I booked some shows at South by Southwest 2011 for a Chinese noise band, Carsick Cars. Since music is my work and I'm a Texas native, it was a chance to both take in the manic week of industry-saturated overstimulation that is SXSW and to catch up with local friends operating on the fringes of the festival.
Each of these two worlds offered one band whose presence in Austin was, to my mind, disproportionately hyped. The "industry" touted the arrival of Odd Future, an avant rap collective from LA who, after years of building an alternative online fanbase, jumped on the cover of Billboard magazine and headlined some of SXSW's most prominent events. Coverage of this group is by now ubiquitous, but the most interesting to me (and most pertinent in this context) is an article on the Poetry Foundation website in which Bethlehem Shoals compares the group's lyrics to a passage of transcendental violence from Guide (see: Odd Futurism).
Though the vast majority of the people at SXSW will never have heard of them, the band I was most interested to see was Yellow Tears. They were invited to play an underground power electronics/ harsh noise/ hardcore showcase by a friend of mine, Austin-based artist and filmmaker Rusty Kelley. Despite the fact that most of the people who told me about Yellow Tears are veteran obscurists desensitized to all forms of extreme music, this band uniquely inspires obsessively hyperbolic reviews: "the best band in the world," "almost life changing," "One of the most important groups of any genre in the current decade" are some direct quotes. Needless to say, I planned my schedule on the last night of SXSW around this show.
One fact must be stated at the beginning, as it grounds most conversations about Yellow Tears: the band is all about piss. Immediately on arriving at the venue, which took place at a bombed out east Austin warehouse space called the Broken Neck, I was informed/ warned by different people that Yellow Tears had collected several buckets of urine that would be used in their performance. Their set began with nondescript atmospheric sounds — vague moans and scattered gargles — while the band screened urine-themed porn on on the wall behind the stage, pissed in backlit yellow vats, and ladled the resulting brew into small glass bowls. Back on the the stage the bowls were positioned above a camera and mic'd so that the audience was fully immersed in the opening ritual, the band members one by one dunking their heads into the bowls, gargling, retching.
After this blunt opening salvo Yellow Tears moved into real assault mode. The visceral gargle was warped into a monstrous roar via seemingly random knob twisting, but this music was not improvised. They knew every detail intimately, moved with it. Their faces contorted in reaction and anticipation. They raged to the sounds they had procured and manipulated. About halfway through their set is when they moved from cliche power electronics schtick to something deeper and harder to classify. Ethereal operatics created an almost Catholic/ Satanic atmosphere while the band again descended on the urine vats, their perverse self-baptism enthusiastically cheered on by the crowd. Highly coordinated, Yellow Tears regrouped for an incongruous steel drum break, then an unsettling laugh track sample.
This music is aggressively manipulative, as are the musicians, whose sneering laughter is met with applause from the audience. As people clap the band claps with them out of apparent disgust.
I usually can't identify a "highlight" from a harsh noise set, but there was one moment of Yellow Tears's performance that stuck in my brain like a thorn. After more mixed and chopped gargling, they sampled a middle-aged man speaking in a moment of candor: "Most of the time, I'm fine. But every now and then, they say that my mind sort of... drifts off. But... I always find my way back." This sound-bite is innocuous on its own, but Yellow Tears knew exactly how to bend the words — both as sounds and symbols — to create a real terror of slipping consciousness. Listening to some of their recorded work after the fact, it seems that this careful re-contextualization otherwise inoffensive samples into a broader landscape of vague, distant despair is characteristic of their approach. It can be heard on "Buffalo Slaughter," the opening track on their Paint Gurgle cdr, where a polite, if panicked voicemail message later reverberates with a deep pain of separation when folded into their music.
Ultimately, Yellow Tears is a hard band to pin down. As I mentioned before, I've been surprised by the number of hardcore extremists who champion Yellow Tears as a paragon of the form. After seeing them live, I was equally surprised by people who brushed them off as "not music" and "not a show I could bring my parents to." Coming from people I've known almost exclusively in the context of hardcore, harsh noise, and other inherently anti-aesthetic/ antisocial musical territories, these comments are exceedingly odd. It seems that Yellow Tears strikes a deep aesthetic, moral, even phenomenological nerve that divides people already on the extreme musical fringes. Personally, I was strangely nonplussed after seeing their performance. I realized what I'd seen was important and moving in some way, but I wasn't sure how or why. I talked to a similarly affected friend after the show. Though she didn't really know what to think, she pointed out that older generations of her family drank urine for medicinal benefits so she wasn't turned off by that particular aspect of the performance.
While they are certainly theatrical, I don't think shock and disgust are the point of Yellow Tears. Their antics are not in line with GG Allin's ritualized self abuse, early punk's obsession with smearing and hurling condiments, or black metal's animal sacrifice. They trade not in blood, vomit or mayonnaise but in urine, the most naturally occurring substance in the human experience. Whether to purify or debase, they meditate on piss, immerse themselves in it, use it as an instrument, incorporate it into their recordings and performances with a comprehension that is nothing short of religious. I mean religion here in the sense of ritual action and personal sublimation, a set of behaviors that blurs the line between sacred and profane and elicits a specific set of reactions from onlookers: instinctual rejection; rubbernecking fascination; Pavlovian cheering; obsessive, cultish fervor.
I had originally intended for this post to recount my gut reaction to their performance. I got preoccupied and I'm afraid that some of my most visceral, immediate reactions have been buffed by the time that has passed and I was left with this overly analytical rationalization. In any case, there's really no substitute for seeing Yellow Tears live. You can find a list of upcoming performances on their site. My personal recommendation would be to catch their show on June 17th at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, where they'll play along with Hospital label-runner Prurient and the teenage anarcho-posthardcore Danish group Iceage, who will be making their US debut.
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p.s. Hey. Josh Feola, a very longtime if recently quiet d.l. of this blog, fills the local weekend with this terrific post mostly but not exclusively about the band Yellow Tears, who, for what it's worth, I first discovered upon the receipt of this guest-post in my email box and can now recommend to you as well. Attending the post will begin making up your mind. It's fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, due to a timing screw up on my part, the gig he recommends to you happened yesterday, oops, but do check the link leading to the band's other current gigs. Anyway, enjoy, talk to Josh and to one another, etc. Thanks. And massive thank you to, Josh, and it's very nice to have your sensibility, words, and taste back on the blog. ** Kiddiepunk, Well, thanks. You ready for spooky housing? Talk to you in a bit. ** Empty Frame, Bonjour to you too! Good to see you, natch! Actually, I guess you can add another head to your list of maddening ones because the one in question belonged to Meg Ryan post-mucho surgery not Ms. Hawn. Man, that's rough with your friend's son. It's great that his mom and you are doing everything you can for him. The poor guy. Jesus. Oh, yeah, of course on using the fragments of mine. I would be very honored. Cool, thank you. I'd love to see what they're incorporated into if you don't mind and whenever sharing them feels right. And I'm really glad you're working on your stuff. Yeah, cool, great, and welcome back, and have a weekend you love. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, thanks, David. It runs in my family. Yes, since she was brought up yesterday, I've investigated the current doings of Julie Delpy much further, and she is in fact hard at work. ** Bernard Welt, Suggest, and you shall receive. Weird that didn't come up given the crazy variations on the word 'head' that I used/googled to make that post. Yep, I know that Milland/Grier movie. Last time I checked, it was one of John Waters' all-time favorite films. Someone was telling me the other day about this supposedly viral video that shows some running soccer player being decapitated whereupon his headless body continues to run for a while as if nothing untoward had happened. You couldn't pay me enough money to watch that. ** Postitbreakup, Hey. Oh, the contest was decided. Yeah, I guess that news got deleted. Dude, those things are the ultimate in subjective, political, etc., etc. crap. If you win. it's a nice little ego boost, and if you don't, they mean diddly-squat. Christophe said to to tell you thank you very much. And thank you very much for the kind, careful response to my image tower. Believe me, even though they don't look it or probably warrant it, those posts take a fuck of a lot of work, and I really appreciate your attention. ** Alan, Hey. Yeah, I thought it was kind of disturbing. It was a particularly hard one to put together. Usually, I can make continual image connections, but, with that one, I had to live with a number of breaks. Maybe the stopping and starting had an ill effect too. ** Hyrule Dungeon, Heads everywhere you look these days. It's fucking weird. Yeah, most if not all of my favorite American directors are very Europeanized. My favorite writers too. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Nice seeming coagulation of your focus for the article. That guy's stuff looks quite interesting. A bike, cool! The saddle thing should be pretty easy to fix, right? Wrench turning material, it would seem. Hope so. I'll be curious to hear how the clock watch goes, of course. Here, I'll ... Everyone, _Black_Acrylic seeks your support for ... well, this mighty cause: 'Yuck ‘n Yum member’s Alexandra and Andrew are attempting to watch the full 24hrs of Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ on Saturday the 18th of June at the CCA. This is in order to raise funds for our program of events scheduled for 2011/12. You can sponsor YNY online here. Any contribution, however small, goes towards funding our zine so I'm rattling the tin for anyone who's able to donate. Seriously, anything.'. Help a brother out if you can, people! And before we leave _B_A for the day, here's another alert for you from him: 'My friend an DJ colleague Scott Duncan aka Il Discotto sent me this clip just now. It makes a nice epilogue to my recent Bobby O Day, and it's a conversation with God through the medium of a disco record. Not for everyone but I enjoyed it.' ** Sypha, You think? Interesting. Really nice about the good meeting. Very glad to hear that, man. ** Bill, This place was honored by the embedding, sir. I used to play the recorder, as you probably know, and, well, yes. That Airplane Controller thing is fascinating, of course. Wow. Everyone, one of the instruments Bill was using in the piece I embedded yesterday was an amazing thing called an Airplane Controller, and here's Bill to explain: 'an Airplane Controller is this device built by Alain Crevoisier, which turns practically any surface into a multi-touch control surface. Imagine your iPad potentially the size of a wall. It's based on infra-red light and a high-speed camera, mounted in a clever way. More info here.' ** Steevee, Hey. No, no, you didn't over-occupy the blog time at all. Perish the thought. Very interested to hear about the Miike film. I've read interesting things about it. And the Lee Perry doc too, of course. And, well, how the Bogdanovich has held up as well, if that's not asking too much. ** Schoolboyerrors, Well, thank you, D. Good weekend planned, I hope? ** A NON, Hey. Thanks a lot about the heads. Oh, philosophy. Any fave thinkers/writers? I love Bas Jan Ader. I guess there's a newish book out about his final, ill-fated sea voyage piece that I've been dying to read. You've probably read it? I totally understand the cross-pollination of your art. My writing is more influenced by art, music, and film that it is by fiction, I think. So, yeah, totally. ** L@rstonovich, Heads up, ha ha. Welcome back, man! No, I did not know that about Beckett and Andre the Giant, and that is completely amazing, wow. Coincidentally, and this isn't anywhere near as interesting, but a friend was telling me just last night that Beckett lived for a while at Nathalie Sarraute's house in Paris, and she couldn't stand him because he was so dirty and stinky. Jesus, that Gaddis thing is new and big news too. Totally weird. I'll go look at those clips asap, and I really need to pass that on. Everyone, here's a fascinating tidbit from d.l. supreme L@rstonovich: 'Would you believe William Gaddis appeared in a blaxploitation vampire movie in the early '70s?! He and his second wife Judith are extras in Ganja & Hess (1973), among the few whites in the predominantly black cast. In the restored director's cut DVD of 1998, they appear briefly at a garden party at 27:30, and then in a longer outdoor wedding scene beginning at 1:08:22. The couple looks very elegant; Gaddis was 49, and Judith 32 (in a striking backless dress), and it was filmed in the spring of 1972 in Croton-on-Hudson, where they lived in the late '60s.
The movie has become a cult film over the decades, much more complex than the typical black vampire movie of the 70s--or so I understand, not a genre I know anything about. Or want to. Try here at 12:36. And here at 8:28, especially at 9:07. I looked up the movie and apparently it was A Black produced art film that the studio tried to sell as blaxplotation. In 1973 Cannes voted it top 10 American films of the decade. or so IMDB says.' Wowzer, man! Thanks! And do your weekend proud, yes? ** Chris Cochrane, Hey, Glad the gig with Eszther went so well! No surprise. And very cool about maybe playing with Fier. He is really something. Yeah, 'Beaster' is incredible. I think 'Copper Blue' is really fantastic as well. Finest of the fine weekends to you. ** MANCY, I miss driving a lot. Enjoy the trip and the out of sight, out of mind stuff re: your work hugely. And eat a horrible roadside microwaved bean and cheese burrito for me. ** Misanthrope, It is or was Math's birthday? How sneaky of her. Happy birthday, Math Tinder, wherever you are! Well, I believed you because I always believe you, sort of, ha ha, but it makes more sense logically that the incident existed only in your oh so dark imagination. Well, and in your poor friend's life to start. No, I skipped the Weiner speech. Even way over here, I was well past burn-out point on that story by the time he did his bow. ** Brendan, Welcome back, B, and get some sleep. You got some nice praise while you were gone. Congrats on the 7th place finish. Are those poker reality shows still popular in the US? If so, do you feel like being a pop culture reference point? It doesn't seem like it would be worth it, but ... Yeah, August, I'm pretty damned sure. ** Into the weekend go you and I. I of course urge you to spend some of it with Josh Feola and Yellow Tears and crew. In any case, you, me, Monday, it's a date.
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