(This is an expanded and heavily-altered version of an article originally published in the Reno News & Review.)
There are nights when you consider surgical attachment to your coat. Maybe you could replace one of your kidneys with a space heater too. Because there is no visible future in which you are taking off your coat. You know that Les Rallizes Denudes song, “Flames of Ice”? It knows where you are at. This weather only exists to make you more comfortable with death.
There are nights in which you shuffle into a basement to watch some goddamn bands play. Maybe one will have a guitar. Maybe they will play it and the whole audience will sail on an electric groove into the gelatinous center of the universal hivemind.
There’s no blood on the floor or anything at the Hen Den, a house and basement on Sinclair Street where the shadows grow, and all stains are the long-faded consequences of hardcore shows, but your concentration with regards to the cold and the remnants of somebody’s gum tissue have briefly obscured your surroundings, which reveal themselves in a real moment of reckoning.
CHINESE GORE: LIVE AT THE HEN DEN 11/06/2009
There is a fucking tent. In the same space that those electric-guitar-playin’ astronauts normally only fill. Shadows move within the tent, supposedly calculating whatever sound this is that gallops from the speakers and directly into your guts. It sounds like the earth’s long-held-in exhalations. It is bigger than you. These shadows seem to extend and bow, as though they are all kowtowing to the sound. As if the sound built them from nothing, and they must pay their respects.
Which is understandable, because the sound bears wrath. The sound has an unknowable bottom. My best guess: It is either a black hole or full of teeth.
This was the Reno noise group Chinese Gore on November 6. At an interview at Swahili’s practice space one month later, now separate from their tented shadows, they appear alarmingly human. Three of them resemble the same overpowered superhumans who drag Swahili through the heart’s great violence: Troy Micheau, John Griffin and Van Pham.
In fact, the first Chinese Gore show resulted from an untenable Swahili date—an August 29 show with Santa Rosa bands Starskate and A Pack of Wolves.
“I think we were scheduled to play a show as Swahili and we could not,” says Pham. “So we made a fake band.”
“Van and I had talked about doing something else for awhile,” says Micheau. “With Swahili—I don’t want to say we’re locked into a sound, but we kind of know what we do, so we wanted to try out some more freeform ideas.”
CHINESE GORE: LIVE AT CLINTON SLEEPER’S HOUSE 08/29/2009The first performance, in the middle of Clinton Sleeper’s (of Reno emo heroes Praying for Greater Portland) living room, featured Pham, Micheau, Griffin and Swahili drummer Ryan Schofield giving abrasive birth in costume. Micheau, dressed in full grandma garb, and Schofield, dressed as Robin in the “Batman and” sense, hit metal sheets, hit drums, hit assorted objects laced with contact microphones. Griffin, topped with a tiger hat, conjured from his bass guitar the black mud of the soul. Pham—I can’t say what she was but she resembled some unearthed Egyptian ghost—moaned into microphones and levitated over a keyboard display. The music? The music was big electric saw that coursed its rhythmic way through the pleasure centers. It left us with only the raw and awful feelings. We were unwilling to move, as though the slightest twitch would break us free of our new Zen existences.
“It feels like more of an exercise for us and then hoping they (the audience) enjoy it,” says Micheau. “It’s putting us in this position where everything is up in the air for them and us. The audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The only thing that’s happening between us is the sound.”
“I remember getting out (of the tent at the Hen Den show) and being surprised that people were actually in the room,” says Michael Modene of Think in French and Short Hair, and recent convert to Chinese Gore’s sonic pilgrimage.
Chinese Gore create an improvised drone that can emerge arbitrarily or with malevolent intent, that can undo itself in a great fire or evaporate in slow motion. In between, it bores its way through all attendant living matter, but in varying degrees. It can resemble the off-the-cuff assault of Japanese noise or the composed serenity of the occasional Kevin Drumm record.
“There’s always a bit of anxiety before a show,” says Modene. “Not knowing at first what a song’s going to be, or where we’re going to transition. It’s fun because we don’t know where it’s going as much as anyone watching does.”
If the names of band members seem thrown-around and oddly fluid, it is by nature of Chinese Gore’s construction: they have an open-and-revolving door policy with regards to membership. Those who currently operate under the name think of the project as, in Pham’s words, “an exercise”—as an outlet for less-band-and-song-based explorations.
“It allows you to get into a different head space than playing in a normal band does a lot of the time,” says Micheau. “When you’re playing in your band, you have your songs that you’ve written. When we do this we have no idea what’s going to happen at any time.”
“It’s nice to go by the seat of your pants and not have to practice,” says Griffin. “You’re in so many other bands over the years and you’re always trying to remember a plethora of things you’re trying to achieve. And with this you just go out there and shit into a mic for ten minutes, and it feels way better sometimes because you don’t have to worry about it.”
The tent in the Hen Den was itself a last minute decision, but one that, regardless, had the site in mind. The sound too is built for the place in which it will be received.
“For me, what we do here, the sound is an environment in a lot of ways,” says Micheau. “So I want the music that we’re making to fit the surroundings and to alter it in some way and to be part of it.”
Thus the 14 minutes and 10 minutes above, the whole of Chinese Gore’s Hen Den and Flavor Country sets.
“I don’t know if we try to play short sets,” says Micheau. “I think at around the ten-minute mark we’re all…”
“Oh, I think we’re boring now,” mimes Griffin. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“To me it almost suspends time,” continues Micheau. “After we played that first show, I felt like that was going on for centuries. And then you guys were like, ‘Oh, that was seven minutes.’ ”
Last night, Chinese Gore played for what seemed like 20 minutes—I’m not entirely sure, I didn’t film it. And thank God I didn’t. Fuck this incredible internet-based need to document every musical happening in full. It is a source of great disconnect between noise and receiver. When I am trying to film someone, I cannot give into them.
Last night, I gave into Chinese Gore. They took me into the tunnel and showed me what happened there.
I saw the blood. I felt the cold.
Tags: Chinese Gore, noise, Reno
yeah much prefer the revisionist article.
these sounds interest me. i like the percussive qualities here. i’ve always found joy in hitting things to see what noise comes out.
and it gives some kind of dynamics to thiskindofthing which can on occasion sink into monotony.
yup.
“it feels like more of an exercise for us…”
maybe that should be exorcism?