November 8th 2008

There were two people in the venue that night that spoke English remarkably well. Winds up they were from Columbus, Ohio. They were an American noise band named Sword Heaven. I had never heard of them before. They were remarkably polite and soft-spoken.

The drummer mentioned that they did a couple of dates with Skinny Puppy. The shows apparently did not go over very well. According to one hateful email, the band was “too fat” and should focus on eating more cheeseburgers instead of making music. The drummer bared a striking resemblance to Zach Galifianakis.

Sword Heaven usually play on the floor, but the venue was too crowded. So the two-piece set up their portable PA system, drum set, four-track tape machine, and assorted electronics on stage. Then the drummer took his shirt off, tied a rope tethered to three broken cymbals around his ankle, and began to drunkenly stumble and weave through the crowd while growling, moaning, and barking. The cymbals clattered and screeched across the cement floor. On stage, the other half of the duo brandished a metal pipe outfitted with a guitar strap and a contact mic. He dragged a piece of scrap metal along the inside of the pipe, creating a Godzilla-like howl. The drummer finished his rounds through the audience, crawled back on stage, and duct taped a contact mic to his throat. His indecipherable animal sounds suddenly became amplified demonic roars. He picked up a pair of mallets and began to beat the drums. The drum set was worn to shit, but they were outfitted with triggers that made each hit seem impossibly huge and blown out. There was no tempo, no beat, no patterns; just spontaneous bouts of thunder with distorted shrieking on top. The scrap metal player made tape loops while they played, creating strange echoes and Doppler effect pitch shifts. One of the house PA speakers blew.

It was a disturbing and unsettling half hour. The crowd crept to the back of the room, but remained transfixed throughout the performance.

Backstage before a concert this past weekend, two men huddled closely to their respective bottles of beer making small talk. They did not know each other. One man, largely unkempt, was the bass player in the opening band about to go on. The other was there to see the headliner.

The man who was there to see the headliner asked the bass player what he usually did before he went on stage. The bass player replied, “Usually, I fuck,” then looked up from his beer with an empty, open, and inquisitive gaze.

Suddenly the bass player appeared as he really was: a wet ox in heat. It was monsoon season and he was ready.

There was silence for a bit and the man who was there to see the headliner said, “So when is you all’s next show?” The bass player said nothing. He put his down his beer, went onstage, and played his set.

A few things strike me as a make last minute preparations for the trip. 1) No band looks cool once you’ve wandered through their MySpace—reading the Kings of Leon MySpace, for example, makes me think that they’re trying to psyche up for a forthcoming high school reunion. 2) Didn’t we need Rage Against the Machine in 2004? Explaining their reunion, Tom Morello told NME that “"It occurred to all of us that the times were right to see if we can knock the Bush administration out in one fell swoop, and we hope to do that job well.” 3) In a few hours, I’ll be watching bands I’ve been listening to for years, (through albums, not, mercifully, their MySpace pages), but I’ll be seeing these icons in the unforgiving California sun while lining up for bottled water. There’s something geeky and pure in that.