Aaron Dilloway & Nate Young - Grosvenor Arms, London - 7/4/09
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
In the early days of Wolf Eyes, Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway and John Olsen started making truly original intelligent experimental music. You could go as far as to say that they created an entirely new genre from what was before a handful of obscure and disparate influences: from industrial bands like Nurse with Wound, to acid hippies like Smegma, to avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen, artists had explored some bold uncharted, untime-signatured territory with no melodic phrase or consistent meter. What these musicians didn't have that Wolf Eyes did was the luxury of a significant amount of such music to draw upon as reference. As such, Wolf Eyes were one of the first bands to really hone a lot of the aesthetic qualities of this kind of music into what has become a highly sophisticated craft.
Along with such acts as Prurient, John Wiese, Harold Steltzer, Damien Romero, Hair Police, Yellow Swans and Nautical Almanac, Wolf Eyes have helped create one of the most exciting forces in contemporary music culture, but as with all scenes, once the conventions have been established and the categorisations have been put in place, the music has become in its more popular form stifled by its audience's expectancy. Nowadays when you go and see Wolf Eyes which Aaron Dilloway is no longer a part of, you get fist-pounding machismo rather than chin-stroking consideration - I myself, whereas I have no problem with the former, am increasingly predisposed to the latter. Tonight Dilloway and Young both prove in their separate sets that they too are both still committed to their original pioneering attitude.
[NATE YOUNG]
In the last couple of years Nate Young has taken to mucking about with a lovely big old modular synth, used primarily with his project Demons on his label AA records (Aryan Asshole, not Automobile Association like you thought). The most impressive section of his set was the performance of a piece of music recorded and released on the Demons/Dilloway tape, except that during this performance the lyrics are much clearer, creating a much more stark atmosphere before a room of irreverent chin stroking zombie geeks. Mr. Young to my mind has always had an incredible way with words, although some may dismiss a great deal of his sentiments as immature and comparable to the miserable poetry of a teenager. The mistake there is that in observing that teenagers are miserable and immature, critics have tended to assume that all miserable people are immature, whereas I feel that Nate Young is a man that has taken a good look at some of the more fundamental and tough elements of getting through existence. He has then tried to voice his observations and feelings in the most direct, honest and cathartic way he can, whilst still wording it beautifully and artfully. This is something that very few lyricists have the guts to do these days and something for which he should be commended. One major difference between what can be heard in Nate Young's lyrics and what may be found scrawled in the note book of a young goth is that there is no hint of self obsession here, the subject of the lyrics very much addressing the nature of our shared existence, which provides exactly what you would hope for in a small venue gig setting but are so seldom privileged to experience.
As the set slowly creeps back into the recesses of the speakers the definitive end is marked to a specific millisecond by an uncharacteristically abrupt YEAH! from the otherwise subdued audience.
Aaron Dilloway has long been my favourite Wolf Eye. If I were a teenage girl and Wolf Eyes were my favourite boy band he definitely would be the one that I fancied. The beginning of his set tonight was the audio equivalent of an aged gouda or a lambic beer - the use of stereo being highly effective adds to this salivating experience tremendously, exquisitely, something that noise artists should certainly utilise more. DIVINE.
I find myself situated for the most part of this set amongst an outer mantle of beardy fellows with their torsos covered in a layer of leather jacket. It is plausible to conceive that the leather itself was due to the erosive nature of the music with its almost tidal repetition of decaying tape loops emanating from the speakers.
Aaron Dilloway's interest in looping samples of recent years leaves an interesting study in the nature of repetition. When listening to a repeated tape loop, especially one that has no time signature or no recognisable formal structure, the physicality of the sound is far more emphasised than when you listen to musicians repeat a riff. Generally speaking, the repetition of a riff in a rock song is to familiarise yourself with a sort of context or framework: this framework can then be used to hang a vocal or a solo from, or even to interrupt and truncate using it as a sort of source material. The differences within the rock song become the most significant thing or, more accurately, they cause a sort of dialogue between the repeated framework and the varying element, whatever it may be. The focus whilst listening to a repeated sample however, is the repeated experience of hearing the recorded document over and over again. The minute details of the sound become very significant, your comprehension of that short repeated sound being sharpened ever so slightly more with each repetition, becoming more in depth. Add to this the slow changes due to the decay of the loop and the layering of the loops and you also experience a high receptivity to change: the smallest discrepancy between one loop and the next can then have a major effect on the listening experience.
Overall tonight has me thinking about meditative music, I often refer to noise music as great music to have on and not listen to, which would suggest a sort of meditative quality. Something, though, makes me resistant to putting this music under the same hat as the sort of transcendental meditation that David Lynch can be heard harping on about for example.
[AARON DILLOWAY]
The problem lies in what you would define as meditative - noise that is constantly shifting and without pattern can be meditative in that you are able to think about other things whilst dipping in and out of the sound. The intricacies of the overall sound are too much to comprehend and yet the overall aesthetic can be relatively consistent, much like when listening to (or not listening to) birdcall. This, I find, encourages a very distanced but conscious mind state, the kind of mind state that helps you think about your opinion on a topical subject or what you need to do next week. Then there is the meditative experience that arises from the sort of focus I mentioned with respect to Aaron Dilloway's set - as the word focus suggests, a great degree of the usual conscious stimulus is largely ignored in favour of one particular sonic aspect: this happens to a degree with most music, but with Aaron Dilloway it is honed down to a minute detail to the point that your state of consciousness is largely altered and primarily concerned with a very specific aspect of sensory stimulus.
Transcendental meditation however, seems to be concerned with a consciousness so detached from the external world it is almost completely abstract or - subconscious. Perhaps it is a prejudice of mine because I cannot help but feel that the more that Lynch has got into transcendental meditation the more there has been a kind of irritating spiritual wishy washyness creeping into his films, and also, all that nonsense about catching the big fish is simply a ridiculous overlaboured metaphor that in actual fact is not clever- it's stupid. The bottom line is you are much better off listening to noisy music than worrying about catching ideas in the shape of big fish.
Artists in this article: Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway
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