'Feedback Not Part of FluiD's Performance

For the NOISE SHOCK II Festival, Joe Grove and I did seperate telephone interviews with the QC Times. Below is a reprint of the interview/article that appeared in the QC Times.

'Feedback Not Part of FluiD's Performance'

While noise is often characterized by massive amounts of feedback from those not into the music genre, the second Noise Shock Festival at Mixtapes in East Moline this weekend will feature several artists who don't use feedback or even looping pedals in their sets.

Chris Gilmore, the man behind FluiD, takes songs he's recorded on piano, saxophone, clarinet, drums and bass and loops sections together to form a continuous 30-minute set. What makes his performance different than what a DJ would do is that he loads 100 clips, none longer than 20 seconds, and continually mixes bass lines from one song, keyboards from another and vocals from a third song, creating a completely new, improvised song on the spot.

"It's a complete reimagining of the audio," he said. "That's basically what my show is, a remix or re-contextualization of my existing songs."
While the occasional traditional noise element will slip into FluiD's performance, Gilmore said the music aligns most closely with the concept of dubbing.

"It's definitely not a wall of sound or noise for five minutes or 30 minutes," he said. "For me, that would become kind of boring because that would be the same thing, almost flip a switch and just run a noise generator through a few pedals. There's people who do that very well, they're very imaginative, and then there's other people that don't do that so well and it ends up becoming a monotone thing."

Joe Grove doesn't fall into the typical category of noise music, either, because he doesn't use feedback or looping pedals in his set. He does, however, build his own instruments, which is common among noise musicians. In fact, he usually spends more time building the instruments, which are AM radios with wires soldered to them or children's toys that he circuit-bends, than he does playing them.

For the Noise Shock Festival, Grove is hoping to build a new instrument that he would stand on and play with his feet and toes instead of with his hands and fingers.

"I'm a really big procrastinator, and I really decide what I'm going to do the day before," he said. "It's all improv, usually."

Like FluiD, he uses prerecorded songs in his performance. He records everything from playing the guitar himself to reading poems on a four-track recorder and then plays it back through a Walkman hooked up to a crappy speaker Grove has had since he was a teenager but won't get rid of because he likes the sound.