Switchboard to Everywhere

Brought to you by Datura 1.0.

I got to taste a new flavor of noise music last night: Laptops Unplugged II: Electric Boogaloo. (Best sequel title ever!) Datura and eight other electronic musicians set up laptop computers in a small theater and improvised all at once. No conductor, no metronome, no melody, no harmony, no rhythm. Just sound. After about 20 minutes, a guy named Mike stood up and said, "Thank you!" and it was over.

The players scattered themselves around the theater, both at tables down front and up in the audience, but no one sat on the stage. The only thing on the stage was a spotlit chair with a microphone on it, which Mike was using to record the proceedings. Candles littered the tables, but most of the light came from the computer screens. It was very informal; audience members wandered the room freely, sitting down next to the musicians to peer at the oscillations on their screens, and my friend the Kerner strolled around with a small portable recorder. One spike-haired young woman in zebra-patterned sneakers knitted fiercely the whole time, producing at least six inches of fuzzy red and yellow scarf during the show.

One of the most interesting things about the performance was that it was collaborative, but not necessarily cooperative, and definitely not competitive. All nine guys did their thing at once, but no one's strain interfered with or detracted from anyone else's. Datura put it best when he called the result organic, like several bullfrogs croaking out their individual songs in a swamp. But these bullfrogs are made of silicon and plastic, and they dine on sampled sounds.

I'm avoiding describing what the noise sounded like because, well, I can't. That's the thing with noise music: you can't draw a nice neat staff with a treble clef and a bass clef on it and assign each note its place. You can't say whether the major chords outnumbered the minor or whether the rhythm held steady. None of those rules apply.

It's like — you know in a sci-fi movie how sometimes a mad scientist will translate the cosmic radiation from distant stars into sound waves to see whether we're receiving Bach etudes from space? Noise music is kind of like that. And just as with the cosmic tunes, every once in a while, just when you think you've found a pattern, a meaning, some balding god takes a slug of his beer and presses a button that changes the whole tune.

Or I could say that sometimes some of the tones sounded like underwater modems dialing the switchboard to everywhere. Or that some of them sounded like a marimba falling down an interminable flight of stairs. Cat hisses, amplifier feedback, shifting continents, wind in the willows. None of it was very loud or very jarring; it was everyday sound captured and fed back through each musician's unique filter: familiar, but not.

I guess my best suggestion would be to go listen to some — Datura has some mp3 samples on his site — and form your own opinion. (One of my previous attempts can be found here.) Try it! It's a buzz.

Today around the world: June 1 is International Children's Day in Angola, Australia, Cambodia, China, Laos, North Korea, Uruguay, and Vietnam.