An evening of Experimental Music at DSGN CLLCTV

The back room of DSGN CLLCTV hosted an evening of electronic, noise, and left field music. Some of those on the bill were old friends and familiar faces from Cincinnati’s stalwart scene of experimentalists, while two of the other acts stopped by on their respective tours, to make for a memorable night.

An evening of electronic, noise, and left field music

On the evening of May 11^th (2024), after some tidying up and the last of the dishes had been washed following my granddaughters birthday party, I walked a few blocks down from our home to the back room of DSGN CLLCTV for an evening of electronic, noise, and left field music. Some of those on the bill were old friends and familiar faces from Cincinnati’s stalwart scene of experimentalists, while two of the other acts stopped by on their respective tours, to make for a memorable night.

Iovae was up first with an impressive set combining shortwave radio recordings of the recent geomagnetic storm. These were recorded from two different receivers and played back in stereo. Added to this were more shortwave radio recordings of Hal Turner’s description of the same storm and other geomagnetic storms in history, and their propensity to damage electronics, and in some cases, even cause earthquakes. These kind of storms can be heard as noise on shortwave receivers and as music by the discerning listener. As these sounds penetrated the atmosphere of the room, Iovae got up and started to play some glass milk jugs, with varying amounts of milk for tone, that hung from a homemade contraption. He hit these with a mallet, accompanied by processed tapes of the same. Iovae’s music is frequently educational, and when audience members later asked about the storm and the northern lights it had caused they were treated to his knowledge of the subject from years of listening to radio and recording such audio from solar flares.

10st was up next, project of local maverick Fritz Pape, who provided a heady trip through a singular modular universe. Odd time signatures and percussive blips abounded before getting transmogrified into a cascade of heavy drones causing the room to reverberate with resonance. He had an interesting electronic instrument as part of his set up that I had never seen before, that was turned with a hand crank, like some kind of whimsical hurdy-gurdy. He played this along with the who-knows-what-else was inside his modular rig, and it all created a clean and energizing sound that was a bright counterpoint to the gurgle, dust and sun-spot induced tape stains of Iovae’s set.

The Electric Nature from Athens, Georgia played next. Their sound could be described as pedal and pedals. Pedal steel guitar, and electric guitar with an array of pedals. This duo opened up a hallucinatory hole in the listening space and all manner of drones erupted. I love guitar oriented drone music, and pedal steel as well. There is just something about pedal steel, with all those sliding spaces between the notes that it is hard not to fall in love with it every time I hear the instrument. Here it was used to reach out into strange realms, more psyche than Americana. The Electric Nature rounded all this out with propulsive electronic drums that flowed between the more ethereal beatless moments.

KBD & The Noisyattic from Toledo, Ohio were pretty much ready to go by the time The Electric Nature was finished. They had all their kit set up in another corner of the room. Their set up included a kind of jazz-fusion-noise drum kit, played by Michael Kimaid; a modular synthesizer in a box on an upright easel played by Gabriel Beam; and a table with tapes, samplers and other unknown devices and a trumpet played by Ryan Dohm. Together as KBD they traverse an improvised landscape of gurgling and expressionistic textures, warbling and slowed down voices just out of the range of intelligibility. Crackle, hiss, and sonorous drones excavated with bowed metal, cymbals rubbed with the ends of drum sticks like a singing bowl elucidated their esoteric world that skirted the liminal boundaries between waking and sleeping.

Wasteland Jazz Unit finished up the night as only these veterans of the Cincinnati noise scene know how. Jon Lorenz and John Rich are well known to locals from their long standing efforts at booking shows under the Art Damage Lodge moniker, then under Dome, and their No Response Festival. They are also known for their tenure on radio shows such as Art Damage and later Lorenz’s spot as a co-host of Trash Flow Radio. As a saxophone duo they blister the ears of their appreciative listeners by processing their squelches, squawks and honks through a series of pedals and amplifier feedback. It is easy for me to imagine such a Wasteland Jazz Unit, now, or in some other dystopian time, playing amid the ruins of civilization as it sinks further into decline. The overall effect is one that, somehow, through the haze of distortion and colliding overtones, brings clarity through the musics clusterfuck of pantonality.

When I went home at the end of the night it was with a clear mind, enriched by all the possibilities for making music in this world, from the ways all of these individual units each approach their experiments in sound.

Visit DSGN CLLCTV at www.dsgncllctv.com.