I Missed No Fun For This?!

As a New Jersey native, there is nothing like being back home in New York City.

OK, in all honesty, I do love, and always will, New Jersey. Just as much as I love New York City.

Returning from the south to the great upnorth, for me, was especially ideal sometime before May 16th, 17th or 18th (preferably the 16th), a week after the final day of my last semester as a Tulane undergraduate.

Those three days, those three days I will never get back, were the dates set for the fifth annual No Fun Fest, a carnival of sounds created and organized by Brooklyn-based noise artist Carlos Giffoni (and by "carnival of sounds, " I don't mean an event of musical merrymaking--of people hopping and skipping to pleasing, agreeable arrangements of voice, guitar, bass, drums, etc. By "carnival of sounds," I'm referring to the 60's cult horror classic, "The Carnival of Souls." From guitars to synthesizers, from saxophones to laptops, from ukeleles to aluminum paint trays filled with small metal objects, the "music" at No Fun Fest, with its disarrangements, if not mutilations, of very much anything that emits a sound will unnerve you, assault you, disorient you, and haunt you, even well after you've experienced it.).

Before it relocated this year to the Knitting Factory in New York City, No Fun Fest unleashed its yearly maelstrom of discord in Brooklyn, with its 2004 inaugural performances housed in club North Six, and its following performances the next 3 years in The Hook. No Fun Fest has become from the very start one of the more successful independent music festivals, attracting big names year after year from the international noise scene: Wolf Eyes and Hair Police from Michigan; John Wiese and his cut-and-paste noisecore project Sissy Spacek from Los Angeles; Philip Best of Consumer Electronics, and of legendary noise and industrial pioneers Whitehouse, from the United Kingdom; Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth from New York City; and Yoshimi, of the pioneering noise rockers Boredoms, Incapacitants and Merzbow from Japan. No Fun Fest's success is all the more obvious since its "music"--and this should go without saying--is not really music at all. What you hear at No Fun is strictly anti-music. A discernible melody may escape here and there, but it is the proverbial needle in this haystack made of barbwire set on fire.

All musical conventions are scrapped for aural speed, ruthless volume, and torrential ambience, whether it be the brooding atmospherics of Burning Star Core, or the relentless crackle, swish, pop and boom of the Incapacitants' electric firestorm. With musical conventions, all things audible are a step or two closer from being a crude block of sound to a handsome bust of song. Without them, the block remains, free to be chiseled, sculpted, and hacked at in any way, and with any tool, to produce anything, or nothing, as a free exploration, or exploitation, of the possibilities, and impossibilities, of sound to effect, if not represent as well, the multiplicity and complexity of human emotion and thought.

This is the main reason why I'm a fan of noise, and why I really wanted to attend this year's No Fun Fest. After learning about the festival only last year, and missing the first 2 and a half of the fest's three nights, I made it a goal to not miss No Fun at all in 2008 (this was before the show dates were announced). I never expected that another "goal" of mine--as in a goal I would accomplish not for myself, but for my family; I did not care for it much myself-- would get in the way--walking on stage to be handed my degree in Tulane University's inaugural Undergraduate Diploma Ceremony, a new addition to the university's 10th anniversary Unified Commencement Ceremony, in which graduates from all of the university's schools and colleges are all gathered and recognized, this year in a place where Tulane has not had their commencements since Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Superdome. May 16th to the 18th were the dates set for No Fun. For the graduation ceremony, the 17th. Was there no fun to be had at all, in those three days I waited a year for? Oh man...