It's hard to open up a music festival, especially one packed to the brim with discriminating hipsters and demanding electronic noise elitists. Playing a double neck guitar with a violin bow through a couple of ebows and effects pedals, Noveller builds layers of atmospheric and melodic waves of sound that develops into a pleasant and peaceful wash of noise. She even seems like she'd be fun to hang out with, we could talk about all her quirky electronics experiments. Either that, or it would be really awkward. Ha.
Chris Corsano contributed his own considerable 2 cents to this festival dedicated to experimental sound. For this show, he built a custom sensory mic which he ran through a distorted amp and placed in various positions around his hi-hat. All that noise from just one hi-hat! Then for a finale, he jumped on a real kit and showed off some chops for literally a minute. He should've played it longer! My buddy Alex (who went to school with Chris) told me that he recently went on a world tour with Bjork as her drummer, so you know he's got skillz...
Thrones was pretty bad ass. Kind of like if a heavy metal bass god from the 70's retired to a cave with a bunch of electronics, only to emerge 20 years later with a sound no one has heard before. He had a massive setup, playing through at least two amps and three cabinets, including an 8x10 (those always sound amazing). Some moments were pure magic, where I had no idea how he was creating the music I was hearing. How in the heck did he make his voice sound like that? It's not an auto-tune, and clearly there is some kind of upper-octave pitch-shifting, but I really don't know what is going on. No matter, I'm glad I got to see Thrones once in my life, even though I had never heard of him before! He's straight out of the dungeons of rock.
