#aahrus

This trailer was enough for me to decide to have all the information about this thing and discover if it was possible for me and a couple of friends to get to this place and see at least a day of performances at the festival that gathered some (if not all) of my favourite harsh noise/absurdists/dadaists/no wave/shitcore artists. The second thing that shocked me in this long Epopee was the internet site of this bunch of weird guys

http://aarhusinternationalsupernoisefestival.dk/

This amazing piece of internet clarified the entire concept of the festival with a really appealing charm that i could not ignore.

"A three day festIVAL CELEBRATING harsh noise & shitcore CULTURE! 50 kroner! CHEAP BAR! VEGAN FOOD! 2 RULES: NO LAPTOP, no drumset! "EXTREME MUSIC"  is a derogatory term!   CURATED BY DEN JYSKE HARSH NOISE MAFIA!"

I was very trilled by all the artists and the possibiity to see Denmark all in a row but what gave me the final kick were:

The program of the festival

The reason of the festival

"Ok" i realized "we have to go to Århus"I gathered two friends that were totally unprepared to stand everything we were going to see and my girlfriend, rented a car and the next weekend we drove for nine hours to the International supernoise festival. I was very excited and after we passed the border of Germany and entered Denmark and we saw our first Ø we knew that we were ready to listen to some hard sound. We arrived at the place at midnight of the 7th of Jenuary ready to experience some of the loudest and most shitfaced noise music ever created played in an occupied space in an industrial complex. I must admit that i did not know every project playing at the show; i went there expecially to see the CEO bend-o-rama, Louise Vind Nielsen, Clean boys, Gravhund, Alien tech zombie, Reaction power trio, Svartvit, Cementimental and above all, i must say, the wonderful noise party alien kings-troglodytes from outher space: THE FCKN' BSTRDS

I must admit that the thing i like less of those events is that the music is usually very loud and so loud that, in those circumstances, no human being (except a small group of chosen ones) can listen to an entire concert and that the morning after all that remains of your ears is a loud noise wall in the deep of your brain and that won't go away for the next three days. What i really appreciated of this fest. was that they gave you the possibility to choose between an ears massacre or a very comfortable pair of plugs that was free at the entrance. After noticing that almost everyone was visibly drunk, when we arrived the first performance we experienced was ...Now wash your hands's one.

An onld school very cool Harsh noise drones wall with some beat and a distorted voice remembering everyone how filthy do we are. The slow soundscape that was so loud to destroy anyone's capability to hear and understand others and everything was served with a good dose of healthy english maid dadaism giving you the opportunity to wash your hands for real with hands hygiene products and an air freshner. His performance was very stunning: few lights and what i thought to be sort of b-movies about giant sharks vs genetically modified alligators projected on the back played their role (I have come to know lately that it was more a documentary about Dinosaurs and life in Paleozoic that, if you think about it, makes much more sense!).

Isn't he a trustable guy?

After the one that was a destroying half an hour and a change of set we were ready to have more!

Now was Zanstones turn.This guy that i did not know before the exhibition was very different from any other guy in the room. He was sort of well dressed, i do not mean that all the other guys were dressed like shit, i mean that for being in an harsh noise festival he was TOO well dressed, almost with a suit. He presented himself in a very kind way that a gentleman from london would probably not had and then told us that the piece he was going to play was a collage of field recordings that he recorded that day in Århus. I must say. He had already stole my heart. After pressing play Zanstones started to wrap, with a huge pack of rubbish bags, the two columns that were in the centre of the room going fast around. The people around seemed to like the idea and so some of them started to place himself in between the columns to be wrapped inside.

What the fuck is this guy doing?

After ten minutes or so the two columns were completely wrapped in the black plastic that started to pulse from the inside because of the moving people. It was like watching a black rubber shapeless creature moving with dreadful slowness. The field recordings base played an important part of the process of alienation and introspective perception of the entire performance and were much appreciated for their semplicity and for the mercyless mass of concrete sounds in wich the recordings took shape .

Oh now it makes perfect sense!

After everything was over we talked to Zan Hoffman and discovered a couple cool things about his touring experience (it seems that he is quite famous in Andalusia and that Louisville Kentucky has the best BaconBourbonExperimentalmusic combination all to discover). He tells us that it was the first time he did something like that "I just saw the rubbish bags, the two columns and i said myself: why not?"

After a wonderful chat with this charming guy we were ready to experience Gravhund at his finest. Those guys whose are the creators of the festival and the Den Jyske harsh noise mafia (i think from what i have come to witness) are famous because their idea of a perfect artistic performance is to play an harsh noise weird shit destruction while throwing real rubbish that goes from plastic to organic waste (Yeah, rotten fish and deperished milk included - no, it seems that Denmark does not know the word Recycling). The guys seemed to have a very variegated set, from shortwave radio to analogic devices to a lot (and when i say a lot i mean a lot) of pedals to shit whatever sound they planned to play. 

Good boys!

The musical set was very good and very different from most of the sets i had listened on youtube and other spaces. The guys played from the shorwave radio a large range of folk and old kitschish pop music that was destroyed and reassembled in real time by the destroying will and the sick fantasy of the three sausage dogs and their instruments creating an uncomfortable weird space of umpredictable electronic interaction. Even if there was no rubbish in their performance (i hoped for it, but at the same time i think that to survive several hours in a small room with no windows with decomposed food on the floor should have been the chance to get a life long lung disease) Gravhund tought to get the audience in something slightly different from usual. A performer named Olga Szymula came naked and painted in gold bringing a big wheelbarrow full of soil that she overthrowed on the ground.

That's not something you see everyday uh?

then the girl gave anyone a golden painted egg to throw to her so lately she could roll on the ground to make the soil stick on herself. When people threw the eggs two on almost twenty broke on her and the other crushed around in the room (i think that harsh noise and alchool are not a good starting point to train the perfect aim) but no worries! Gravhund gave their help and buried, in the end, Olga Szymula with the soil. All is well that ends well.

After a while it was time for some unprogrammed noise! contravening to one of the two rules of the festival: No drumset (the other rule will be broken, at least, at the end of the fest, as i stated from some Pics cementimental took). The "band" was now suddenly composed by two members of the RPT ensamble playing drum and slaughtered guitar and a girl that was screaming primitive and incomprehensible shit. The entire set was quite short, playing two improvised songs and a third that was the encore, but trust me; i don't know if it was because of the nervous drums breakdown or for the ravenous female screams but the entire performance sounded as a ravish storm of uncontrollable violent sounds. Worth it!

After this beautiful performance we were ready to see the unique and weird dadaist most famous noismakers group from the netherlands; ladies and gentlemen, the FCKN' BSTRDS! Since we entered the room an entire corner was full of colourful waste that the band collected to create their surrealistic and anarcho-oniric landscape that they build different in each performance to set up a dazed and everytime personal post-apocalyptic evironment and now it was ready to be used!

Isn't it beautiful?

After wondering for hours what could they do with all this shit we experienced, in my opinion, the most stunning and weirdos performances of the entire night (and perhaps of the entire festival).

The minimal drone/harsh noise base was only the border of the entire show: the acting itself was circumscribed and contained in the line of the annoying bombastic loop as much as the totems made out of rubbish and broken toys shopping carts and thrashed lights (that created a weird lo-fi spaceships feeling) used as a circle in wich the artists with weird costumes made out of, mostly, plastic and paper went around throwing plastic bags and confetti and interacting with a possessed trash bin they customized or simply screaming obscure sounds 'til detroying theìr vocal chords. A spiral of madness and pure destructivism that last for half an hour that we really enjoyed. Even if we tried to stay out the active part of this madness fest we ended up trying to fit Now wash your hands in the already mentioned rubbish bin; but, hey, he asked us to help him like a real english gentleman! What could we do?

After this amazing acting it was time for 5 minutes of other crazy unplanned noise. Different members RPT played a drum and drum machine performance of improvised noise sound and then crashed everything. Yeah, i am sorry. It's pretty much everything. We don't even know the name of the project. Well, 0 fucks given: it was totally cool, thanks guys.

Well well well, what we got here? It seems that we are near to witness the most nihilistic solo acoustic drum project of the night: LordxGonzo from France (all these french people are slowly killing my ears). The guy tells no jokes, the drum set is now the principal place where the appetite for the obliteration of the sound reunites all the guys forces. Blastbeats that could be an heritage of Napalm Death and early Terrorizer fused with and cymbals rapes inspired by 60s and 70s happenings along the extreme acoustic noises showcase befall on an innocent exhausted drums and end in the partial destruction in anger of the percussive set. I must say kinda expected it.

I am pretty sure it was a normal drumset before this festival...

Meanwhile we became superstars to a danish guy that believed us to be part of the performers group. It seems that to drive 9 hours from Germany to Denmark to witness an harsh noise festival is considered somewhat a superpower. At that time i realized that we were, in the room, approximatively 60-70 people; maybe less. Stating to the fact that the performer where at least 30 and that probably from the organisation there were 10 people we were the practically only ones that came from abroad to see the event and so yes, we were kinda special.

After this brief chat it was time to experience Cementimental's most gruesome and dangerous electronic labirynth: a wall of painful and granitic white noise that pierced our brains and smashed our cortical membrane. With the total spastic control of a lot of pedals and some feedback generation offered by circuits bending delights, the english concrete maneater provided an unforgiving lo-fi hammer that has no name and no form. So fucking loud

CEMENTIMENTAL'S SET AT ÅRHUS SUPERNOISE FESTIVAL

After a while i realized that everyone of my group including me, after 9 hours of driving through Germany, somewhat like 20 beers and three joints, was tired. So we decided, after half of Cementimental's set, to grab some shirt of the festival, some free offer tapes and to go home and have some sleep before exploring the normal Århus, the one without extreme noise and weird drunk people going around wrapped in rubbish or hanging from the ceiling.   

no need for explainations.

So it's time to draw the sums of what we experienced. During the night we saw a lot of different styles of performances that, in a context like that, sounded very peculiar and very different one from another. This thing that is difficult to notice when you are trying to discover some harsh noise on the net. What really impressed me, besides the fact that everything was ridicoulously cheap (getting drunk in Scandinavia has never been so easy), was the fact that the ambience that the festival created was very friendly, not pretentious (both artists and audience) and very coherent with its central concepts: Fucking noise, friendly place, cheap alcohol and food. What else? Yes, it was not easy to understand the dynamics of the festival: at a certain point the changes between the bands were a lot and the only two rules were broken, not last the fact that someone (not me) could argue about the real artistic value of the actings and the performances but the point was only to make some unpleasent noise and to enjoy it all togheter with no borders or limits. I went there and i did not give a fuck about anything: talking to the artists, playing with tem or simply get wasted was the only thing that was worth to do without having paranoid reflections on the research of sound itself. It was one of my best (if not the best) (anti)music experiences. It was the first completely anarchic and free art space in wich i ever took part and, for that, i am very grateful and i will make anything to go (and if i can, to play) to this festival next year. Those guys are making something that is really important and they are doing it as a group of friends; that's a thing that usually is missing at all levels of the music ambient: from the main stages to the very (so-told) underground. I am sorry i could not stay more.

Thank you Århus, it was a great time.

Hereafter, as a reference, we will publish the complete programme of the fest and all the artists that partecipated to this mastodontic waste of human possibility to play understandable music.

Cheers from Artetetra, we hope you had fun.

Fuck music, make some noise.