The promotional CD for this show arrives in a halved manila folder. It's an appropriately DIY press kit for Portland's Jyrk Collective, which runs something of a niche DIY label, with Yellow Swans as their flagship act. Spearheading the more digitized realms of experimental noise, Swans employ quarter-inch tape, guitar, voice, drum machines, microphones, mixer feedback, and various other electronics to make an aural clusterfuck that employs anything from industrial to punk and dub to glitch. But throwing labels at this stuff is rather futile. The culmination of instruments and styles sounds nothing like any of its ingredients, and standard, readily identifiable concepts of structure, melody, and rhythm are often unapparent. In terms of accessibility, the harshest Yellow Swans stuff (examples: "Police Eternity" or "The Bombs That Keep Dropping Make It Hard to Sleep" from 2004's Bring the Neon War Home) is just the friendly side of your average Wolf Eyes composition, whereas the relatively tame stuff (Home's "Bring It All Back Home") is downright meditative.
The sounds of the bands that round out this bill are even more varied than the Swans. Bryan Eubanks and Leif Sundstrom make up God, whose music is made with "cracked circuit boards and a feedback-prone home stereo." Their single-track contribution fades in with an initially monophonic bass-frequency pulse, which is eventually joined by crackling, grinding high frequencies, and ultimately sounds like a painful visit to an alien dentist office. Inca Ore's Eva layers her haunting vocals, looping them and adding delay as they slowly build into a dense texture of sound. Axolotl's hallucinatory musings fuse many of the aforementioned aspects—periods of monophonic frequencies that swell, only to be incurred by seemingly random percussive pulses, maraca, and chanted vocals. The 14-minute track from Bonus starts with several different frequencies that gain until they converge, methodically wrapping around one another, and joining with digital representations of kitchen appliances. This show is manna from heaven for those who like the weird stuff.
