Skip to main content[FREE NOISE] Go forth into the noise world and seek out the slightest trace of humor, quirk or goofiness and bring back what you find. It won't be much: a small handful, if anything. Most purveyors of noise music lean heavily toward dark self-seriousness. Blame the genre's dominant bleak, abrasive aesthetic. Yet, at noise's birth somewhere in the mid-'70s, there was Smegma, whose members take themselves only as seriously as members of a band named after "a thick, cheeselike, sebaceous secretion that collects beneath the foreskin or around the clitoris" can. Go ahead, use it in a sentence: Smegma was all over the place last Friday night! Which it was, and it was grand.
Frankly, the members of Smegma look like aging hippies: gray beards, long hair and colorful clothes. It was as if the industrial music movement never existed for them. Mostly from Portland, the members of the band carry a breezy aloofness that increased the distance between band and audience by miles (which is, normally, a rough task in the narrow hallway that is Food Hole). This is fine, but is definitely an odd occurrence in the noise community/asylum, where the crowd often shares breathing space with the band. One dude got pretty close, but his obvious possession/supplication (twitching, contorting) was an exception to the rest of us 20-odd souls.
The five-person crew—which has shifted many times over Smegma's three-decade existence—counters the above mentioned band/audience rift with an anti-tech performance. Since Smegma's 1973 birth in Pasadena, it's hard to believe that the band has updated their equipment even a bit. Smegma's arsenal of horns, drums, rubber bands (or something similar) and garage-sale turntable defies the knots of wires, contact mikes, recorders, looping stations and rewired effects pedals that make up a "standard" noise arsenal. Moreover, the show didn't hurt a bit: As always, I forgot my earplugs, but didn't miss them for a second. At moments it was creepy, but chalk that up to the "scary fun" disc spinning on the turntable (really).
But, almost until the end, it was cacophony: There was little discernible relationship between the players, save for impromptu recorder and horn choruses. Less than a half hour after the set started, we got a climax: drums and guitar tuning into the same crescendo, cutting, and that was it.
It's tempting to exempt Smegma from noise altogether, despite many "legendary noise band" tags, and just call it free-improv. But the noise is there in the disorder, if not the method or attitude. Seeing Smegma play is to see the moment when absurdity meant noise and noise meant freedom.
Smegma plays with Grouper, Thee Scarcity of Tanks, and Health, Wednesday, Oct. 11, at Rotture (formerly Loveland). 9 pm. Cover. 21+.
WWeek 2015