Local Live and CD Reviews

[August 2nd, 2006]

^D. Yellow Swans Saturday, Aug. 5

Portland duo draws the line between noise makers and noise musicians.

[COLLECTIVE NOISE] "When times get desperate, Americans get loud and weird." So says Pete Swanson, one half of Portland noise-duo D. Yellow Swans. True enough: With the rise of bands like Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes and Black Dice, it's as difficult to remember when noise bands were marginalized to basements and homemade cassette tapes as it is to remember the time when newspaper headlines were about presidential blowjobs and O.J. Simpson. Extreme times call for extreme music. Recall the original psych movement of the Vietnam-shadowed '60s, the Dadaists of early-20th-century war-wracked Europe, or the no-wave and hardcore movements that countered the gray Reagan years.

Yet, noise isn't necessarily a political opposition. It's a cultural foil as well, a subversion of the daily chaos in which we already live. The other half of D. Yellow Swans, Gabriel Saloman, clarifies: "Noise is a real rejection of mainstream culture." He continues, "The time is appropriate: In a world of ring tones, industrial noise pollution and constant advertisements, people are already accustomed to listening to noise and incidental sound as a massive surrealist collage." Call it chaos appropriation: taking the incidental noise of our daily lives and making it intentional, putting emotion and craft into it.

Of the popular noise artists, D. Yellow Swans come closest to achieving the "noise musician" tag, one that's often maligned in the noise world in favor of simply "noise." But the intricacy and basic musicianship is undeniable in this duo. While bands like Lightning Bolt or locals Dead/Bird thrive on the sonic assault—masochistic aural equivalents of car crashes and building implosions—DYS works at engagement, whether it be through a barely formed melody, a subtle drum rhythm or the alluring sinusoidal vocals of collaborator Sam Mickens (Dead Science).

"Many noise artists express anger and misanthropy in their music, and it can seem to be an attack on their audience as much as anyone else," says Saloman. "I love people, and I am a very happy person, and my goal is for our music to be seen as ecstatic."

A DYS listen is a bit like getting thrashed about in a breaking ocean wave, as opposed to being thrashed about by a baseball bat: it's hypnosis, a soft power. And it's something rarely captured in studio work. The band, over five years, has released only two studio albums, while having put out countless live recordings under its own CD-R label, Collective Jyrk. That's entirely fitting, given the "fuck structure" nature of anything that dares to call itself noise.

In the end, D. Yellow Swans create sound (music, noise, whatever), liberated. Saloman puts it in language that any current-events fan can understand: "We share a sincere desire to experience freedom for ourselves and to attempt to help others experience that as well."

—MICHAEL BYRNE.

D. Yellow Swans play with Family Underground, Shoplifting and Problems at Disjecta. 10 pm. $7. All-ages.

^EMBROWNLOWE and Jonathan Miller Aug. 3-5

Why didn't I think of that? We Made This: The ultimate DIY comp.

[ROCK] Two things about Portland music fans: (1) Everyone likes a good mix CD or tape, and (2) nearly everyone is in a band. So why not make a mix of bands you know and have them give it to people? Jonathan Miller and Em Brownlowe of Swallows rounded up 14 local rock acts and gave them all a CD-R in a Ziploc bag with a single photocopied sheet and told them to reproduce and distribute. Now they've got 13 of those acts lined up for a free three-day festival slated for this weekend that—although it doesn't strive for the comprehensiveness and girth of last weekend's PDX Pop Now! Festival—may combine with the compilation to help a group of underground local bands increase the strength of their community with essentially no overhead. WW sat down with Jon and Em to discuss what they made.

—JASON SIMMS.

WW: How did the bands get selected for the comp?

emBROWNLOWe: A lot of the bands are bands that Swallows play with. We probably know two-thirds of these bands. They don't necessarily know each other. We're trying to bring together this whole community and trying to create a new underground scene.

Jonathan Miller: We also found a lot of bands that we didn't know but that we had heard of through other bands or by chance. I was listening to those songs on the PDX Pop Now! website at random, and the Autopilot song came on, and I was like, "I have to get in touch with this girl; she's incredible."

Why the gritty packaging?

Jon: I like to keep the cost [of production] as low as possible, but I know that some [of the included bands] are making their own covers to make it fit into a case. When we originally sent this out to everybody, this was sort of like the default: This is the cheapest, easiest, fastest way. There's no reason to spend a ton of money on promotion when you can do it grassroots. Bands don't need to be fighting for exposure.

Em: We're hoping that people who get this will think it's a cool concept and do one of their own.

Any tips for someone who wants to give it a shot?

Jon: I would say if you asked a band to do it, and they don't get back to you within, like, three days, just find another band, because bands who don't follow through initially won't follow through later. The concept for this was something we've had for a really long time. I used to live in Massachusetts, and I tried to put together something like this there and it failed miserably.

Em: It was really unorganized, with the bands not being prompt, and it just got to the point where it was really frustrating.

How important is the fact that We Made This is a free comp?

Em: I think it's pretty important. That was one of the things we were explaining to the bands—you have to pull your own weight—and they all knew [the comp] had to be given out for free. It's a promotional item, and it would be kind of hard to sell. These bands are all really on-top-of-it, smart, with-it people. These people are really pushing their art, and that's why they're on it—they want it to be out there.

How successful has the comp been as a promotional item?

Jon: We want each band to make 75 to 100 copies and if a third of those [roughly 1,200] people like your music, and a third of that third come to see you, and a third of that third buy an album, you're still making a profit. [That would make around 44 albums.] We've had a lot of bands come across the MySpace page and be like, "How can we get on the next one?" At least 10 or 15 bands just in the last two weeks since we've really been getting the comp out there.

The We Made This Festival takes place Thursday-Saturday, Aug. 3-5, at the 9th Ave Pub. Day 1: Adam Gnade, Autopilot, Swallows, Cark. Day 2: Morgan Grace, Advisory, Enchanted 4ST, The Shotgun, Arman Augusto. Day 3: The Decliners, The Vulturines, The Tactics, emBROWNLOWe. All three sets start at 7 pm. Free. 21+.

^Soul Plasma Soul Affect (Self-released)

Soul P is on the spiritual tipping point, taking religious rap to the streets.

[SPIRITUAL RAP] "Hot music for the soul's the only way it's explained," Soul Plasma raps on "Soul Affect," from his album of the same name. "It varies all the time so don't be surprised if it rains." Still, one can't help being a little surprised, or fascinated, to hear the Portland emcee mix the spirituality for which he was recently signed to Sony's Christian Hip-Hop imprint, Beatmart, with street smarts and reasonably radical politics. But that, aside from the fact that the production on Soul Affect is largely stellar, is what makes Soul Plasma (who now goes by Soul P) special: He keeps it real.

On "Soul Searching," the deepest and most lyrically cohesive song on Soul Affect, P describes a street-hustling family man trying to feed his family by any means necessary. Instead of weaving some grand moral lesson into the song, P wraps it up with a barrage of stereotypes about black America: "black bastards/ alcoholics/ pant-saggers/ do-rag hat/ crack color to match it/ pissy mattress/ one bed, four heads/ many homies dead shot up and the other half locked up," he says, with unwavering affection for sinners and saints alike. Soul P's emotional kinship with crooked characters is a theme throughout the album.

After "Soul Searching," P turns directly around and kicks "Goodness," a catchy-as-Kanye summer jam with a crack-rock vocal hook for a chorus. Soul P's focus doesn't stray from the struggle for long, though, as he shifts from describing structural strengths and weaknesses of the ghetto to sharing his own story of abandonment on "It's Been."

It's on "Racial Profileâ" that Soul P's frustration with society comes to a boil. He drops the N-word like he was trying to crack BET's Rap City, opening the track over dark synth-strings by saying "Niggas like us don't make it/ Niggas like us die young." P is reconnecting the word with its original shameful roots as he assumes the role of white police officers and slave-drivers while also expressing sadness that too many inner-city youths fit the profile that keeps them in cycles of violence.

It's refreshing to hear an emcee who is emboldened to use his spirituality as a weapon for social change instead of as an excuse to sit idly by and wait for the last days. This all goes to show that, while Soul P might have his sights set on heaven, his feet are planted firmly on the ground.

—CASEY JARMAN.

Soul P performs with Down Band and Serge Severe at Doug Fir. 9 pm. $6. 21+.