Decaer Pinga vs Smack Music 7
Cul De Sac
Double Leopards
Tony Conrad
Subcurrent Day 3,
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
23/04/05
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Subcurrent’s attempt to shine a light on the DIY aesthetic of modern experimental sound art provided a clutch of bracing performances by artists from all over the map. Much of the music was deliberately artless, ignoring conventional notions of technical skill and instrumentation. The focus was on warping and transforming sound through the use of electricity and extreme volume. Unlike other festivals of new music, there wasn’t a laptop in sight with performers preferring to grapple manually with real world objects in real time; it was intense, occasionally confrontational and not always an easy ride.
Decaer Pinga vs Smack Music 7 kicked things off, bellowing into their mics, abusing records, tapes and assorted devices and generating blood-curdling whirlpools of noise. Amidst the alien groaning and raw jolts of electricity it was just about possible to catch snippets of speech and music that suggested, to me at least, a hellish soundtrack to the work of Hieronymus Bosch.
Next up was Cul De Sac. Originally labelled Post Rock along with outfits like Trans Am, they have now been adopted by the new weird America movement though they hardly seem better suited to that. The group's full scale rock band set up (complete with keyboard stack, full drum kit, multiple guitars and effects racks) was somewhat at odds with the junk yard of home made electronics that constituted most of the instrumentation of the evening, in fact it was a bit like seeing the Grateful Dead pitch up in the middle of a Sonic Youth set.
The music was spacious and cinematic with a twist 
of melancholy. Guitarist Glenn Jones writes elegant melodies influenced as much by eastern music as by pre war American folk. His shimmering, eloquent finger picking, refreshingly lacking macho guitar hubris, recalled the likes of Robbie Basho and John Fahey but also the freewheeling extemporising of Jerry Garcia. The rest of the band provided a constantly shifting palette of colour and texture, effortlessly switching through Krautrock grooves to muscular improvisation and blaring passages of rowdy ensemble noise making. It was grand, entertaining stuff but somehow out of place in this context.
Brooklyn’s Double Leopards struggled with gremlins for a small eternity before all their fx pedals began working. Whether or not that had any effect on their performance is difficult to say but they delivered a stunning set of spine tingling intensity. It was like watching a séance as the quartet moaned and yelled into their mics, their voices heavily processed 
into towering gales of noise. Falling to the floor they dredged up massive storms from modified guitars and assorted devices. Gradually the instruments fell away, leaving only phantom voices. It was like suddenly being becalmed within a hurricane; calming and seriously eerie. Eventually, as the storms faded, barely audible vapour trails faded into the air, like the ghosts of a shipwreck.