Back in Brooklyn
Last week I took the plunge and went out to GreenPoint for a show my friends were putting on. Definitely a long trek, and well outside of my current comfort zone, but it was strange how familiar the landscape felt once I got there. I haven’t been back to Brooklyn in a long time, and I’ve never been to this particular neighborhood, but it wasn’t far from where I lived for a short time in Williamsburg. Seems like the current theme of my life is a tendency toward nostalgia, and if that’s the case, then this definitely fit the bill. Quiet streets, low brick buildings, nondescript bars and shops, no discernibly central thoroughfare (to non-locals at least)…all smacks of what I remember from living in Brooklyn in my early New York Years.
In any case, after about a 50 minute trip on the not-so-iconic, and occasionally reviled, J and G trains, I found my friend in the Nassau subway station trying to get some equipment up to the street. I lent him a hand and we got his granny cart filled with amps and other electronics over to the venue, which was mercifully close to the train.
Matchless Performance
The show went down in a bar, Matchless, that has what appears to be a converted garage attached to it. I found that tremendously amusing, and if not ironic, then perhaps post-ironic? A noise show put together by a guy who goes by the handle “Acid Marshmallow” in a venue that is, in actual fact, a garage? C’mon, you can’t make this stuff up!
So you’ve probably gathered that this is all a pretty home grown operation. The guys involved mostly make no money whatsoever off these shows, and sometimes shell out for expenses like transporting equipment just for the chance to play. They’re not really out to hit it big with this particular iteration of their music, I’m told, though I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if they did. They’re really doing it for the love of the art, the practical upshot of which is that to an uninitiated listener (I.E. me) the music can come off as strange and jarring at times. Still there were altogether awesome moments. Let me see if I can even begin to explain…
Charming Snakes with the Electric Trumpet
Grasshopper works with a lot of electronic equipment doing noise distortion with a mix of traditional instruments, and stuff like the electric trumpet, which apparently hasn’t been produced in quantity since the late 70s. Picture a flat, black, foot-long rectangle with a sort of stocky, flat cylinder stuck to the bottom. They also employed what looked like an electric footpedal and what I’m guessing were some sort of synthesizers to modulate and loop the music, though I unfortunately don’t have the background to be certain.
The show started with something that I could most closely identify as snake-charming music, if it were to be played by some sort of industrial robot. The sound quickly modulated from there, and would go on to defy all attempts at description shortly thereafter. As I listened through the 20+ minute long jam, I found my mind putting together new and bizarre combinations of experiences to explain what I was hearing, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t make much sense in retrospective analysis.
Ultimately the music became a very personal experience. The weird cadences were so utterly unlike anything I’d musically experienced before that it forced me into a very exclusive bit of head space, connected to the music and the scene, but also aloof from it. Grasshopper managed to keep up this hypnotic dissonance right through to the end of their jam session, at which point they broke into a new jam with regular brass trumpets building on top of the stuff they’d already looped in the synthesizer. I’ve gotta say…that f*cking ROCKED! I don’t use the phrase “melt your face off” often, but I think the term applies here.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is, the noise music scene is definitely challenging for casual listeners like me, but there is a lot to it if you give it a chance. Grasshopper is a group composed of two classically trained musicians with something like 5 music degrees between them, so don’t be fooled into thinking that there’s no method to the madness. Just relax and have a pair of earplugs handy, and I promise you’ll hear something unlike anything you’ve heard before.
