Scene and Heard

No Fun Fest, Day 3

Photos by Nate Dorr » With Rehberg and Schmickler, Conrad Schnitzer, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Jazzfinger, Cold Cave, Emeralds, Black Pus, Prurient, Skullflower.

Text by Nate Dorr
Posted on May 22, 2009

Black Pus

The last day, though mostly a cooling and easing, began in delicious confusion. Rehberg and Schmickler, moved to the first set because they insisted on sound checking, played suddenly from the sound booth, opposite the stage, turning on the house lights to capture the dissarray of an audience wheeling in search of the origin of the intricate shrapnel unexpectedly erupting around them. (The sound check was apparently worth it, their set had a piercing, uncomfortable clarity elsewhere lacking).

Conrad Schnitzer’s set turned out to be a live mixdown of a show by Keith Fullerton Whitman, flanked on stage by four discmen, each armed with a different variety of shifting white-hot sands and collapsing office blocks.

Jazzfinger’s steady hard feedback swelled, then gave way to a disheveled tonal burble, with Cold Cave following with the evenings synth-pop set, apparently a palate-cleansing requirement of the middle-evening, before Emeralds forced the room back into a dense but chord-threaded chaos. Those chords began almost lost in the center of the sound, but gradually solidified and took on subtler shadings.

Black Pus brutalized a drum set, shrieking guitar lines into his mask-sewn mic and pumping out searing bass linked to his kick pedal. Finally a pair of pure noise sets, a fitting close: first the combined gut-felt, cochlea-dissolving talents of Prurient and Kevin Drumm, then a seething storm from a variant of Skullflower that included a return of C. Spencer Yeh in addition to its own obscure electric stand-up bass. For many, of course, the show would go on well into the next day, reworked and newly performed by the quailing of inner ear hairs, traumatized by three days of glorious abuse.

Schmickler and Rehberg
Peter Rehberg at No Fun Fest
Marcus Schmickler at No Fun Fest
Schmickler Rehberg audience at No Fun Fest
Audience confused as to source of Schmickler Rehberg set at No Fun Fest

Conrad Schnitzer and Keith Fullerton Whitman
Whitman, Schnitzer at No Fun Fest
Keith Fullerton Whitman Mixes a Conrad Schnitzer Show at No Fun Fest