By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Feedback settling into notes and beats and melodies erupting into feedback – this describes most of the music in Ackerman Grand Ballroom Sunday night, the closing night of the four-day All Tomorrow’s Parties concert.
As expected, performances by Stereolab and festival curators Sonic Youth were the eight-hour show’s highlights, with most other groups acting as more extreme versions of the latter group.
Sonic Youth’s set, which lasted for an hour and a half, was a consistently solid mix of well-constructed songs and noisy improvisation.
The crowd shouted their love for various members of the band, along with song requests. One audience member called out for “that loud one with feedback,” commenting on the band’s tendency to improvise.
Sonic Youth didn’t play any half hour-long drones, like its infamous opener at an All Tomorrow’s Parties in England in 2000, but it didn’t take the group long to find their spirit of adventure. By the second song, guitarist and singer Thurston Moore was rubbing his guitar on the monitor and the melody dissolved into noise.
After several bands that played little else but feedback, it was a relief to hear Sonic Youth’s combination of songs and jams, giving the audience something to dance along to before breaking it down to an electronic jumble.
The group’s jamming was never annoying, which is more than can be said for other, more shamelessly self-indulgent bands that evening.
The members of openers Black Dice were more into their music than anyone in the crowd was. Swaying to a rhythm that wasn’t there and mixing in one abrasive sound after another, the group’s members were too entranced by their own sound to notice that there was an audience listening, too.
Giving a similar performance was Dead C. Consisting of one 40-minute jam, its set was a collage of feedback and distortion that didn’t actually include any notes. The group’s drummer, Robbie Yeats, held it together and made it a more listenable song than any of Black Dice’s, but pretension overpowered the music.
Peaches, on the other hand, gave a set that was the opposite of pretentious. Proving herself to be the Lil’ Kim of rock, she sang about nothing but sex, and did so in as vulgar a way as possible. While her singing was live, the music was canned, and the songs relied on one often-repeated catchphrase. Her performance was popular with the crowd, though, probably due to the pictures drawn on an overhead projector to accompany Peaches’ singing.
These drawings were most fun when they framed Peaches, standing in the light of the projector, in different settings or put her in different outfits. They were least creative when they consisted of cutouts of men and women arranged into orgies.
Peaches’ performance didn’t particularly fit into the eight hours of thinky rock, but she was well received nonetheless.
Another popular set was by rock veteran Mike Watt and The Secondmen. Watt, most notably of the 1980s band the Minutemen, showed the diversity of his projects. His singing captured the energy of early punk and the short songs kept the crowd bouncing.
Saccharine Trust, who performed early in the show, also got audience members bobbing around after the initial shock that vocalist Jack Brewer looked like a professor. Dressed in a far-from-fashion-conscious sport coat and mismatched shirt, with curly gray hair, Brewer was not what he looked like. Everyone realized this when he started yelling his lyrics and jumping around with his fist in the air.
Giving a far more sedate but impressive performance was Stereolab. With its beautifully arranged songs and soft sounding layered vocals provided by the group’s two female members, the attention was on song formation rather than improvisation.
The group maintains the independent aesthetic without ever alienating listeners, making it like Sonic Youth in this way. Aside from that, similarities between the two groups are hard to find, but the crowd found both bands’ performances rewarding finishes to the festival.