilating to the strictly generative. In other words, expect any- and everything.
Sunday, May 17
Carver Audain
8 p.m., Outpost Artist Resources
Carver Audain‘s compositions burn with a quiet fury, ambient drones reminiscent of stand-up fans that come on like sleeping gas piped in through a hotel room vent. Each breathy blare initially seems to conceal more than it reveals, but whenever Audain opts to initiate a tectonic, dynamic shift, it’s noticeable in a way that makes you aware that you’ve truly been probing those fungible clouds of static, reaching for the hidden truth beyond what you can’t quite hear. Recorded output from this native Australian is depressingly scarce right now, a state of being that I hope changes in the very near future. Remember: He goes on early in Sunday’s bill. Be there.
Yeezus Walks With Me (May 2015)
Yeezus Walks With Me: http://yeezuswalkwithme.tumblr.com/post/120256401858/ende-tymes-v
Ende Tymes V
I happened to catch most (but not all) of the fifth annual Ende Tymes Festival of Noise & Abstract/Experimental Liberation from May 13-16 (had to miss the last day at Outpost Artists Resources). Curated and organized by Bob Bellerue (Thank you, Bob), it’s been the premiere noise festival in NYC since 2011 (particularly since the demise of No Fun Fest). Although memories of a few of the acts I saw are a bit hazy, due to seeing 8-14 bands per day, most of the week gave me some of the best memories I’ve had going to shows since last year’s Ende Tymes, making this the only music festival I wouldn’t dare to miss for as long as it continues in future years. I didn’t take any footage of the fest but I highly recommend checking out the footage posted on unARTigNYC’s YouTube page.
May 13 - Knockdown Center, Queens - Greg Fox, Z’EV, Marcia Bassett / Samara Lubelski, Lary7, Timeghost, Julia Santoli, Sputnik Trio, Bob Bellerue
Ende Tymes’ first night ever at Knockdown Center started with an opening reception during which installations went on in different rooms of the giant warehouse. Daniel Neumann performed a live 8-channel work, Bob Belleure set up a feedback system with radios and a piano soundboard, and Postcommodity had a video installation of a woman in a tub cutting up a dead sheep (that one was a bit hard to watch, and not sure I’m ok with it ethically).
The first performance of the night that everyone huddled around to watch was Bob Bellerue’s collaboration with dancer Rainey White. It was billed as a collab with Bob’s wife Wanda Gala but I’m guessing she just did the choreography. The performance used the same feedback system as the opening installation, but I think Ms. White was also covered in contact mics which impacted the sound whenever she got close to one of the radios. One sound that was prominent during the set was two guys on the radio talking about baseball.
Sputnik Trio played a rather wild and chaotic set (as much as you can while sitting down), using cello and guitars affected with tools and tape.
Julia Santoli did a set using looper pedal with which she layered her vocals Julianna Barwick-style. She stood pretty close to her amp and played with the feedback potential of her setup, her movement slow and theatrical, almost like watching noh theatre.
Timeghost gave one of the more extreme performances I’ve ever seen, not in terms of sound (industrial-tinged noise with some Eastern percussion elements) so much as in theatrics. A few specific images: at one point he wore a clear gas mask which exuded vapor and he drifted his arms across two candles while rotating a pair of baoding balls, and at another point he put in a mouth guard which went through his cheeks and connected with wires attached to the back of his head, all of which altered his voice to sound as creepy as you could imagine. Oh yeah and there were strobe lights of course. It’d be pretty hard for anyone to beat Timeghost in the badass department.
Lary7 gave a solid psychedelic-tinged harsh noise set using giant synths I’ve never seen the likes of before, some of which he threw on the floor at the end of the set.
This was the second time I’d seen Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski perform together, and I liked this set even more than the last one. The sound between the two performers was well-balanced and the arc of the piece worked a lot more. Great ambient work that stays in a middle-ish dynamic range.
I think I was expecting a little more of Z’EV’s set. He played a set of electronic drums accompanying a video filled with dark kaleidoscopic visuals. The sound that resulted was a sludge of electronics that only occasionally sounded related to percussion at all, which I thought interesting since this was his first US “cine-cussion” event. An interesting thing to watch though was Z’EV’s playing style, which looked a lot more like slow jazz drumming than anything else.
Greg Fox, however, played in his fast-paced but totally zenned out way that only he can do, touching every inch of each of his drums in every way possible. Classic Greg Fox.
The whole evening had a really great flow and no technically hiccups that I can recall. Thoroughly enjoyable night.
May 14 - The Silent Barn, Brooklyn - Laundry Room Squelchers, Clang Quartet, Breakdancing Ronald Reagan, Secret Boyfriend, Taskmaster, Tinnitustimulus, Raven Chacon, Tralphaz, Andorkappen, Wrong Hole, Dreamcrusher
Didn’t get to see Mister Matthews, Philip White, Limax Maximus, Sterile Garden, or Sadaf, but got to Silent Barn just in time for Dreamcrusher. One of the most memorable sets of the fest, it got pretty wild and people were moshing and jumping on each other, even people I never would’ve expected to. Dreamcrusher crowd surfed multiple times and his movement was either highly aggressive or otherwise extremely still, playing dead on the ground for up to a minute, for example. The set was cut slightly short when one of the audience members accidentally rolled onto Dreamcrusher’s laptop (the entire set was playback, as far as I could tell).
Wrong Hole’s set was quite harsh and droney, featuring some elements of junk percussion. Best part of the set was when he put a contact mic in his mouth and writhed around in the audience and kept banging his head against one of the speakers.
Andorkappen’s set was rather subdued, industrial with minimalist beats and death growls. At one point he gave the mic to a girl in the audience who began screaming with the music (I guess that’s a thing they do a lot maybe?)
Tralphaz had a really energetic set despite standing at an electronics table the whole time. The sound went back and forth between really harsh noise and quiet drones.
Raven Chacon’s set was highly dynamic, evolving from low drones to harsh high pitched frequencies to scraping a sheet of metal with an antler to yelling into a radio.
Tinnitustimulus came closest to sounding like a Merzbow set, really wild and amorphous but super harsh the entire time.
Taskmaster’s was the only Harsh Noise Wall set of the fest as far as I know. But that’s not to say it was completely static, it did seem to get denser and louder as the set progressed.
Secret Boyfriend had the only set of the fest (that I saw) which incorporated original pop elements, starting off with a sort of folk guitar song and then going into a synthy house track. The set ended of course with harsh drones and Secret Boyfriend screaming and throwing around a broken metal chair (or something) and putting a duck-caller (or something) in his mouth.
Breakdancing Ronald Reagan performed as an unannounced guest and gave a really fun highlight performances of the night. Playing super aggressive and harsh noise with really sinister screaming, he also included silly moments like a brief cover of Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero”, and at the end of his set did a diving elbow drop onto his equipment table.
This was the third time I’d seen Clang Quartet, and while I love the piece he performs – basically preaching the gospel of Christ through visual symbols while performing power electronics and playing a set of maybe a dozen cymbals on the ground, a great work of theatre – the fact that he doesn’t really switch things up means that some performances don’t hold up as well as others, and this night’s performance wasn’t as emotionally enthralling for me as it has been before.
Laundry Room Squelchers had a really wild set that anyone who stuck around that late was rewarded with. Rat Bastard played guitar and MP Lockwood (Radio Shock) jumped around with a wried-up radio (and maybe a tape player) going crazy and jumping into the audience, a girl in the audience joining in at some point, and she and MP writhed around on the floor and the stage. Some cords got accidentally unplugged and replugged during the set multiple times.
The show ran a bit late and by the time Laundry Room Squelchers ended at 2:30, Bob decided to let everyone go home and postponed the KILT performance.
May 15 - Work/Death, Developer, Jason Zeh, Jah Excretion, Metalux, Arcane Device, Thomas Dimuzio, Gordon Ashworth, Zeek Sheck, Don Dietrich / C Spencer Yeh, Don Haugen, KHF, Constrain, Harness
The Harness duo had a great dynamic set filled with creaking analog synths and a pretty harsh climax.
Constrain began with sparse industrial-sounding percussion and his set evolved toward putting a contact mic in his mouth and using the feedback to create a harsh sonic assault.
KHF did one of his best sets ever from what I’ve seen, as usual taking sit-down psych rock to its most extreme logical conclusion. Pacing, arc, and the sounds themselves were impeccable.
Don Haugen performed a rumbling drone work that was actually more soothing than anything else.
I’ve had to wait a couple years to see C Spencer Yeh do as wild a set as he did this night with saxophonist Don Dietrich or Borbetomagus, who put his microphone in the bell of his instrument and wailed like mad. Yeh did effects and played strange objects, thought he was going to flip over his table at one point.
Zeek Sheck did by far my least favorite set of the entire fest. Did like 30 minutes of “songs” based on a concept about a community of people who live underground. Didn’t really present it well, had a ton of technical difficulties (her forgetting certain cables), the sounds themselves were kind of corny, and it took forever.
Gordon Ashworth had a really interesting set mostly made up of field recordings, many juxtaposed against each other and against recordings of acoustic guitar and noisey drones. I really regret not picking up one of his LPs during the fest.
Thomas Dimuzio and Arcane Device did a sort of tag-team performance where Dimizuo played a short set, which transitioned into a duo with Arcane Device, which transitioned into an Arcane Device solo, all of which blended as one long piece. Dimuzio’d portion of the set combined synth drones with what sounded like cut-up field recordings (which acoustically sounded like they were coming from a radio, which they could have been). Once Arcane Device joined in there were some technical issues, both of them noting verbally to the audience that a giant hum we were hearing was “an invisible third player” that they couldn’t get rid of despite trying for 5-10 minutes. It was interesting seeing them truly experiment in the sense that they weren’t exactly sure what was happening with the sound. Giving up and just going with it, Arcane Device finished the set with ambient electronics and synth-driven rhythms.
Metalux did a killer set with distorted vocals from both MV Carbon and Jenny Gräf, whose tape and guitar manipulations (respectively) won me over even though I couldn’t really tell when soundcheck ended and when the set began. I also like the fact that they do short unrelated pieces rather than a single long piece as is the trend among these sorts of shows. Breaks up the rhythm a little which is nice.
Jah Excretion’s set was a lot tamer than I thought it’d be given the project name, but it was a really nice psychedelic and synth-filled soundscape, really amusing to watch while he stood still and chewed a piece of gum.
Jason Zeh did one of my favorite sets of the fest, probably because I really like music that gets super quiet and minimal sometimes, sort of in the Jason Lescalleet vein. He used a lot of different tapes and tape machines, some small odd homemade instruments.
Developer did a very brief but extremely high energy set filled with the harshest and most aggressive kind of power electronics you can imagine. Crazy the kinds of things that come out of Dayton, Ohio…
Waited a long time for Work/Death to set up and was super tired and kind of impatient for it to start, but it was worth the wait. It was a trio setup with cello, keyboard, and Scott Reber on some kind of Renaissance contrabass. Obviously droney at certain points, the sub-bass was super intense and shook the whole room. It was a dynamic composition certainly informed by classical tradition but still definitely appropriate for the kind of noise fest Ende Tymes is.
May 16 - Bastard Noise, Dead Machines, Facialmess, Chris Goudreau, KILT, Granpa, Pedestrian Deposit, Xome
Really disappointed in myself for missing Dromez, who gave one of my favorite sets of Ende Tymes IV. I arrived in the middle of Xome’s set while he seemed to be playing harshtronics with his balls.
The lineup order changed completely from what was announced, so I’m not entirely sure of the order of all the bands that follow, I just know I had to leave right after Bastard Noise (so I didn’t get to see Pharmakon, Hyena Hive, One Dark Eye, or Scant).
Pedestrian Deposit proved once again that they are potentially the best live noise band I’ve ever seen: the amount of drama and tension that goes into one of their sets is off the charts compared to most other acts. There are no theatrics other than the way Shannon Kennedy plays a giant spring that hangs from a gallows they set up on the floor. They don’t put on airs, just happen to be a couple of the most badass people of all time. Each time I see them at Ende Tymes the venue is packed fuller than it gets at any other time of the year, and unless you get a good spot you might miss the whole thing. But anyone who does get a view just totally goes nuts when the duo finally break the tension and begin the formal assault on the audience. If they lived in NYC instead of LA I’d probably go to every show they did.
Lucas Abela performed as Granpa, playing a big shard of glass with his mouth, which I’m not entirely sure how it translated into the fuzzed out electronics that ensued. I was really scared for the guy but the edges I guess weren’t very sharp since it didn’t look like a single drop of his blood was spilled. Quite impressive.
The supergroup trio of Raven Chacon, Bob Bellerue, and Sandor Finta (Andorkappen) performed as KILT, which they had planned on doing a couple days prior but had to delay. Really high energy during their set, with Sandor on vocals and Raven and Bob on electronics, full sonic annihilation.
Chis Goudreau played a big modular synth in a way which very much reminded me of John Cage’s original Williams Mix in the best way possible.
I’m not entirely sure what equipment Facialmess used but it was glitchy and harsh as hell, can absolutely see how he holds in own as a white Brit living in Japan.
Dead Machine played a sort of free jazz set with saxophone, maracas, pulsing electronics, and percussion from a beat up metal shopping cart.
It’s hard to say exactly why, but Bastard Noise did my favorite set I’ve ever seen them do and the best possible closing set for my week at Ende Tymes. Eric Wood and Anthony Saunders are a new golden pairing that I hope makes some killer records soon.
Brooklyn Vegan (March 31, 2015)
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2015/03/ende_tymes_fest_4.html
NYC’s “festival of noise and abstract liberation” Ende Tymes Festival was recently announced to return this year from May 13-17 at Knockdown Center, Silent Barn and Outpost Artists Resources, and you can now check out the full schedule with daily lineups and set times. The fest includes Z’EV, Metalux, Dead Machines, Pharmakon, Lary 7, Gen Ken Montgomery, Chris Goudreau (of Sickness), David Lee Myers, Thomas Dimuzio, Bastard Noise, C. Spencer Yeh, Marcia Bassett & Samara Lubelski and many more.
Tiny Mix Tapes (Mike Reid, March 4 2015)
Ende Tymes Festival V: Pharmakon, C. Spencer Yeh, and Secret Boyfriend among those set to literally rip ears off
We could be in a situation where we’re forced to reexamine our lives through the perpetual experience of a particular year’s Groundhog Day. Or, even worse, we could be subject to an annual five days of Apocalypse, before raining hellfire gives way to optimistic sunshine and the chirping of bluebirds, which are quick to use the solidified Earth-risen goblins as guano target practice. Those five days would be literal hell though, so thank the lord for alternate spellings! The annual five days of Ende Tymes entails five days of as much noise and sonic experimentalism as any person could want. You might think the world is ending, but that’s really just Pharmakon screaming until the interior lighting explodes.
ENDE TYMES V: it’s set to take place the nights of May 13-17 at three venues in Brooklyn and Queens, with performances from Pharmakon, C. Spencer Yeh, Metalux, Arcane Device, Secret Boyfriend, Z’EV, Dead Machines, Bastard Noise, and an undisputed litany of others. Here’s a link to the full lineup, which coincidentally brings you to the Ende Tymes Indiegogo page. The rarity of zero sponsors necessitates your help. Necessitates!
Don’t sleep on the shows at Outpost Artist Resources, by the way. The film and video focus sounds super cool.
Modern Drummer (April 2015)
http://www.moderndrummer.com/2015/04/ende-tymes-v-festival-features-drummers-among-the-musical-din/
Ende Tymes V Festival Features Drummers Among the Musical Din
Ende Tymes V, the Festival of Noise and Abstract Liberation, is being held this May 13 through 17 at several locations in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. Though the lineup is heavy on laptop and effects-pedal manipulators, a number of the artists feature drummers, including Greg Fox (Liturgy, Guardian Alien) and guests, Scotty Irving (as Clang Quartet), and Stefan Joel Weisser (Z’EV, pictured). For locations and a full schedule of events, go to halfnormal.com/endetymes.
:::: ENDE TYMES IV ::::
Hyperallergic (Charles Eppley, May 13 2014)
http://hyperallergic.com/126180/a-festival-of-noise-and-experimental-liberation/
A Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation
The fourth annual Ende Tymes festival summoned a deluge of harsh noise, heavy drones, and electronic improvisation upon Brooklyn this past weekend. The four-day festival of experimental music was split between the rejuvenated Silent Barn in Bushwick and Outpost Artists Resources in Ridgewood, drawing large crowds to the outer boroughs, despite the rain. Ende Tymes expanded in its fourth year in size and scope, offering a diverse lineup that attracted noise-heads and newcomers alike. Local sound authority Bob Bellerue, who also performs under the Blessed Thistle moniker, has organized Ende Tymes since its inception in 2010.
This year’s festival presented an impressive selection of artists, juxtaposing legendary figures like Hiroshi Hasegawa (of the infamous Japanese noise unit C.C.C.C.) and Phill Niblock with recent mainstays like Kevin Drumm and Bhob Rainey (Nmperign). The festival also features local figures, including MV Carbon, a recent resident at the former Clocktower Gallery, string duo Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski, and Crown Heights space explorers Telecult Powers.
The mixing of generations may be incidental, but Bellerue nevertheless understands the importance of the chance meetings, which set an inclusive atmosphere:
They party, they rage together, they listen to what each excels at… I think there is a huge amount of respect going both ways. The older artists are certainly well respected for their well-honed aesthetic confidence, and the younger ones are respected for their dynamic innovation and ability to spazz out. They are just people intersecting in their own cosmos.
Indeed, Ende Tymes felt less like a music festival than it did a communal gathering, in part because of its no-frills attitude and open structure, as Bellerue notes:
I book artists who make work that I love… harsh noise, heavy experimental music/video, gnarly drones, DIY electronics, rich abstract innovation, feedback feedback feedback, and extreme sonic mayhem. I don’t consider their ages or their looks or their political status. I just see people who are good at what they do, and I ask them to come play in Brooklyn amidst all these other maniacs.
The first evening provided a concise introduction to contemporary experimental music, a continuum that is exceedingly inclusive and disciplinarily ambiguous. The more sonically aggressive side of this continuum was represented in part by the psychedelic feedback of guitar-noise outfit Slasher Risk, as well as the gestural, feedback-laden power electronics of Bellerue’s own Blessed Thistle project. In contrast, the glacially-paced tonal swaths of Niblock, a veteran droner who has hosted experimental and improvised music in New York for over four decades, provided a slower, more controlled aural composition. The evening peaked with the deft electro-acoustic gestures of Scott Reber, performing under the Work/Death moniker, who managed to cover vast sonic territory without ever receding into a kitschy “everything in the kitchen sink” aesthetic.
The second night opened with local brass and string duo Grasshopper, who artfully crafted a murky, dystopian wash of amplified muted trumpet and viola, invoking the siren-like glissandi of Krzysztof Penderecki. Heavy distortion was contrasted by the careful, meditative gestures of C. Lavender, a perennial student of Pauline Oliveros, founder of the Deep Listening Institute and current Whitney Biennial artist. However, meditation was disrupted by the “mutant techno” of Mincemeat or Tenspeed, and all but destroyed by harsh noise artist Jeff Carey, whose fractured, circuit-bent gesturalism was intensified by a seizure-inducing light show. Following this spectacle, the rest of the night was a bleak affair, and quickly turned toward the darker end of the noise spectrum, best embodied by the flailing, chain-swinging antics of noise outfit Pedestrian Deposit. The group knocked out the power at the beginning of their set, immediately spawning an explosive mosh-pit upon its return. The evening was capped by a slow, heavy wall of noise constructed by Kevin Drumm, performing with an unannounced guest, Chris Goudreau (of Sickness).
The festival continued in a similar vein on the third evening, mixing harsh noise with immersive, meditative drones and noise-laden ambience. Brooklyn-based Telecult Powers brought the festival to near metaphysical ruin with a warped “music of the spheres” aesthetic, performing on homemade modular synthesizers and anointing the crowd with unknown oils. If Telecult Powers summoned heavy spirits, then the onslaught of piercing feedback by Liz Gomez, performing as the power electronics act Dromez, successfully exorcised any lingering spirits. Grimness carried out through the efforts of Bastard Noise, Sickness, and Clang Quartet, but was best epitomized by the harsh noise wall of Hiroshi Hasegawa, who was undoubtedly the loudest of the festival. However, the night was pointedly driven home by Cleveland scummer, Skin Graft, who performed all of five minutes, provoking a violent fury resulting in more than a few bruises. Ende Tymes wrapped up on Sunday evening, including performances by avant-saxophonist Bhob Rainey, sound artist and composer Maria Chavez, and local feral techno guru Pete Swanson (formerly of Yellow Swans).
The festival also hosted substantive screenings of video art in addition to experimental music, underscoring the medium’s (often overlooked) aural component: the first three days at the Silent Barn featured a corner-room with a looping display of video works, amidst screen-printed posters of past events, and the Sunday session at Outpost Artists Resources featured three hours of curated screenings.
Ende Tymes is relatively new compared to others like Unsound and No Fun Fest, but it is quickly becoming an emblem of the noise community, locally and internationally. The festival has changed in recent years – e.g., expenses and ticket prices have increased, reflecting a larger schedule – but Bellerue believes that its core DIY identity has remained intact since its beginning four years ago:
After living in Brooklyn for three years and booking smaller noise shows, I had a few people say to me kind of out of the blue, “You should book a fest,” so I took that as a sign. I emailed 12 or 15 people who I would like to invite and they universally said, “Fuck yeah,” with no conditions. It was easy to get people on board. The only guarantee that I usually give is: “We’ll give you good gas money and you will have a fucking good goddamn time.”
Village Voice (Raymond Cummings, May 13 2014) (he reposted it to the following blog after the VV folded)
https://voguingtodanzig.tumblr.com/post/177904946268/highlights-from-ende-tymes-festival-2014
Highlights From Ende Tymes Festival 2014
I covered Ende Tymes for the Village Voice in 2014. Below is my piece, which was published on the VV site on May 13, 2014. R.I.P., VV.
Better Than: Inviting strangers to your apartment, cranking the heat, and then cuing up a vintage Merzbow set on YouTube.
Noise music is a huge, ever-expanding tent that — unlike the GOP, who merely pay lip service to the tent metaphor — truly contains multiple perspectives. A number of these perspectives were in vociferous evidence for the 2014 Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation, staged in Brooklyn from Thursday, May 8th through Sunday, May 11th at the Silent Barn and Outpost Artists Resources. The scene included everything a noise fan could ask for: thrilling floor sets, impromptu mosh pits, fully stocked merch tables, affordable libations, non-scary bathrooms. Oh, and there was also the music itself, Bataranging from pulse-pounding power electronics to sampled-live loop soups to caustic dance rhythms to white dwarf drones to near-punk abandon served up in 10-, 20-, or 30-minute busts of inspiration that sent breathless revelers retreating to the bar or outside smokers’ area — until the next act struck up a blare.
We were only able to attend the first three nights of the festival, and what follows cherry-picks only the highlights. Honorable mentions are due to Worth’s avalanche of sawed-off violence, Shredded Nerve’s Richter-scale poltergeist, Work/Death’s majestic Phantom of the Opera atonality, Grasshopper’s bulldozing drones, Being’s five to seven minutes of total and utter death, Andrew Coltrane’s harsh wall jack-hammering, Sickness/Bastard Noise’s cosmically overwhelming tribute to the late Kelly Churko, Dromez‘s viciously orchestrated noise tangles, Developer’s extreme prejudice Etch-A-Sketch, and the Clang Quartet’s symbolism-heavy testifying. Really, everyone killed it, in their own ways; there are no losers here.
Day 1 – Thursday, May 8
Limax Maximus
This NYC-based duo opened the festival with very heavy gloomy tones that swirled, accelerated, then thundered into galloping rhythms and collisions, only to pull back. Everything grew louder and more immersive, until the audience was left with something impossibly intense: tons of heavy low end growl and hard chirping at the high end, with vocal intimations cutting in and out, pumping bass, and beat chopping. By set’s end, the sound suggested someone attempting, with great vigor and limited success, to get the engine of the Great Space Coaster to turn over.
Philip White & Chris Pitsiokos
It’s very difficult to do justice, using words, to how enervating and annihilating this set was: the spectacle of saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos flailing around in the throes of exorcism, unleashing beast blasts of raw tone, while Philip White danced around a table that appeared to be full of detonators, grabbing and yanking and jerking as though the equipment were swarming with angry, poisonous snakes. Both men seemed to be dancing in time with the resulting havoc of music that was very physical and visceral: wood-splitting electronic farts, virulent sax smears. There was the sense that terrorists had rigged the Silent Barn with complicated explosives and that these two — and only these two — comprised Brooklyn’s sole defense from total and utter devastation. You had to be there.
Lazurite
NYC’s Megan Moncrief — aka Lazurite — was the first performer of the festival to go in for what was to become my favorite trend of the weekend: the use of props. Using a mic’d bow, a ukelin, and other objects she stirred and shape-shifted into an elephantine effects blizzard that suggested, at its apex, the vivid perversion of bagpipes.
Phill Niblock
After the preceding pyrotechnics, Phill Niblock’s set acted as a sort of pure-phase palette cleanser: a very long, very deep sunspot drone that shook the room and was the first set to draw the attention of passersby outside of the venue. The sound drifted over time from warm and sunny to ominous. In droll contrast to most other festival performers, his set was largely free of action, as he worked calmly and methodically from a silver MacBook. Niblock later remarked to me that he’d intended to perform a second piece, but encountered some technical difficulties.
Slasher Risk
Something of a fake out, this set. Guitarist Andy Borsz lit a chunk of incense and walked through the crowd, waving it, then went in for some Eastern cross harmonies for guitar that were very gentle and thoughtful. Then he and drummer Sara Cavic detonated a punk-rock neutron bomb of snarled, bludgeoning chords, annihilating the venue, setting into motion the first serious most pit of the weekend, and effectively owning the first evening of performances. Anyone who caught this set who wasn’t a believer before certainly is now.
Day 2 – Friday, May 9
C. Lavender
Hudson, NY’s C. Lavender involved singing bowls of water, a mallet, and a small microphone she guided around the bowls in her set. Each bowl had a separate tuning, and, when struck, menacing reverberations sounded in a bell-like pattern. And while this pattern became the basis around which a circular, curling thunder swung, tolling and quaking, the introduction of an electric guitar would shift the trajectory and supplant what had been established previously. Lavender raked out chords that felt alien, swimming, and demonic, carving a separate realm into which the bell toll was re-introduced, connecting the narrative dots, sewing up the continuity. When the artist paused, late in the set, to drink some of the water in one bowl, an act of in-the-moment pragmatism somehow felt downright iconic, charged with meaning and transgression.
Mincemeat or Tenspeed
For some time now, friends and acquaintances alike have been singing the praises of Providence, Rhode Island’s Mincemeat or Tenspeed. I’d sampled a handful of tracks online and shrugged, but Friday’s set has forced me to re-evaluate my position. Davey Harms’ high-energy quizzical synth noise was infectious; he was easily the most dance-oriented act at that point in the weekend, very clearly invested motion-wise, with an array of lunges, whiplashes, and head bangs. Resolutely hard beats emanated from a variety of boxes, swinging animatedly through a ton of rhythmic and melodic shifts in a way that felt organic, like a zillion different tuned zippers being yanked hither and yon all at once. A wholly applicable phrase to describe the atmosphere surrounding this performance might be “turnt up.”
Jeff Carey
Albums are nifty, but sometimes, albums are totally irrelevant. I hadn’t heard much studio work from Maryland’s Jeff Carey before catching his live act, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had, because in concert, this guy is a breed apart. His Ende Tymes set wasn’t a just a noise performance; it was a commentary on and condemnation of information overload and the Interactive Industrial Complex. If Carey happens to set up his array of remote controls, seizure-inducing strobes, various boxes and switches, and massive/phallic arcade-style joystick anywhere near you, you more than owe it to yourself to put gas in your tank and buy a ticket.
When all of the above is locked in place, it seems like Carey is preparing to pilot a starship. The music instead suggests that he’s manning a heavy artillery weapon, as he jerks, flails, and convulses all around the stage, seemingly out of control; the effect is very concussive, like a virtual-reality video game in which the player might experience an orgasm, but might not actually survive to tell about it. The flashing, blinding lights react in time to the music; the rhythms become intriguingly inconsistent, strained, and staggered, switching back and forth from gunfire to tonal anarchy before turning curiously funky. Shock and awe.
Mesa Ritual
Mesa Ritual, the New Mexico-based duo of Raven Chacon and William Fowler Collins, unleashed a sound like a blast furnace with a train whistle at the core that reverberated mightily; if you were present during this set, you received a free foot massage. Think of a a rumbling, crumbling, world-ending whorl – that was what happened, but it happened within a vortex that spun faster and faster and faster. Think of the most unrelenting roller coaster you’ve ever been on, and imagine it just accelerating beyond the limits of imagination. The pair eventually began to nuance and finesse the maelstrom, coming on like a flux capacitor on the brink of erupting, bouncing boisterous beats that got bigger and ever more steamrolling.
Day 3 – Saturday, May 10
KHF
New Hampshire’s Patrick Cole kicked off the third night by whipping up a whorl of galloping distortion. Recorder sounds were then fed into a whirling loop, with the recorder tones getting heavier and more prominent until they were a key part of the sound. The low end gradually came to suggest a string of detonations, with the high end feeling cubed, at which point garbled utterances were delivered into a microphone, and those utterances became part of the overall nightmare. At its gnarliest, this set was a cross between being very close to a fireworks display, the slash of helicopter blades, and television popcorn static. Near the end, when the low end aspect was at its most intense, scraping and heaving electronic bass beats swept in and the whole became more rhythmic and engaging, as if three or four distinct cataclysms were battling for supremacy.
Tom White
Somehow, the twisting of dials on electronics boxes produced a sounds that was fractal and liquid while implying the collision of colorful blocks in a video game, marbles, or ice cubes: Ping-Pong, pinball, a lottery machine. Then once the audience grew accustomed to what was happening, White dealt in outliers – swathes of silence, streaks of static, throw up industrial clatter – going to work on a slightly different sound palette with the sonic equivalent of an X-Acto knife. By set’s end, he’d somehow locked into a disjointed groove. A key sonic prop in this set: a sheet of aluminum foil. In a festival full of welcome new discoveries, this numbered among my favorite finds.
Sharlyn Evertsz
Miami-based Sharlyn Evertsz made good with a mix of hard industrial techno and IDM that knocked hard. Head-ringing beats and acid tech squelches set a baseline that a noise bomb flattened, giving way to a new beat clambering up and out of the ruins that’s was more catchy and melodically pure than what came before; you could imagine some permutation of it blaring through the loudspeakers at a football game. Just when that strain had gained a foothold, Evertsz ground back down into total noise domination: waves and waves of scree beat bloody by stomping, digital drums, a huge, smothering, almost hallucinogenic sound. As the set wound down, the drums started to cluster and pop as if they were being hermetically sealed, with serrated slices of noise acting as accents.
Telecult Powers
Live and on various recordings – solo and otherwise -Cleveland/NYC duo Telecult Powers are given to cryptically calibrated declarations, and Saturday’s set was no different. The opening segue observed that “I notice that John Paul II is now a saint, but Sun Ra isn’t,” while the closing seque promised, come summer, a tour and a new album. In between Witchbeam and Mr. Matthews plied their sinister, spiritual trade mostly in earnest: distributing quantized, tingly bolts of modified synthesizer that thrum and tingle and quake the bones. On record, this is already a psychedelic experience. In concert, everything is taken to the next level: every time the duo switches frequencies you can sense it; every time the drone clips, you feel it in your groin; every cascade of white-hot high tone shoots down your spine and tickles your shoulder. There’s a very distinct shove to what Telecult does that’s immediately recognizable and irresistibly potent. At some point they interpolate 60 seconds or so of Duran Duran’s “Rio”; a fortunate few disciples close to the stage were anointed, Ash Wednesday style, by Witchbeam. Mostly, I just wanted more, more, more, longer. Side Note: Josh Millrod of Grasshopper spent the entire set under the band’s gear table.
TAHNZZ
With lit red voltive candles and roses surrounding her gear, and a black bandanna hanging from her neck, New Mexico’s Tahnee Udero massaged a shape-shifting cascade of blare that scrambled like eggs. Hers was a maelstrom with a furious core of electrical shorts at the center, yet over time the sound became gnarlier and dirtier, with the daisy chain of snarling, haunting effects trawling through the piece nudging the volume beyond 11. Pre-Mother’s Day bonus: her setup was laid out on the same rainbow shawl blanket my mom gave me when she came back from a trip to Mexico.
Hiroshi Hasegawa
Smart phone use is a compulsion regardless of where a user happens to be or what’s happening; noise festivals, as it turns out, are no exception. For most of Ende Tymes, I felt some degree of guilt about being One Of Those People, but I rationalized that praying to the Glowing Handheld Idol was a necessary evil because I had to be able to take notes and snap pictures for the live festival review you just skimmed through. But, really, none of us should have had phones anywhere near our hands for Hiroshi Hasegawa’s set; we should all be deeply ashamed of ourselves.
As a solo musician and a member of C.C.C.C., Astro, and other projects, Hasegawa has been steeped in noise music for longer for most of those in his audience Saturday have been alive – and the set he shared might best be described as a macro, a harsh Berlin Wall of power electronics that shook me to my core. Immense, take-no-prisoners, balls-out, tunneling to the center of the Earth through steel and gold and everything else that inspired a small pit. A set that changes you fundamentally.
This was an internal organ liquefying set, a set that could unbraid your hair, a set that could untie your shoe or garrote you with the laces. And it was long, and never let up, and grabbed you with eight hands and shook you. It sounded like the incessant scrambling of a very large dial. A set like this poses serious questions, for the person experiencing it, as to whether they are really and truly living life to the fullest extent possible – but is also considerate enough to provide some of the tools required to begin to answer some of those questions.
Voguing to Danzig (Raymond Cumming, May 16 2014)
https://voguingtodanzig.tumblr.com/post/85959059088/because-bob-bellerue-demanded-it-unused-notes
Because Bob Bellerue Demanded It: Unused Notes from My Ende Tymes 2014 Write-Up
Here is what actually got published (a link to the Village Voice piece above), which was twice as long as the length that I was initially assigned. What follows is what I typed at the festival but couldn’t fit into the piece. Be warned, it’s raw and unedited. Honestly, guys? There were a few sets I straight up missed because I needed to get air or it got late and I ran outta gas. I’m old.
JST - operatic serial killer psychosis vortex, v theatrical /emotional
Taskmaster - didn’t see, but fractal whine noise sustained that sounded dope even though I was outside. BOILING
Worth’s avalanche of sawed off violence, a panoply that started with a range of very hard, varied knockings before sprawling in myriad, face melting directions : like wandering a psychic battlefield, or somehow riding all of the worlds harriest roller coasters at once
Shredded Nerve’s Richter scale poltergeist sent shock waves through the venue - folding in the sounds of crashing bottles and seeming to turn itself inside out in a new way at every turn. This set rivaled his records for intensity and inventiveness.
Developer: etch a sketch with extreme prejudice, ethnic instruments, music boxes - short but potent
***Work/Death - majestic atonal phantom of the opera chords, ugly, massive smashes…tons of booming distortion underneath, and crushing walls of noise and squirts of scree occasionally. It threatens to go new age but he keeps pulling it back from the brink of that. The lights - color bulbs and strobes. - figure in heavily, and the crowd is entranced. Things evolve into a very malleable drone that’s almost black metal in sound….an unholy howl that swallows the room, a blast furnace or a afterburner. Then: all noise, all vicious, unrelenting. It’s like listening to the end of the world. Ends like someone scraping paint off an aircraft carrier while crazed.
Grasshopper - violin, trumpet, and a variety of synths and boxes - the loose ends swiftly knitted themselves into a tremulous, exterminating din stabbed with deep, pronounced stabs of bass. Another paradigm shift followed, with the sound giving way to all-in, bulldozing tidal waves. Similar to the albums - the swollen, variegated drone with lightning streaks of sax. Very great.
Ape Technology - bow on a cymbal and two sets of electronics kits. There’s some kind of spinning silver thing connected to the music somehow like a gigantic sleigh bell. This is very uncomfortably atonal music that is like a cat trapped in a sack trying to get out - it pushes and probes at different places at different times. Striking, but not a highlight. Halfway through a junkyard percussive element announces itself but then backs off - there are maybe 30 to 60 seconds where the pace is moving from snail to something more engaged , then it’s back to snail. Was hard to get into in a way - there was a defined sound but it still felt kind of…not for me. Might make more sense on record. Space noise maybe.
Marcia/Samara: nightmarish mewl, wonderful, scouring - volcanic/cavernous. Had the entire venue spellbound. You had to just close your eyes and let the white diodes dance in darkness of your line of sight as the tendrils of sound flared in all possible directions.
Pedestrian Deposit: a very soothing, generative minimalism - like a robot breathing with bells stuck in its throat. ( if this is the set) maybe THIS is the real set - a seeming clatter of grumbling, rusty metal, a rapidly layered pile of plucked guitar notes….and then the storm trooper red end of humanity as we understand it. FULL METAL JACKET. Then the set cut out and the crowd cried for more, then he eeupted all over again. Very very harsh wall noise. There is also a cello involved. Then it softens somehow and gets very pretty, like an aphex twin remix of an NIN single or something. Then within that beauty the cello begins to carve a space within a drone that grows choppier and choppier, more brutal. Sounds like spare change is being synced into the mix. Everything Is huger and harder. Also, chains.
MV Carbon/Bill Nace - four track, cymbal, keyboard = this looks quite promising. Nace is on gtr. MV singing into some distortion filter. This is incredibly noisy in a way that makes it hard to make separations. The sprain of the guitars w pedals, and then MV ’s spooky action at a distance. It’s so heavy and SO immense that it has the effect of con caving the sound or convexing it or something. A lot of blare, but Nace adds some degree of strut to it. Playing entirely in the dark adds some mystery and forces us to confront the sheer weight of the piece. When the cymbal becomes involved everything gets more interesting and insane. You swear their amps will blow. I couldn’t even begin to guess how the 4 track is impacting the sound, but the vocals when they come add a welcome insanity, so the piece becomes less about being this huge alien thing and gains some humanity. A studio version of this would be interesting .Got better when they unleashed the cray as it reached the end
Dog Lady Island - minimalist drones that I liked but wasn’t necessarily indebted to, with drums. You have to sort of salute how minimal and quiet and pulled back it all was.
Andrew Coltrane - a variant of the sort of drilling, HW noise that feels scary and volatile, like a jackhammer. Very punishing, confrontational, sometimes very stolid and at others open and at others ear splitting. The transitions between these states can be jarring in a way that, in this live setting, is compelling. The world is full of cassettes of music like this and they’re mostly lame because they’re mindlessly authored, and one cannot necessarily or even possibly package the live experience of this music, really, you have to BE there, to be steamrollered strategically in person and feel your clothes actually vibrate. On that level, this delivered, even if I don’t know if I’d want a document of it - the experience is enough, the experience is perfect.
Dromez - lost most of my notes on this. Incited a pit or three. Deep thrumming spiced with very volatile screaming, and heavy noise shoved in various directions. Great set but I can’t remember more. The important thing to note here is how downright tangled, brambled, and viciously orchestrated this was. opens with a very, very serious thrummmmmm that yields to thwacks and crashes and just a trapped in hell malevolence where vocals become expressions of eternal torment, swirled and burst .
Sickness/Bastard Noise - appear to be having equipment troubles. Tribute to Kelly ??? (See flyer for spelling). “Noise is music.” Very, very quiet almost as though the set isn’t happening. Then Eric Wood’s voice leaps to demonic life, and we’re plunged into the maelstrom of shock torture electronics, replete with a mosh pit. This set puts a serious emphasis on the sheet physicality of this music, Chris Goudreau really putting his muscles, his oomph into whatever is happening/existing on the table. This is noise as machine shop hazing, and it’s effective and surprisingly nuanced, structured in movements with a serious sense of pacing. After the thrash of the opening the set almost settles into a heavy metal plod - ie three note bass crush at snail speed with Wood’s whispery golem/tree beard vocals creeping alongside like a burglar. It is loud, and powerful, and serious, and it’s easy to see why the moshers upfront are so reverent. You feel like you’re at some religious ceremony or summoning or something. Then the pair begin to to introduce these close encounters of the third kind synth drones that are seismic, and the weight of everything we’re hearing doubles. Definitely a religious experience, like we’re traveling to a different planet. They just keep piling on different flavors of noise until there is, literally, no sonic space left, and the perception of traveling the cosmos without really moving is very, very real.
Clang Q - very thrash y, very tribal, quite a spectacle - one of the biggest draws of the evening, with tons of symbolism. Sick drumming, harsh noise.
Prefix Mag (Dustin Nelson, May 13 2014)
http://www.prefixmag.com/news/watch-full-sets-from-the-ende-tymes-music-festival/77542/
The fourth annual Ende Tymes Festival, a gathering of experimental musicians and sound artists, took place over the weekend in Brooklyn, NY. Musicians and artists from around the world came together at Silent Barn and Output Artist Resources in Brooklyn for four sold out nights of shows. Fortunately for everyone who wasn’t there (((unartig))) was.
(((unartig))) is a videographer documenting — for lack of a better, more encompassing word — outer noise shows around New York City. He films black metal, doom, ambient, noise, punk… and does it very well.
(((unartig))) has posted a ton of full set videos from the festival and it seems like more keep popping up as the week moves along. So, I’m just adding a smattering of sets here. Head to his YouTube channel to find tons more from the likes of Hiroshi Hasegawa, Dromez, Slasher Risk, Mincemeat or Tenspeed, Work/Death, Pedestrian Deposit, Rat Bastard and more.
Creative Sugar Magazine (Adam Devlin, May 2014)
http://www.creativesugarmagazine.net/the-beginning-of-the-ende/
The Beginning of The Ende
I went to the first night of the fourth installment of the modestly legendary Ende Tymes Festival, a weekend-long celebration of experimental music, video, and art. It was situated at The Silent Barn in Brooklyn, NY and on Sunday at Outpost Artists Resources in Ridgewood. It’s an entirely independently funded festival of extremely noncommercial music—mostly harsh noise—started by musician and organizer Bob Bellerue. I went on Thursday night, May 8th, to see what the noise (so to speak) was all about.
The concert is notorious for being what Bob has described as the “one noise concert of the year†for a lot of artists and musicians in the Brooklyn area. Its substantial line up served as a powerful draw of likeminded artists around the New York area. Performers had a focus on textures, performance, innovation, and the extreme ends of the sound spectrum. A wide sprawl of different ethos drives the artists on display, but experimentation is their shared connection.
As an event organizer, Bob Bellerue is a modest, well-spoken man, kind and easygoing. Organizing the event himself, he skews away from commercial sponsors, handpicking the acts based on who he personally enjoys. Low budget and ramshackle, Ende Tymes operates entirely on handshakes, informal agreements and whatever free promotion the internet can offer. It’s an unspoken majesty of the experimental arts world that I will proudly defend: no one is in it for the money. This is true expression, take it or leave it.
A short walk from the Myrtle/Broadway J train stop brought me to The Silent Barn. Performances had begun on time, which was a little unexpected. Bob is strict and regimented in his scheduling; like some others I know in the same position, he’s dealt with enough noise code violations to understand the importance of the strict itinerary. And everyone helps each other. A percent of the door goes to the performers, who are vast and from several places in the world. An average performance length of about 15 minutes promises speed in delivering weird or transformative experiences.
Unaccustomed to bands who keep their schedules so strict, I miss Chris Pitsiokos’ performance with Philip White as well as Limax Maximus. Their performances, already uploaded online to UnARTigNYC (unartignyc.com) by the time I wrote this story, are excellently diverse and colorful.
I entered to the sounds of Lazurite, one electronic musician whose manipulation of live samples created an unusually immediate reaction. She was weaponizing sculptures installed in the Barn’s main stage, building a squeaking groan into a disarming, unexpectedly ebullient swell of buzzing drones and a kind of distant, glimmering twinkle of something that at full volume would be quite terrifying, but in the distance, has an odd allure to it. It strikes me as a “gem†sound, for its crystalline, elusive beauty, and how it holds the air in stasis.
In the midst of the audience were most of the performers. They are all friends to some degree, and usually associate on Facebook in different music groups, where the proliferation of event sharing ensures a loyal attendance. I met up with Rat Bastard briefly, who I had previously seen in Gainesville when he was promoting the International Noise Conference, his noise festival.
“I’ve done INC [at The Silent Barn] before. There’s too many f***ing rules now,†he says when I tell him I’m excited for the next performance. “Now you can’t take a beer, can’t take a s*** with a beer,†he laments.
As a member of the Laundry Room Squelchers, Rat is privy to the kind of psuedo-celebrity status of other noise artists with long and influential careers. His show is last, and he’s a major crowd draw.
Following Lazurite was one of the most spectacular performances of the night, Phill Niblock. A lasting force in avant garde music, minimalism, and experimental composition, Niblock has had influences on artists such as David First, Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca. Armed with nothing but a computer and a beer, he drew layers upon layers of simple waves into a heart stopping superdrone.
It could only be called such, a superdrone; past the dirges and chants, coursing through the legacies of the Scottish bagpipe and the esoteric artifice of the snake charmer, the raga and the sitar – building more furiously, growing metallic and mean and brighter than organic instruments but still perfectly seated in the middle of your ears, it was a breathtaking performance, unmatched. At 19 minutes, it felt far longer and yet I didn’t mind it one bit. I sat down and got some thinking done. At one point I may have tried to meditate. Niblock sat patiently at his computer sipping his beer, then folding his hands together.
Worth followed, an artist who utilized a string of effects pedals and a device called a no-input mixer, which is an audio mixer that creates sound out of pure feedback. Existential implications aside it burst forth in piercing tones in harsh timbres and occasionally thumped a deep heartbeat or a cat’s purr or a motorcycle in idle. At the end of the performance it was wailing and screaming, as it is wont to do.
I took a break and went out for some fresh air in the side entrance and stone garden that wraps along the side of the Silent Barn. Lazurite and their friends were relaxing, and I knew one or two people there to kill time with. The experimental community is a fairly close knit one but everyone is welcoming and friendly. I had a drink outside and surveyed the sculptures and art. As I stood up to return, I heard the sound of a broken pipe. It may have been gushing water into a metal bin.
Past the flimsy threshold between the outside world and what is now a Taskmaster performance, I heard the sound of two trains colliding. It just kept going and going. Vicious and metal and loud, the A and C trains crashing together in parallel from 125th to about 14th. No wait, now it sounds like children clashing pans. No, it’s two hundred gamelan players with no rhythm playing their hearts out. Then everything gets blurry and sounds like a nightmare. It’s about half over at this point. Taskmaster grabs a wire which (I guess) makes noise happen, and locks his arms spread out, Diane Arbus hand grenade style. He has an impressive beard and a monastic disposition.
Next on the stage was one Jean Sébastien Truchy, who I am unfamiliar with. His music consists of stark, binary drones—up note, down note, beat, rest, etc.—and a disturbing stage presence. In a truly unnerving cadence, Truchy contorts his hands and moans like a tortured prisoner. The industrial pulses behind him grow stranger and collapse under electronic processing. He’s also rocking the monastic chic look, but of a monk who’s rooting for the other team. Then he just starts screaming like a regular demon. I’m thoroughly terrified and impressed. Once in a while a burst of noise subsumes another and it’s almost briefly kind of catchy. It’s very pretty at the end, with layers of voices and wind gusts.
Truchy gives way to Shredded Nerve. He has on black boots and shorts and a t-shirt for the band Disma. Sometimes when people use loop pedals or looping equipment of some kind they like to use interesting sound sources and in Shredded Nerve’s case he banged on metal grates and used a metal billy club with a microphone attached to it. It was sort of catchy, or it was infectiously looped until satiation set in and I could hum along to it. I’m pretty sure at some point the sound of someone urinating was sampled, which has a long list of precedents.
I was eager to try out the camera, which I had borrowed. The stage proved difficult to photograph due to low lighting, so I wandered around the venue. The Silent Barn was cluttered with trinkets, walls were covered in graffiti, and the side entrance contained not only a ticket booth but also a barbershop, where customers are encouraged to pay what they think their haircut is worth.
I took a few shots of the interior and some of the art. Walking around I saw art peppered along the walls and rooms full of people talking to one another. Each of the musicians who had played earlier seemed to have a cabal of people who knew them. There were about three degrees of separation between everyone in the room. I took a picture of Bob as he opened a back door, perhaps to retrieve some more cables. Everyone needed lots of cables at shows like this.
Developer was the most actively diverse sound painter of the night, serving a buffet of interesting and far-reaching timbres interspersed with small, neat experiments—like a microphone on a door hinge, and it squeaks! When I closed my eyes it was impossible to track. It reminded me of being stressed in the morning, when my fatigued mind can’t form a complete thought. Then he bowed what looked like a drying bin for utensils, and at some points along the bow it sounded like an electric guitar. Other noises turned up in pitch and squeaked humanly, and then some genuine bells, musical bells, played before more noise happened.
Slasher Risk were a duo who lit sage to cleanse the venue before playing some post-rocky guitar melodies for a few minutes. It was very moody and kind of nostalgic and sweet. Then someone turned a knob and the melodies became a guitar tornado. Slasher Risk’s attention to detail in the evocation of irreverent 90s alt-rockers was too spot on for the crowd to appreciate. They riffed and posed and twisted their hips lackadaisically while snarls of blown-out bombast whirled about the room. It was very dark and I couldn’t take any good pictures of them and at one point a half dozen attendees tried to start a mosh pit.
Again I was reminded of simple binaries. Silence and noise. Total harmony, then the beatific, cathartic buzz of the atonal. Suspended in the air of the room were two glowing orbs cycling through colors. They glowed along with the music, getting brighter or darker as the volume rose or lowered in the room. But tonight everything was so loud you’d never know. They were fully beaming, in soothing pastels and loud neons.
What began as work/death’s performance turned into an opportunity for me to clear my head a bit. I took off around the street corner for some food and to check my ears to know what kind of damage I’d accrued. I felt guilty for skipping out on the show and subconsciously ill from the absence of sounds. It was as if a great vacuum opened up in my head, far more punishing than anything emanating from the little venue behind me.
Normally at this hour I would have been hearing an arresting, echoing herd of piano chords doused in processing by work/death’s mindful and brilliant Scott Reber; I had to rectify that problem. I managed to make it back after around 10 minutes right as something kind of transcendentally beautiful collapsed into something darkly creepy. It kind of toed that line for a while before fading out.
Blessed Thistle was Bob Bellerue himself, a standard (for this crowd) performance that was nevertheless thoroughly satisfying. He screamed, whipped white hot sonics up and down, pressed buttons that made things growl or hiss or buzz, and at one point shook his gear around violently, knocking some of it to the ground. Bob was the Platonic Noise Artist, his highs perfectly highs, lows just right, and just enough interaction and scalding fury to come alive, particularly when he yelled and shook the flimsy plastic table he laid his toys on. Already worn out from the event—the perils of DIY organizing!—it seemed like Bob held in every last ounce of his precious strength for this part of the night.
Newton provided the penultimate performance of the evening, a schizophrenic sound collage made up of textures and thumps and watery sloshing sounds. Clicks and percussive slaps were timbrally blended into a grey mush that cavorted between speakers playfully…then angrily. When that thing reached its logical end point, Newton played a sample of a crying baby and dissected it, rearranged it, sped it up and down and fed it through weird machinations until it screamed and howled like strange birds in pain. In physics class I learned that a baby’s cry was in the range of frequencies that human ears are most sensitive to.
Rat Bastard was the last act. Quick to set up, he was armed with nothing but a guitar and an amp, and what looked like a pedal that had been built from scratch, no doubt to produce odd noises. With the bravado of the world’s one true guitar god and the outfit of a mad burglar, Rat truly shredded. A method not taught in any books, vile and burning with a mix of hate and desire he shredded like a real life punk. The crowd, which had diminished to a small semi-circle, loved it. Some bobbed their heads.
It was always the most curious thing to me, bobbing heads at a noise concert. How were you all bobbing along? There was no rhythm to follow, no pattern to make sense of. Nothing to grab onto; nothing but pure id, manifest in sound. Yet still, inexplicably, I nodded along with them. The music breached patterns of thought and structure and there we were small but communal, nodding along together. Somehow it still made sense.
Bob was tired. There were still messes of audio cables, circuit bent synthesizers and busted amps to store and plenty to clean up. I offered to help load out gear after the last performance had finished and I was packed up. He told me not to worry. Someone would help. Someone will always help out.
The festival continued all weekend long but I don’t think I could have survived the entire weekend. It ended on Sunday, May 11th, with a screening of experimental video art, a welcome respite from the chaos of past days. Walking back home Thursday night I felt my brain make its own little drone concert: a single piercing ring which grew as the city noise ebbed, until it occupied my thoughts completely and lasted for two more days.
Ende Tymes typically takes place in May once per year, at a venue chosen by Bob Bellerue. Anyone interested in the Ende Tymes festival or any of the performers and artists involved can learn more at halfnormal.com/endetymes/. Anyone curious about The Silent Barn should check out silentbarn.org. Both are artist run, self-supported communities, open to volunteers and participants. (Adam Devlin)
Time Out NY (print edition)
Clocktower / Art On Air Radio interview (May 2014)
http://clocktower.org/show/bob-bellerue-nat-roe-ende-tymes-festival
BOB BELLERUE & NAT ROE, ENDE TYMES FESTIVAL
For a fourth year, Bob Bellerue will produce the 2014 Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The four day festival focuses on experimental and harsh noise music and related video art. Three days of music will be held at The Silent Barn while a fourth day focusing on video art will be held at Outpost Artists Resources. The event will take place May 8-11, 2014.
Tiny Mix Tapes (Dan Smart, February 27 2014)
Ende Tymes Festival IV to feature such noisey, shrill, and disagreeable names as Kevin Drumm, Pedestrian Deposit, Phill Niblock, Pete Swanson, Hiroshi Hasegawa
Hey you; TMT reader-guy! Yeah you. You like a good noise festival, don’t you? Sure you do. I mean, you sure did last year, anyway. Hell, you even liked reading about a good noise festival last year. So what would be different about this year? Yeah. Fuckin’ nothing, that’s what.
Or. Well… okay, I guess the line-up. That shit’s totally different, actually. According to East Village Radio, anyway. Yeah, it’s all still called Ende Tymes. Only this time, it’s Ende Tymes 4, and it’s got over 30 noise guys coming at you from outta nowhere, including Kevin Drumm, Pete Swanson, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Phill Niblock, Telecult Powers, Damion Romero, Pedestrian Deposit, and others.
Oh, and the date too. That’s totally different than last year’s too. This one is May 8-11 at Brooklyn’s Silent Barn and Outpost Artists Resources. So, don’t accidentally go to last year’s.
Either way, check the linkage below for more info and the complete lineup and whatnot. Actually, no. You know what? You’re a loyal TMT reader and noise fan, so you don’t even have to do that. Here it is (don’t tell anyone I hooked you up like this, though).
Tiny Mix Tapes (Taylor Peters, April 9 2014)
Ende Tymes Fest IV (featuring Kevin Drumm, Phill Niblock, Pete Swanson, and Bastard Noise) has one week left to raise a little DIY $krilla on Indiegogo
Look, I bet you didn’t know this about me, but my favorite book of all time is Tribulation Force, the powerful second novel in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ classic Left Behind series. Why am I telling you this now? Well aside from the fact that my mom told me in order to make new friends I’m going to have to get used to not lying about my life, I’m also trying to establish that I know a whole heck of a lot about the end times, putting me in the unique position of being way over-qualified to talk about the the fourth annual Ende Tymes festival planned for May 8 through May 11 in Brooklyn at Silent Barn and Outpost Artist Resources.
So what is Ende Tymes? In addition to being the period of seven years between the rapture and Christ’s glorious return to Earth, it’s also an annual noise and video art festival in New York. I mean, if your memory is not totally terrible you probably remember reading about it on this site already. All those facts, mind you, are still true. However, now, in addition to announcing a call for video artists (the deadline for submission is April 15), Ende Tymes has made it clear that it needs your help by way of making an Indiegogo dealy! This is like that part in my second-favorite book, Soul Harvest (book four in LaHaye and Jenkins’ seminal Left Behind series), when the Antichrist almost eats a fellah, but then Jesus goes ahead and saves the guy. In this analogy you are Jesus, the fellah is the Ende Tymes Fest, and the Antichrist is not having enough money, I guess.
The fundraising campaign has about a week left to get to its $5,000 goal, and there’s all sorts of special treasures you can get if you donate at different levels, including mix tapes, posters, signed memorabilia, and the chance to literally purchase a performer. That’s right, for the low low price of $100, you can buy an entire Kevin Drumm to take home, teach tricks, and feed bon bons. I’m personally thinking of picking up a Bhob Rainey of my very own. Scope the full lineup below and see which of the artists you might like to make yours.
Brooklyn Vegan (February 24, 2014)
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2014/02/ende_tymes_fest_3.html
Ende Tymes Festival 2014 lineup (Bastard Noise, Kevin Drumm, Pete Swanson, MV Carbon, Bill Nace, Samara Lubelski, more)
NYC’s noise and experimental music festival Ende Tymes just announced the lineup for its fourth annual festival which, as in previous years, will be going down at Silent Barn and Outpost Artist Resources. Ende Tymes will run from May 8 through May 11, so prepare yourself to venture to outersound via four days of really, really loud.
The lineup includes long-running noise/powerviolence/experimental/etc band Bastard Noise, former Yellow Swans member Pete Swanson, noise/ambient electronic master Kevin Drumm, a duo set from Metalux member MV Carbon and Body/Head member Bill Nace, a duo set from Zaimph’s Marcia Bassett and Chelsea Light Moving member Samara Lubelski, Japan’s Hiroshi Haseagwa, legendary composer/jack-of-all-trades Phill Niblock, and many more. Check out the extensive lineup below, and stay tuned to the Ende Tymes site for more info.
To learn a bit more about the fest, check out interviews with fest organizer and musician Bob Bellerue over at Tiny Mix Tapes and the Village Voice.
Animal (Marina Galperina, March 10 2014)
http://animalnewyork.com/2014/four-day-noise-video-art-festival-coming-silent-barn/
FOUR DAY NOISE AND VIDEO ART FESTIVAL COMING TO SILENT BARN
“If you are not familiar with noise as an art form — it’s a different way of appreciating and creating sound, with a decidedly idiosyncratic hands-on approach, often leading to unique and profound results,” Bob Bellerue explains on the Ende Tymes IV Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation IndieGoGo campaign page. The venue/artist studio complex Silent Barn is hosting the third annual event featuring some of the best noise artists in the world. Your artist preview video is below. Headphones are recommended.
Hosted by SILENT BARN and OUTPOST ARTISTS RESOURCES, ENDE TYMES IV will present more than 40 NATIONAL and INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS over the course of 4 NIGHTS. ENDE TYMES presents a wide variety of STREET-LEVEL EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC and NOISE ART: HARSH NOISE, AVANT-GARDE, DRONE, MODULAR SYNTHESIS, and our personal favorite “UNCLASSIFIABLE”
This is an intense event that some of us care about quite intensely, so any help would be great. Working with Outpost Artist Resources, the festival is also taking submissions of single-channel video works, recommended at 2 to 15 minutes in length. The theme is “sound vision” — “sound as integral component of the conceptual / thematic / technical video material.” Submit to video@halfnormal.com by April 15. Come rage.
:::: ENDE TYMES III ::::
Village Voice (Raymond Cummings, May 24 2013)
12 Artists to Catch at Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation
The third-annual Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation is nigh, a three-day bacchanal of theory, art, cinema, beards, and tunings of an exploded, inside-out, or perforated nature. It’s Bob Bellerue’s five-star, no-name tinnitus buffet, and to help whet your appetite we’ve sampled the menu liberally and emerged with 12 must-see scheduled highlights. Know this: Ende Tymes is, basically, the Lollapalooza of noise — an orgy of lifers, rising stars, no-profiles, and all-around retrobates banging on shit and dissembling expensive stereo equipment with pliers and generally rendering sterile all the wildlife in the surrounding environs. Check out the schedule, and grab yourself a plate.
Friday May 24
Long Distance Poison, 9 p.m.
With New York’s Long Distance Poison, space is unambiguously the place, an endless slow-motion on-rush of IV-drip drones and sprinkler-system synthesizers and rapturous out-of-body experiences. If you ask us, this act would be better suited to the tail end of the last night of the festival than at the first night’s close, but we’re just stoked to have them onboard.
Breached Hull, 9:30 p.m.
Ohio’s Breached Hull — members of Water Torture and Pussdrainer, if those handles ring a Hell’s bell — straight up scare us. Nobody should be allowed to have a discography this shallow while bringing to bear decimating, wasteland wrath like these dudes do. The emphasis seems to be on decaying loops of melody and flanged industrial detritus, jacked samples, and some guy screaming into a microphone. Think of Sword Heaven, Skinny Puppy, the pummeling early moments on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral — then imagine all of that stuff hastily shoved under a hood and kicked down a stairwell strewn with syringes and broken glass. Remember Pinhead, from the Hellraiser movies? This is his favorite dance-pop band.
TAHNZZ (NM), 10:50 p.m.
Something sinister’s afoot in Albuquerque; Tahnee Udero’s Soundcloud page will provide all the evidence anyone could need to prove that. What we have here is a very earthy, downright terrestial strain of sound that brings to mind spades shoved into rocky soil, metal detectors swung methodically over marshlands at dusk, cyborg buzzards signaling one another obliquely, backmasked. Sometimes her noise just sputters, spurned and shamed and spinning slowly, like a under-confident, tarmac-humping headwind. There’s an odd, thrilling comfort in Udero’s micro fume and fizzle — some allure in being scared shitless.
Kakerlak (MD), 11:50 p.m.
The best thing about seeing Baltimore’s Kakerlak live might be watching people in the audience trying to suss out how the fuck to react to the simulated sound of a drill bit chewing through ten-foot thick reinforced steel doors for the entirety of the set. Some people headbang absently. Some nod in accordance with a beat that only they can hear. Some just stare at the hopelessly normal-normal looking dude fucking around with gear on a table, gear that can make you believe that you’re listening to a water roaring down into the drain of a Pluto-sized bathtub on the verge of taking you down along with it.
Saturday, May 25
Maria Chavez, 9 p.m.
Brooklyn’s own Maria Chavez does amazing things with turntables, eliciting sounds from them that are transportive, demonic, mischevious, anarchistic, sometimes all at the same time, whilst setting fire to the idea that musicians laying waste to precision electronics is, unavoidably, a taboo. If her set this weekend inverts your paradigm, invest in her how-to text, Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable, if you can get hold of a copy.
Peter J. Woods, 9:40 p.m.
Wisconsin’s Peter J. Woods — overseer of the FTAM Productions label, curator of the Milwaukee Noise fest, and way more besides — is a veritable atonal omnivore: his tastes range from the splintery to the hailstorm to the startlingly theatrical, depending on his disposition and who he’s performing with. Regardless of which Woods you catch at Ende Tymes, expect to come away altered, changed.
Penny Royale, 11:20 p.m.
If you’re of the opinion that most dance music should sound like scrap metal jackknifing a damned jig inside a quaking Maytag dryer ascending the incline of an ancient rollercoaster gear by wretched gear, perhaps you should catch Kyle Kessler’s set. Kessler — who goes by Penny Royale sometimes, Kyle Clyde at others — zooms in on and celebrates industrial’s irksome, tactile pleasures, but her electronic constructs sometimes linger lovingly over ice-floe strewn Arctic quays of ultraviolet synthesizer. Afraid? You should be.
Dried Up Corpse, 12 a.m.
Hailing from Washington state, Dried Up Corpse flies the flag for noise of the scouring, crackling, no-televised-signal variety. At moderate volume and intensity, the result is offensively anonymous; jacked up and wilding out, it’s the best, most random kind of sonic terrorism, like wandering into a slush-ball fight between rival gangs and having no clue whatsoever who’s cold-crushing your vintage Cross Colors gear, busting your Oliver Peoples, deep-sixing your iPhone.
Aaron Dilloway, 12:20 a.m.
Post-Wolf Eyes, Aaron Dilloway’s artistry has blossomed and boomtowned into an aesthetic at once comic and concussive, gnarly and gregarious. Noise reigns, of course, but in loops that knowingly lasso in horns, grit, and well-chosen samples, relentlessly working over source material the way gravity and time transform fossils into oil. The key difference: huffing Dilloway’s fumes won’t make you violently nauseous. Or will it?
Sunday, May 26
Collapsed Arc, 8:20 p.m.
Ohio’s Collapsed Arc is a sacred trickster, a purveyor of gimmick-strewn klatches and pattering hiccuping machinist quirks and farting samplers; slide whistles, bells, and other noise makers have a role. In his hands, experimental music becomes a fantastic sort of play, like MATMOS without thematic conceits or rigor; it’s nothing short of refreshing.
Jason Soliday, 10:00 p.m.
Pegging Jason Soliday’s work is difficult. There is what might be described as a willful fluidity to his sonic expanses, a generous sense of give, but one digitally worked-over burst of sense-data — a scrap of drone, a burst of static electricity, what sounds like somebody masturbating a balloon filled with helium — inevitably gives way to a divertingly infinitous miscellany, like a low-calorie Russell Haswell or something.
Mister Matthews, 1:30 a.m.
As half of NOLA/NYC synthesizer disembowlers Telecult Powers, Mssr. Matthews conjures air balloon rooms choked with dosed, velociraptor soot. So it’s been weird to bear witness to his solo guise, High School Confidential, that force-fed metric tons of spasming harsh noise. New tape Competitive Games of Realness (Trepanr) is a welcome left turn, a twee nirvana of threaded, curlicue synths and hyperventilating effects. All of which portends an intriguing direction.
Tiny Mix Tapes :: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/bob-bellerue-ende-tymes-festival ( NOTE: I had some issues with the way this was presented, using words that were not my own, due to editing an earlier interview into the published version. i made a revised version which you can read here )
Tiny Mix Tapes :: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/ende-tymes-doing-fundraiser-for-may-festival-aaron-dilloway-macronympha-crank-sturgeon-pulse-em
Brooklyn Vegan :: http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2013/04/ende_tymes_fest_2.html
Tiny Mix Tapes :: http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/ende-tymes-noise-festival-2013-aaron-dilloway-pulse-emitter-zaimph-workdeath-lots-more
:::: ENDE TYMES II ::::
The Wire (June 2012)
Village Voice (Rebecca Aronauer, March 28 2012)
With Coachella next week, the summer music festival season is officially beginning. And for outdoor live music, this country offers a lot more than just sweaty hipsters in Southern California. There are sweaty metalheads in Maryland, sweaty EDM dancers in Las Vegas and sweaty reggae lovers in Southern Florida. If you're planning a road trip this summer, you could do worse than following the trail of these music festival across the country.
The Best Off-the-Radar Music Festivals
1 of 26
Summer in New York is one big music showcase, starting with Ende Tymes Festival, an experimental noise, music and video festival coming out of Brooklyn and Queens. This year's event will take place from May 17-20, 2012 and feature music by Sudden Infant and Cheapmachines, and a film by Phill Niblock and Katherine Liberovskaya. Above, Crank Surgeon plays at Ende Tymes in 2011.
East Village Radio (Jeff Conklin, 31 Jan 2012)
Initial Lineup and Dates for NYC's Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Liberation Announced
The dates, venues and a handful of performers for the second installment of the Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Liberation have just been announced. Filling the considerable hole left by the absence of Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun Fest, Ende Tymes’ maiden voyage last year (which you can read about here) presented performers from a variety of underground disciplines including noise, power electronics, drone, and avant-jazz, and proved to be one of the last major events at beloved (and temporarily displaced) DIY venue, Silent Barn. The brainchild of Brooklyn-based musician/promoter Bob Bellerue, the festival will take place from May 18th through the 20th at the newly re-opened Secret Project Robot in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and at Outpost Artist Resources in Ridgewood, Queens. Check out the initial lineup for this year’s edition of the fest below, along with a couple videos from last year’s running of the only noisefest in town, and keep an eye on the Ende Tymes website for more announcements.
Time Out NY (May 10 2012)
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/music/ende-tymes-festival-of-experimental-liberation
Returning for a second year, Bob Bellerue's Ende Tymes festival brings together some of the country's best noise, drone and experimental artists for a four-night conflagration of sound. On Thu 17 and Fri 18, the action starts with video screenings at Outpost Artists Resources, then continues with live music at Secret Project Robot; Sat 19 is entirely at SPR, and Sun 20 winds things up at OAR. Highlights include Lussuria, Husere Grav and Opponents on Thursday; Mike Shiflet on Friday; and Grasshopper, Beer Damage, Hiroshi "Astro" Hasegawa and Telecult Powers on Saturday. You can see a full lineup at halfnormal.com/endetymes, but expect the unexpected anyway.
DNAinfo.com (Meredith Hoffman, May 11 2012)
Ende Tymes Experimental Music Fest Brings the Noise to Bushwick
BUSHWICK Japanese noise artist Astro just has to twist the knobs and flip the switches on his synthesizer, and Bob Bellerue feels like he enters another reality.
"It becomes this enveloping sonic experience," said Bellerue, a musician and festival organizer who lives in Bushwick. "It's evocative of a psychedelic genre."
So Bellerue enlisted Astro and dozens of other pioneering musicians, including artists from Switzerland, London, and Quebec to take part a four-day festival in his neighborhood next week.
The second annual Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation hits the nonprofit creative space Secret Project Robot on Melrose Street with acts starting next Thursday. Additional video and music acts will perform at the Outpost Artist Resources space in Ridgewood.
“You really have to be present with the music, because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. You have to pay attention to what’s going on because there’s no framework” said Bellerue, 43, who first fell for the noise genre in 1987 while in college at UC San Diego.
“There are people who dance, but mostly people just stand there and throb.”
Bellerue, a noise artist who is currently touring the Midwest, has invited musicians including Sudden Infant, work/death, Sickness and Grasshopper to the festival. His own act, Diablo, is part of the Saturday lineup at Secret Project Robot.
“I’m just driven to produce an event that present artists I love and respect” said Bellerue, who has hosted festivals for years.
The name of his End Tymes festival is both a play on people’s doomsday prophecies, including the Mayan calendar’s end-of-the-world prediction in 2012, and an attempt to make people focus on the moment.
“It’s always like we’re living at the end of time, we’re right here right now, and there’s nothing else” he said. “People are living ahead or in the past, but with noise you have to be living in the moment.”
Bellerue, who held the event last year at Silent Barn (which since has closed), described his friends’ sounds with a kind of awe, like the artist Work/death, whom he just visited in Providence, Rhode Island.
“He has blistering wild passages, and he’ll be singing but won’t necessarily use the mic” said Bellerue of work/death. “It’s just about this passionate experience, it’s almost emo, but way more savage and deep.”
Bellerue reminisced about work/death’s recent “mindblowing set that was totally amazing and two-thirds through it went to a whole other level. Those are the kind of things you just go, 'yeah.’”
The festival runs from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thurs., May 17, through Sat., May 20, at Secret Project Robot and Thursday, Friday and Sunday nights at Outpost. Weekend passes cost $45; nightly tickets cost $10 at Outpost and $15 at Secret Project Robot.
VICE dot com (Nat Roe, 3 May 2012)
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/pp89dz/help-bring-on-the-ende-tymes
Help Bring On The Ende Tymes
Bob Bellerue's festival of liberation is back for a second year.
Contrary to the popular saying, there are, in fact, three things in life that are certain. There's death. There's taxes. And there's the fact that whatever city you're in, there is a small group of freaks making horrible screeching noises in a basement and calling it art.
No matter whether it's New York City or Albuquerque, experimental scenes are always small and tight knit. Bob Bellerue, who has paid his dues in more than a few scenes in his day, launched a Kickstarter to fund his second annual Ende Tymes Festival. An event of "experimental liberation," Ende Tymes does the best job I've seen of bringing many of the nation's noise cliques together under the same roof for one beautiful clusterfuck of a weekend. This year, Secret Project Robot and Outpost are hosting the fest from May 17-20th.
Brooklyn Vegan (May 8, 2012)
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/ende-tymes-fest-1/
Ende Tymes Fest happens at 2 venues for 4 days (schedule)
Fans of noise music and the outer reaches of experimentalism can be found at Ende Tymes Festival next weekend, which goes down over four days, May 17th-20th. The festival, which was launched after a successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, is housed in two venues (Secret Project Robot & Outpost Artist Resources) and will focus its efforts on noise & experimental music, film, and video art from more than fifty artists working with “STREET-LEVEL AVANT-GARDE TECHNOLOGY”. Greg Fox (Guardian Alien, ex-Liturgy), Astro, Sudden Infant, Sickness, Telecult Powers, Grasshopper, Diablo (featuring fest organizer Bob Bellerue) and many others are all on board and you can check out full details on the event, including the schedule, below alongside the flyer and some live video.
Tiny Mix Tapes (Jared Micah, Feb 6 2012)
New York’s second annual noise/drone/electronic festival Ende Tymes has announced the first chunk of confirmed artists, dates, and venues for 2012, therefore a tiny bit of pee has escaped into my pants (just kidding, I’m not wearing any pants right now). Last year’s first Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Liberation brought some incredible performances from The Rat Bastard Experience, C. Spencer Yeh, David Linton, Phill Niblock, MV Carbon, and many, many more. This year will bring four nights of experimental music and video at “cutting-edge DIY venues in Bushwick and Ridgewood, NY” at Secret Project Robot and Outpost Artist Resources (other venues TBA) on May 17-20.
Impose Magazine (Ari Spool, March 2012?)
https://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/new-music/ende-tymes-2012-announces-line-up
ENDE TYMES 2012 ANNOUNCES LINE-UP
Not much more to say about this other than that I am very excited to see who is playing at this year's Ende Tymes Festival. Last year's fest, at the dearly-departed Silent Barn, was a packed, hot-as-hell, freaky-deaky noise scene and this year's festival promises to be the same, including bringing back a lot of my personal favorite acts from last year. For instance: I hadn't heard of the magnificent original gangster of drone tone Phill Niblock until he played Ende Tymes last year; during that show we determined that he was probably the oldest person to ever play Silent Barn. Since his amazing and mindblowing performance there, he has been bringing his multi-layered analog tones to many new audiences, including performing at Neon Marshmallow Festival in Brooklyn and Roulette's new space. Another returning favorite: Mike Shiflet, who's release on NNA Tapes was one of our favorites from that label, and who very rarely comes to New York unless apparently Ende Tymes Festival Coordinator Bob Bellerue asks him to.
:::: ENDE TYMES 1 ::::
Village Voice (Raymond Cummings, June 24 2011)
Q&A: Ende Tymes Fest Organizer Bob Bellerue On The Apocalypse And The Evolution Of Noise
It’s possible nobody told you, but the world will come to an abrupt, ear-rupturing end this weekend. If you’re planning to be anywhere near Brooklyn, you’ll probably hear it before you feel it; blame underground musician, teacher, and author Bob Bellerue, who’s bringing the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation to Silent Barn and Outpost tonight and runs through Sunday.
Or just blame the miscreants he’s brought along with him: mold-spore drone farmers Hex Breaker Quintet; fluid-obsessed upstarts Yellow Tears; serrated sonic strobe spewer Kyle Clyde; wall-noise slammers Work/Death; avant legend Phill Noblock; tinnitus crusaders Haters. (Also poised to crack foundations and wreck equilibriums: Fatale, Twisty Car, Rust Worship,Cowards, Al Margolis, Mike Shiflet, and Vertonen. Some of these names are unfamiliar to Sound of the City, too, but in this particular scene ignorance often quickly gives way to psychotic bliss. YouTube is your friend.) In an email interview earlier this month, Bellerue clued Sound of the City in on Ende Tymes’ genesis, how to launch a big-city festival, and how there’s no need to anticipate the end of the world because it’s already happening.
The first thought one comes away with after perusing your website: damn, this guy has organized and performed at a ton of festivals. So my first question is this: what are the key things to consider when curating, coordinating, and executing a massive underground music/cultural festival in New York City?
The main unifying element in creating this fest was my own selfish desire to bring together friends and respected colleagues, and have a great time listening to awesome music & watching amazing video art/movies. That’s the only reason to ever do anything, especially when there is no money involved. Festivals sink when there is a concerted effort to bring in performers for financial reasons—”Well, I don’t care much for them, but they will bring in a crowd”—rather than for desire of great experiences and spreading the dharma of ecstatic sub-garde revelatory art creation.
So it began as a series of questions: Why not? What venue do I know who might want to put this thing on with no guarantee that we’ll sell a million beers?
If you arrange things well, the ball is rolling before you ask anyone to play. All I had to say was “I’m doing a fest, you want to play?” and nearly universally the answer was, “Fuck yeah, I’m there.” The ship is on the water, the people are all on board, and all I had to do was give it a little push to send it on its way. That’s the beauty of the noise scene: no guarantees, no riders, no negotiation, no hotel rooms, just pure love of good times. I am lucky in that I have a lot of friends who are great performers, and I do my best to run good shows that stay on schedule and don’t fall apart with drama, disorganization, politics, bad art, bad sound, etc. I’m in awe of people who pull off killer fests with real funding, but I’m happy that i don’t have to let that hinder my fest, thanks to the enthusiasm of the artists to go thousands of miles in some cases to rock my world.
Tell me a little about Ende Tymes as a unifying concept, about its genesis.
I don’t share an interest in death and despair and negativity that you see in some of the noise scene, but I’m not afraid of monumental change which is happening around us, even though I wish as a species we could limit our impact on the environment. With the end of the Mayan calendar approaching, the problems in Japan, Chile, New Zealand, and Iceland, the financial crises, the failed rapture, it just seemed useful to remind ourselves that no matter what epoch we live in, we always have to be prepared for the end of our time, whatever, whenever, and wherever that is, and we need to liberate ourselves from attachment to comfort & security & traditional ways of thinking.
How this relates to noise I don’t know, because when the apocalypse comes we’ll need a lot of hamsters to power the PA. We need to shift gears to move forward, we need to reinvent ourselves as a civilization. But capitalist systems don’t like to change the power structures that benefit them, so I’m not hopeful it will be an easy process. People do seem to be waking up and getting the picture of what is going wrong, even though we also don’t want to give up our way of life with all the comforts of year-round tomatoes. So, if anything, it’s a name that inspires me to think of how to end these nasty dirty stinking times that we live in, which I and all of my friends help perpetuate in some way, and move forward to new times where we can live within our means and not starve the planet of resources so we can have a new phone every month.
What inspired the name?
I had a hard time choosing a name. Finally End Times just seemed right, and I got a few votes of support from some of the performers. I used that name in the public call for video works, and then I finally Googled it and discovered it had been used before in Minneapolis, with such notables as the Boredoms, Smegma, Borbetomagus, Yellow Swans, and Burning Star Core, who is also playing at Outpost under his given name, C Spencer Yeh. There was enough overlap that I reached out to them and they asked that I not use the same name in case they ever want to use it again. That’s why it ended up with this silly spelling, with “Ende Tymes.” I think now I should’ve stuck with the other contender, The Sound of Music, but I figure Ende Tymes has a couple of years to it and then it will be on to something else, like “Mayan Eden.”
As a presentation title, “Apocalypse Wow: Harnessing Rodent Power for Post-societal Noise Performance” has a nice ring to it. This description from the literature—”street-level experimental music and the evolution of interface and community”—seems like it could go in a lot of directions, from multimedia presentations to flash-mob interactive experimentation to looping, kneading, and unspooling found sounds, ala MIMEO. Who will take part in this event, and what form is it expected to take?
That statement is the kernel for a discussion that will happen on Saturday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at Outpost. I had another simple desire, which was to get a bunch of older artists together and get them talking about art, culture, and technology. I’m going to be inviting anyone who has been active since the ’80s to sit down and have a discussion with very basic talking points and some helpful encouragement to keep the conversation going: how things change, how things stay the same; how does the so-called progress of civilization affect our creative lives; how does the underground change when it emerges to fanfare for a moment; are changes in technology more important than changes in culture? I’m interested in “street-level avant-garde” wherein the artistic front isn’t driven by degrees and credentials, but rather enhanced vision of the gaps in expression and the motivation to create greater things with the materials around us, in spaces we can occupy for the time being, what Hakim Bey calls “Temporary Autonomous Zones” but with permanent independence of hearts and minds.
GX Jupitter-Larsen, AMK, Damion Romero, Rat Bastard, Phill Niblock, Gen Ken Montgomery, and Al Margolis are among those invited to tell us how the cows chew the technological / conceptual / cultural cud. I’ve sat through some of these types of things where the moderator was the central narrator and I want to avoid that, and I also didn’t want to have too many people. I thought about having another one on Sunday with the younger crowd, but I decided a party would be better at that point in the weekend, so that’s when the closing reception will be, unless we’re all still sleeping.
Will you be a performer at Ende Tymes yourself, or will you be more of an overseer?
Yes, both. My project KILT is performing on Saturday, and I’ll have a sound installation up all weekend. I’m also the stage manager, executive producer, stagehand, sound recordist, sound engineer, photographer, etc.
Noise and extreme experimental music have become more visible than in the ’80s and the technological means of creation and dissemination have multiplied. What similarities and differences do you see between noise groups then and now?
People still work in a vacuum, making their weird sounds without reference; people are no longer in a vacuum, they have reference of thousands of others doing similar things. It’s still a discovery that each person makes on their own: they turn something on at the wrong (or right) time, and it sounds crazier than they’ve ever heard before, or they have an idea that sounds absurd but they figure “why not,” and a new project is born.
If they were to intently recreate a noise work by another artist, it would inherently be a personal creation, because even if there are lyrics, it’s the sound of the voice more than the meaning of the words that carries the aesthetic of the music. Most of the time, it’s pure sonic content, so even a “cover song” is an “original.” Non-practitioners are blown away, surprised / amazed, and scared by the strange sounds in the noise and experimental music scenes, never having been exposed to it before, intentionally listening to non-musical-sound as music; non-practitioners are cynical, jaded, apathetic, and/or pissed off about noise and experimental music. They have seen enough already and it sucks, they just gave up trying to play guitar so now we have to listen to this shit.
Where will you be on May 12, 2012, and what will you be doing?
I’ll be the same place I was on May 21, 2011: nowhere and everywhere.
East Village Radio (Jeff Conklin, 21 Jun 2011) (saved to archive.org after EVR folded)
10 Reasons Why You Should Attend Ende Tymes Noise Fest This Weekend
Begining this Friday and running through Sunday night, Ende Tymes is a festival celebrating noise and experimental music. Taking place at beloved DIY venue Silent Barn, Ende Tymes boasts a staggering line-up of underground musicians from across the country including noise pioneer GX Jupitter-Larsen and Miami's Rat Bastard as well as the best the NYC music scene's periphery has to offer.
We've put together a list of compelling reasons for you to buy some earplugs and try something different this weekend.
1.You’re a single woman.
Sadly, the majority of noise artists and fans are male. There is definitely more estrogen in the scene compared to ten years ago, but the noise scene is still overrun with swordfighters. So, instead of going on your umpteenth OKCupid date of the month, you would do well to trek out to Ende Tymes, where you will be showered with attention from sweaty nerd-dudes.
2. You’re a job recruiter.
A lot of noise people (performers and fans alike) are jobless blights on the community, if given half a chance and a bar of soap, they would happily deliver weed or serve up burnt shots of espresso for minimum wage in order to finance some new effects pedals.
3. You’re writing a thesis.
It’s high time for some educated folk to take a look into this curious sub-culture. Not all of the Ende Tymes performers are ex-cons and fugitives; the inclusion of legendary NYC artist Phil Niblock all but guarantees at least a few words about the fest in the New York Times' “arts” section.
4. You’re opening an eBay store.
While the underground music economy eludes Soundscan reports and Billboard Charts, the fact is somebody out there is going to pay a lot of money for the limited-to-three-and-a-half-copies Haters tape and other assorted collector friendly ephemera that Ende Tymes performers will be hawking. Here’s a tip: in the eBay listing just put “Wolf Eyes”, “Merzbow”, and “Ramleh” to up your item’s visibility to collector scum.
5. You’ve never been to Queens
Ende Tymes takes place at Silent Barn, a DIY venue located off of the Halsey stop of the L train that is technically in Ridgewood, Queens. Ok, we don’t really know what’s happening in the outer boroughs most of the time and along with the Bronx and Staten Island, Queens is in NYC’s cultural blind-spot. Hey, at least it’s not in Astoria.
6.You’ve never seen somebody perform with power tools and/or home appliances.
That guy from Phish playing a vacuum cleaner has got nothing on the underground’s penchant for using everyday machines to create/massage sound. Don’t you want to be able to tell your grandkids that you once saw a guy play a guitar with a vibrator?
7.You want to give Thurston Moore your demo
When he’s not playing on late night television, swimming in Beck’s pool or doing whatever he does up there in Massachusetts, Moore has been known to pop up at various NYC shit-holes to see shows. We don’t know if he’ll be at Ende Tymes, and we don’t endorse hassling the guy. Now that we think about it, skip the middleman and just throw that demo in the garbage right now.
8.You’re sick of music
Look, there’s a lot of great non-noise music out there. We know that. But maybe, just maybe, you are getting a little worn out by listening to stoner chicks singing about cats and shit over three chords and some middle-class brat whining about his mommy. It may not be “music” as you know it, but we guarantee you will hear sounds you’ve never heard in your life at Ende Tymes.
9.You’ve never been to a festival where the amount of performers equals the size of the crowd.
The noise scene is self-supporting and, by virtue of it’s inaccessibility, a pretty small scene. Chances are pretty good that the mild-mannered, bespectacled gentleman you are talking about weather with in Silent Barn’s basement will be choking himself with a microphone cord while kicking out notes on a shitty synth a few minutes later.
10. You fucking love NOISE.
To get an idea of what you're in for at Ende Tymes, check out these archives of Radio Heart and Just Music where Ende Tymes organizer Bob Bellerue joined us to play tracks from some of the festival's performers.
WFMU (Steven Intermill, June 20 2011)
Apocalypto-a-go-go: Looking Forward to The Ende Tymes Noise & Liberation Festival
Bringing word of the Ende Tymes here... not the radio preacher last month, his gospel was false. This is the good news about next weekend, where hundreds of sound weirdos from across the planet will descend on The Silent Barn and bring warnings of plagues or whatever the hell else they do...
Here I am doing my part, asking three of the Ende Tymes prophets a few questions, first Bob Bellerue because this is his creation, second GX Jupitter-Larsen, who has performed as or with The Haters since the dawn of time, and Chicago's Jason Soliday.
Bob Bellerue
When you were first exposed to experimental music was it in a live setting or via recordings? Do you remember what it was?
i think it was "Reality Asylum" by Crass off of "The Feeding of the 5000" which was the first extended music techniques i'd heard (around 1984). i'd been exposed to much of Jimi Hendrix' catalog by then too, and the Electric Ladyland became sacrament to me (it was released the same month i was born).
the first live experience of real out-there music i had was Crash Worship (1988) when i was in San Diego. i got turned on to some amazing music down there, and scored my first Merzbow record around 1992, and was heavily influenced by running sound for extreme bands like Zeni Geva, Crossed Out, Man Is The Bastard, and Drive Like Jehu. but i don't think i saw any true noise performances until 1998 when i moved back to LA and started witnessing Damion Romero, Bastard Noise, etc. i'd been making noise starting in 1992 but hadn't ever been to a thinking-person's noise show until then
Did it have a profound effect on you at the time?
lyrically Crass had a big impact on me, the whole punk rock thing for me about sonic extremes and lyrical criticism. tripping on acid to Crass and Hendrix were some of the origins of my spiritual awakening. Crash Worship was highly influential, cos they combined hard-core drumming (which was my passion, junk metal and hand drumming being my specialty 1986-1994) with experimental noise guitar and ecstatic vocals. i just wanted to jam and howl (and trip) all the time. running sound and getting into recording definitely set me on my path. watching people make extreme noise out of home-made equipment, but with precision technical planning and execution, really defined me in my pursuit of new sounds.
This is a ridiculously expansive festival, wondering if there is a running theme with any of the performers? Any artists that you dig that just didn't fit?
the only theme is i invited a bunch of people who i wanted to see play, and 99% of them said "fuck yeah i'm there" and then a ton of people asked if they could play, and i had to fit some of them in cos they were also people i wanted to see play. the only people who didn't fit were the ones who couldn't fit it into their schedules, or who had to cancel. the only artists that i dig which wouldn't fit would be large complicated ensembles, drama queens, and people who asked for outrageous guarantees. luckily, i didn't have to deal with much of that, as these are almost universally friends of mine who i have presented before, gigged with, who have slept on my floor or i've slept on theirs, traded albums with, partied with, or have a kindship where we know each other through the scene already.
So you must be excited, the fruits of your labor are about to ripen, what do you have planned after the fest?
i'm not planning anything for a while. but i'm going to Poland for a month mid-July to meet my wife's extended family, see some friends, hike and camp, leave my phone at home, and play a couple of gigs.
Anything non music related that you hope that performers coming in to NYC for the ETF get a chance to check out?
a gallery called Live With Animals in Williamsburg has a show up called Foggy Notion with artwork by Ju Suk Reet Meate and Oblivia (both from Smegma) among other people. it's closing on June 26 so the timing is perfect for people to check it out before the screenings and performances each night. http://www.livewithanimals.org
there is an amazing and free durational performance by Lisa D'Amour, Katie Pearl, and Shawn Hall at the Kitchen Fri-Sun from 2-10pm each day. Tthey build a "forest" and take it down each day, with an amazing soundtrack mixed live by Chris De Laurenti. http://www.thekitchen.org
of course there is the Dreamhouse, open Thurs-Sat 2-10pm. http://www.melafoundation.org/dream02.htm
there will be a bunch of radio activity this week, all of which will be streaming. WKCR will be hosting myself (6/19 10-11pm), Twisty Cat (6/20 3-6pm), ISA Christ (6/21 3-6pm), Phill Niblock (6/22 3-6pm), and Postcommodity (6/23 1-4am, ie late on Weds night). i will also be playing live and talking on East Village Radio (6/19 4-6pm), and actually the same day from 10pm-12am the Tenses (with members of Smegma) will be playing on EVR so you can jump between the stations, tho their show will be archived but the WKCR stuff will not. (only in New York do you have simultaneous scheduling conflicts between live noise performances on different radio stations.) WKCR can be found streaming at http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/ and 89.9FM in New York, and East Village Radio can be found at http://www.eastvillageradio.com
Earlier in the week Phill Niblock is hosting a record release party for Charlie Morrow at Experimental Intermedia on Tuesday eve, 9pm, 224 Centre st some of the Ende Tymes artists are playing a show at Port d'Or Thursday night with some other awesome touring bands.
https://www.facebook.com/portdor
the Bent Fest is happening June 23-25. http://bentfestival.org/2011/
the beach at Fort Tilden (or anywhere out on the Rockaways) is pretty cool. and Coney Island has some new amusement park rides
now i'm just fishing for ideas. i dunno - people should post them.
GX Jupitter-Larsen
When you were first exposed to experimental music was it in a live setting or via recordings? Do you remember what it was?
Picking up a copy of Silver Apples of the Moon by Morton Subotnick. Still love the b-side.
You have been in the noise game for a long time. Is it still exciting for you as it was when you started?
More so. When I started back in the late 70s there really wasn’t much of a real noise scene to speak of. I think the best noise any one has ever done is being done now.
Hater is a popular term, defined by the Urban Dictionary as a "person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person." Is that the general idea of the name of your band The Haters? You guys have been around for a lot longer than the term, sure, but is it coming from the same place?
Wow. Is that what it’s suppose to mean these days?! That’s pretty weak. No, the basic idea behind the name was for the project to take the offensive, instead of being on the defensive. I wanted to celebrate entropy, not protest it. Fixing a problem by adding to it. To fight fire with fire by making the biggest mess possible. It’s been a ton of fun so far.
So what do you love? More than anything else in the world?
Beauty. Albeit, my idea of beauty may not conform to most peoples’.
From what I can tell you are always switching up what The Haters shows are all about. What ties them together?
Regardless what’s going on; be it smashing, grinding, or drilling, it’s always meant to be a celebration of entropy.
Anything non music related that you are excited to check out while visiting NYC?
Looking forward to hanging out with my NY friends. I don’t get over here nearly as often as I’d like.
Have you ever met Ralph Hausmann's mom?
No, but I hear she’s a wonderful woman.
Some Haters from last year's Neon Marshmallow Fest, featuring Steve Makita on sparks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCfnSKH9FTs&feature=youtu.be
Jason Soliday
Jason Soliday sits on floor, Mike Shiflet is sitting, you can see Mr. Matthew's legs. When you were first exposed to experimental music was it in a live setting or via recordings? Do you remember what it was?
Wow, that could be a long story... but let's see... in the fall of 1990, just after starting college, I joined what was basically a Scratch Orchestra (though I had no idea what a Scratch Orchestra was at the time..) called Regular Guy that had been organized by one of the grad students there, a guy named Don DeLeva. It was a revolving cast of about 4-10 people who met every Friday afternoon in front of the school's art department and made a hell of a lot of noise, usually for about three to four hours per performance. The ability to actually play an instrument wasn't a requirement, in fact playing instruments you didn't know how to play was actively encouraged. Amazingly, over the roughly three years we did it we were only shut down once, during an epic 'cover' of Suicidal Tendencies "Subliminal" Apparently six people chanting "they're fucking with me subliminally" over guitar feedback for a good fifteen minutes straight didn't go over that well with campus security...HA! Around that same time after one of the early Regular Guy performances Don asked me if I had heard of Throbbing Gristle.. he wouldn't tell me what they sounded like, just that I needed to find a copy of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Once I did, a lot of pieces fell into place, though it was probably a few more years before I realized the path I was on. At that time I was still thinking of the noise I was making as a not very serious extension of the visual art I was doing. A few years later, fall of '95, I had just moved to Chicago, and was rapidly becoming disinterested in making visual art, but really didn't know where to go from there. Then in October of that year, I came across a flyer for a festival called "In the Eye of the Ear" at a theater a couple doors down from where I was living. On the bill were a bunch of names I didn't know, but it said that the festival was "dedicated to the promotion of artists that use sound as their primary medium" That weekend I was introduced pretty much every facet of experimental music, from text based work to noise. TVPow, Metalux, Steve Barsotti & Eric Leonardson, Philp von Zweck and a host of others played that fest. From that point on I was hooked. I left it thinking that the sound side of things was really what I should be doing and the painting was the not very serious diversion, and I've been making noise ever since...
You probably aren't going to haul that pile of gear I witnessed last week all the way to NYC, how is a Jason Soliday gig in Brooklyn going to be different than one in Chicago?
Ha! Yeah, I guess I do have a reputation for dragging out a lot of stuff to gigs.. though I don't think I've ever drug that whole pile of gear you saw at my place on stage at once.. there's an idea for a future Enemy show: "Jason Soliday plays everything in the house" which of course would include that huge pile of speakers, the cat, and the washing machine has been making a rather nice high pitched screech lately so... uh, yeah...
Over the last few months I've actually greatly reduced the size of my live rig, so I'm not sure that the show at ETF will be that much different than one I'd play in Chicago right now. I'm pretty much down to a very small modular synth and delay box built by Tom Bugs, and a couple of outboard effects. I recently built a small switch box to go along with the modular that lets me do a lot of the quick change/cut-up style stuff that I used to need a ton of gear and a much larger mixer to do.
You run Enemy, an experimental music venue in Chicago, have many of the performers performing at the ETF have played there?
I've been running Enemy for almost seven years, though I shouldn't take all the credit. I've been the one constant here, but I've had tons of help from numerous other people over the years including Eric Leonardson, Geoff Guy, Brent Gutzeit, Ryan Dunn, Omar Gonzales... the list is long. We've had a ton of people play here in that time, including a large number of the acts playing ETF. Two of the ETF acts, Vertonen and Mike Shiflet, played the first show I hosted at Enemy! Looking at the schedule, there's about eleven acts that have played here under the same names they're playing under at ETF, add a couple more if you count people that have played under other names (BWT as Is, Bob Bellerue of KILT as Redglaer), and if you count the artists in the video screening part of ETF, three more (Z'EV, Lucas Abela, and Francisco Lopez). On top of that both Pharmakon and Opponents are playing here in coming months so that list keeps growing!
Any acts playing the fest that you are particularly excited for?
Hmm, that's a tough one. Honestly, I'm really excited for the whole thing. Bob's pulled together a pretty impressive lineup. There's a few folks I've never seen perform before though that I'm looking forward to including AMK and Damion Romero. IDM Theftable blew me away when he played at Enemy last November... Opponents are pretty high on my list too, their CD has been on heavy rotation here since I got it... love that Westworld creep vibe they've got!
Are you planning on doing any tourist activites while in NYC or that shit strictly for chumps?
Well, I'm visiting WFMU on the 30th... that's high on the list of tourist destinations, right? HA.. I'm not much for the whole tourist thing, though I will probably be a bit of the art tourist at some point while I'm there. I'm mainly coming to play and hangout with friends. I'll be sticking around for about a week after the fest, performing at Port d'Or on the 29th, on My Castle of Quiet on the 30th, and at RLD on the 1st with Camilla Ha, continuing the duo project we started last summer before she moved to Brooklyn. I'm also going to be doing some recording with Camilla, and with Mister Matthews of Telecult Powers & High School Confidential fame.
Please note that Jason Soliday is not three people in one, that's him on the floor, Mike Shiflet sitting and Mr. Matthew's legs.
HERE ARE WAYS TO STAY IN THE LOOP ABOUT NEXT YEAR:
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