“Ladies and gentlemen!” announces the self-proclaimed “garbage noise
duet” Sparkle Girl to an audience huddled in a loftlike space.
“In the middle of the room, there is a box full of crap. Make sounds
with the crap!” Slouched in a beat-up TV chair in back, I can’t see
the box, but I do count a dozen or so people next to the stage passing
out chimes, rattles, harmonicas, and other small instruments.
A flurried, breathtaking cacophony ensues. Augmented by Walrus
Machine, Jason from the Sea Donkeys, drummer/composer
Mark Ostrowski of the Monktail Creative Music Concern, and
others, Sparkle Girl disgorge a 12-minute fanfare of keening sirens,
hoots, bleats, and a Doppler double-time percussion barrage that
simultaneously evokes the Allman Brothers in their early ’70s
heyday and the Burundi drummers. Three feet away, a woman shakes
a tambourine. I angle through the crowd and savor the blend of
engulfing electronics and close-up acoustic instruments. Suddenly, a
muscular pulse stomps the entire room, like a club-footed cyclops
trying to kick-start the turbine of the Grand Coulee Dam. It’s an
apt fusillade aimed to celebrate 14 years of Soccer Mom Ebonics,
Sparkle Girl’s homegrown, defiantly inconsistent label devoted to
experimental sound and performance.
Earlier, Sparkle Girl e-mailed me a spreadsheet that tallies a
hundred or so releases. You may have picked one up—they’re
usually free—at a phone booth, record store, protest, or
show. I have a small stack, and collectively they flout what most
of us expect from a label. The absence of consistent packaging and
uniform contents (some have inserts, some don’t) confirm that
everything is handmade. Some releases could be exhibited as art
objects. Even those hurriedly scribbled on and shoved into a case or
envelope retain an aura of a made, not manufactured object. In art-geek
speak, Soccer Mom Ebonics purveys multiples, not commodities.
In the seminal book Noise: The Political Economy of
Music, Jacques Attali suggests that music has an annunciatory
power, “a foreshadowing of structural mutations, and farther
down the road, of the emergence of a radically new meaning for labor…
Music is a foretoken of evolution on the basis of behavior in
the human world, in a crisis announced by artists’ refusal to be
standardized by money.” Sparkle Girl—and the legion of other
music makers who have given their work away since the rise of the
internet—may help transform the notion of wealth from an act of
accumulation and ownership to something actually useful: the
consecration of altruistic contribution.
As the world teeters on the brink of another Great Depression,
perhaps the newly poor will follow suit, electing to be gainfully
employed despite not earning money; someone just needs to suggest
better terms than “cultural worker,” “intern,” or “volunteer.”
I’m hoping Australian sound artist Chris Mann might embed a
suggestion (Thurs March 12, 911 Seattle Media Arts Center, 7:30 pm,
$5–$15 suggested donation) amid his dazzlingly inventive live
logorrhea, where words become cyclones. 
