Murder the Word 3 A Cut-Up Reflection (Previews with Interjections) by Craig Reynolds Begin & end anywhere Blending chaotic strains of experimental noise rock, interactive props and playthings, conceptual fashion, DJ collages, free jazz freakouts, absurdist theater, postmodern sound collage and experimental film and video installations, Murder the Word reveals a new underground sensibility honed at raves, punk rock shows and in cyberspace, where the unreal reigns and the non-narrative impulse provides a guiding light. * Tagged by the Buffalo News "a multi-media assault on the senses," Murder the Word is an abstract evening of information overload and decadent fun originally conceived to activate the sense of joyful, anarchistic abandon at play on the pages of Basta! * "People often ask what the ‘theme’ of Murder the Word is," says Reynolds, "but the point of Murder the Word is to reject themes, to move forward without invoking any kind of over-arching structure on which to pattern our lives . . ." * Even those bands that play out regularly treat Murder the Word as an opportunity to indulge their experimental impulses. The Global Village Idiots will premier their mock-opera; David Kane will debut his new band Infants of Prog; the disARTppointments will play Disappointments fragments arranged by a cue-card-carrying Abe Lincoln; Hallwalls jazz programmer Steve Baczkowski will conduct The Protozoan Improviser’s Collective, a one-time only, 15-20 person free jazz orchestra; and The Knowmatic Tribe will spin 6 turntables simultaneously in addition to the Atari/DJ interface. * A 950-person event specifically engineered to lift off from itself inevitably contains situations beyond any one person’s experience of it, even the event’s organizers (which is always the most perplexing, and yet satisfying aspect of Murder the Word—I love to be surprised). * With stimulating possibilities fragmented across 3 floors in a Chinese Box of rooms, I was unable to see even a single second of David Kane’s Infants of Prog, Erica Williamson’s poetry performance or the activation of Ian’s propeller piece. What’s more, there were a few sets that I did see, but only for a few minutes: The Living Sound Ensemble’s avalanche of free jazz intensity, Matt Chambers’ "Murder the Word" piece featuring Ric Royer improvising words spasms into a bullhorn, Dave Mussen and Jonathan Hughes’ Subspace performances, The Casiophonic Marching Band’s set of vintage volts and Treelinedhighway’s raw show of experimental post-rock. As you can see, the material I missed amounted to an event in itself, although the qualities of negation, erasure and absence that characterized my experience have become as much a part of the event’s final significance as multiplication, consumption and direct experience. * A digression: Just Buffalo last year sponsored a city-wide reading event in which all of Buffalo was encouraged to read the same book, then get together and talk about it. When I learned of this project, I was excited by the possibility of collective mobilization around a common creative experience, although I couldn’t help but remember one of John Cage’s reasons for quitting college: he couldn’t understand the point of going to class if everybody had already read the material. His instincts told him that the classroom experience would be much more fruitful if everybody read a different book and then, in convergence, taught the others what he or she had learned. I think about Cage and Just Buffalo now because in many ways Murder the Word explodes the notion of collectivity. To be sure, it marks the significant communion of Buffalo’s experimental music and art scene, but the sheer number of choices at Murder the Word insures that everybody sees and hears (or creates) a different event. * The photos, video documentation and stories I received afterward more than adequately testify to a multiplicity of experiences. For example, one of the guys from the industrial noise-punk group NoizFuc decided to slice himself with a razor blade before their set (hence the photos of the group with red smears across their faces). I learned later that he had cut into his arm so badly that as soon as the group finished he was rushed to Buffalo General, where several stitches were required to close the wound. I discovered this incident only after a friend of the group’s wondered aloud if the people at the Ukrainian Home were upset about having to clean blood off the walls (the band’s set consisted primarily of found percussion playing, so blood flew freely). Another example of this phenomenon involved the empty wood frame of an installation that never quite materialized (but which we left on the floor of the NoiseRiot ballroom anyway). When Joy Patterson’s models began to vogue, they instinctively utilized the 10’ x 10’ x 10’ cube as a frame for their activity. Later, I was shocked to discover that the structure was filled with smashed metal pieces, which I initially feared came from one of the rented slide projectors precariously propped on the edge of the balcony (I determined that because all 4 projectors were still working, it had to be some other device). Revisiting the ballroom after being downstairs for a while, I saw that the frame was now filled with smashed bottles (and I found 2 guys finishing their beers nearby who then threw the empty bottles into the growing pile of shredded glass. "What the fuck are you doing?!" I yelled. "We thought you were supposed to do that," they answered sincerely). This is where the story ended until about 2 months later, when, looking through the friend's pictures, I came across a photo of a guy smashing the first object in the abandoned wood frame: a toaster (where this toaster came from I don’t know, nor do I wish, or do I wish the owners of the building we were renting, to find out). Hilariously, the person doing the smashing, who with this act initiated later rounds of unexpected destruction, was artist Joe Brittain, who had installed work in the building’s basement. A spontaneous “creative” act, Joe’s violence seems now like a kind of performance art that spiraled into unexpected, anarchistic audience interactivity in keeping with the "official" program of performances that night. * NOTE FOR NEXT YEAR: Create a playground of incomplete structures, artworks and ideas to allow for spontaneous audience creativity outside the boundaries of artist-directed interactivity. * One of the other unexpected occurrences this year involved a wall of drawings scrawled across magazine pages, photocopies of newspapers and other word media. I later confirmed that Mike Straub had hanged the guerrilla installation. * Like the people who came in costume, creating their own spectacle in the landscape of the event, the idea of artists spontaneously clearing a space for their work was satisfying (although in saying this I should mention to anyone thinking about doing it next year that if damage occurs, I have to pay for it so please try to refrain from fucking me over). * One exciting aspect of Murder the Word is its ability to continuously morph and grow, meeting head-on the challenges of the previous year’s event. The highlight of the first Murder the Word was Tony Conrad’s "Human Organ," a sculptural "telephone" that stretched from one end of the ballroom to the other. Participants could speak into the pipeline or listen in on others’ nonsensical confessions, manifesting a discordant party line of anonymous voices mingling in the void of disoriented information. * It occurs to me now that since the first Murder the Word the events with which I have been involved have attempted to develop structures that collectivize input, only to splinter into anarchistic individuality as an ironically inevitable function of the initial collectivizing apparatus (I suppose this has always been my intent with Basta as well, to find in Buffalo a means to collectively reject the herd). * The sound laboratory that emerged that year, as exemplified by Conrad’s piece, proved so promising artistically that for the second Murder the Word Reynolds decided to go all out, maximizing sensory inputs. "We created such an avalanche of sound and image that eventually, the whole system reversed itself," says Reynolds. "The sound mass swallowed up conventional methods of experiencing music, totally collapsing the traditional audience/performer relationship." * Conceptually, the event’s exploration of large-scale information dynamics continues this year. Although music and sound art serve as the event’s primary components, there is no main stage and no headlining band. Instead, Murder the Word will feature a continuous stream of sound emerging from stages and performance platforms situated spatially throughout the three-story building. Audience members can flow through the space, alternating between music, art and various interactive prompts, including subversive coloring books, a bellroom you can dance around in, and a feedback installation consisting of vintage Atari games whose bleeps and bloops--realized in "performance" by Atari-playing audience members--will be mixed into the DJs’ sets. * In addition to media excess, Murder the Word 3 developed a theatrical element, which had stayed relatively latent in events past. The first year, The Knowmatic Tribe performed a masked wrestling match and Mark Freeland donned paper mache masks. For Murder the Word 2, the lone, unspeaking member of Hussalonia wrapped a black hood around his face; Joshua Constant attempted to crawl into a small metal milk crate wearing a clown face mask; George Martin as the Native Guy performed a living jungle cartoon; and Kristie Meal, in white pancake makeup, wore a warped prom dress, a tape recorder strapped over her mouth and pencils at the ends of her fingers. This year, the performance aspect exploded in 2 directions: 1) several members of the audience came in funky clothes/costume and/or masks; and 2) a few musical performances benefited from a definite theatrical intent. * Although they were not conceived as accompaniment to music, Joy Patterson’s beautiful, comic and strange fashions served to play off the horribly beautiful noise generated in the NoiseRiot room. As the musicians, almost all of whom were male, growled ugly intensity, Joy’s silent, beautiful models moved as if floating in slow motion, sometimes engaging the music, sometimes drifting aloof from all context whatsoever. I loved, for example, when RivadeneIraWhitmanSack were playing and the models draped themselves across the floor in front of the stage platform, innocently drinking in the performance. Absurd caricatures of female passivity, Joy and her models followed this spontaneous conceptual situation by brilliantly modulating through various character phases: one minute the models seemed cute and needy; at other times beautiful, strong and dominating; sometimes they served as pure eye candy; and lastly, they become art to be considered as art. * Of the musical performances, the most developed theatrically was The Global Village Idiot’s debut performance of their mock opera Henry, a snippet of which appears on their most recent album New Wage Slaves. Featuring a giant cartoon backdrop by Corndog (the opera is based on one of his comics) and costumed performance by the Idiots, the show involved masks, noise, cookie handouts and Kristin Gilmet’s transformation from sweet blond to black haired temptress. * Other theatrical elements were provided by the Disappointments, who donned masks to perform as The disARTppointments, led by host Abe Lincoln in collaboration with the audience. As Abe explained, the band was prepared to play 2 bars each from 13 different songs. The audience would pick the songs by name, the band would spit out an instrumental fragment and a gorgeous girl standing nearby would write the titles down on a cue card. When enough titles had been generated, the band would play the full composition as prepared by the audience (Abe simply thrust the microphone at an audience member after the last participant’s 2 bars had been played). The result was hilarious musical theater, a deconstruction of pop music convention and an amazingly appropriate example of audience interactivity. * That is not to say that Murder the Word places any intimidating demands on its participants. "Despite my artistic smoke and mirrors and pseudo-philosophical bullshit," Reynolds says, "Murder the Word is in the end nothing more than a really fun party fueled by the mass coming-together of some of Buffalo’s most creative individuals." * Some of the installations had a stumbled-upon quality that served to charge the spaces in which they were placed. The most obvious example would be Gayle Gorman’s found footage film loops, which were shown on walls in the bar-room and at the end of a basement hallway. One strip consisted of ‘30s labor riots footage, another collected title shots from random old movies, and the third looped films of people choking. Dave Gracon’s piece also injected perverse mystery into the hallways leading up to it. First, scattered around the building were placed signs asking enigmatically, “what is Edward Penishands doing in that box?” and other random questions or statements cloaked in mystery. Second, the installation consisted of a video loop culled from the porn parody Edward Penishands that played strangely on a monitor placed on its back in a cardboard box in the hallway leading to the DJ bar-room. Mike Bouquard’s 2 screen video flashed across the hall next to it. * Although initially I thought I was working to organize the random, I realize that in fact I’ve been creating structures that can’t withstand their own tendency towards multiplication/fragmentation. I like to bring disparate elements together in part to enjoy their unlikely communion, but also to experience the fallout when improbable elements collide on the holy plane of utter meaninglessness. This approach may not benefit an autocratic artist, or one with a modernist sense of their work as objectively important, to present his or her work in this forum, but it does benefit the audience, who can finally see behind the curtain of artistic autocracy. * Gayle Gorman, one of the artists involved with the event, described Murder the Word as "a great opportunity for people to engage in a living, breathing, immediate art experience, and to be bombarded with art from multiple and unexpected angles instead of the standard, elitist ‘stuck-on-a-wall-in-a-frame’ art gallery version of art. And it’s a raw celebration of the Buffalo aesthetic of joyful alienation that we experience every day." * Although in past years the event’s angle on the situation of living and dying in Buffalo has been more overt (this year the sheer degree of abstraction tended to overwhelm the specific Buffalo references), Murder the Word 3 was perhaps the best realization of Basta!'s Buffalo proposals. I say this primarily to address something Brett Essler wrote in Buffalo Beat about the event’s east-side location. Although I was obviously aware that we were producing a show in a building very little of its likely audience had visited before, in a part of town generally considered to be the dangerous heart of Buffalo’s ghetto, I had been too focused on accentuating the positive and overcoming people's fears to realize that, as Brett wrote, I was literally putting my money where my mouth was. For years Basta! has argued for the creative reclamation of abandoned Buffalo and for the reversal of half a century’s blind movement away from the urban core, but I didn’t realize that by doing the event at the Ukrainian Home we would be temporarily achieving this dream. If we pulled it off, great; but if it failed, I was fucked. * On a similar note, in the Gusto article previewing Murder the Word 3, Toni Roberto also gave me credit for something that I hadn’t really considered: the event’s proximity to the "Chippewa Street Entertainment District," which is the assumed heart of Buffalo’s rebirth. Although on a purely functional level I knew we would be able to advertise that the event, which took place about a mile and a half down Genesee, was just beyond the celebrated nightlife hub, it never really occurred to me that we were temporarily negotiating an evening of anti-Chippewa excitement. What’s more, it never consciously occurred to me that in some way the event would serve to highlight the isolationist logic in evoking Chippewa to evidence urban revitalization. There is clearly a great deal more to do, as those who drove past empty, abandoned building after empty, abandoned building were privileged to see (as a point of civic reorientation, the claustrophobically gentrified atmosphere of Chippewa seems today like a distraction at best). Although I can’t pretend we manufactured any significant change, I hope that by breaking the seal of Elm St. we opened a few eyes to the viable existence of a neighborhood long dismissed for dead. * One common question raised throughout the night had to do with how we found the Genesee Street space. Those who were more fluent with East Side neighborhoods said they had driven by the building many times without ever realizing what strange beauty lingered inside, while those for whom the entire East Side is a closed coffin were flabbergasted. The answer to the question is that I had been introduced to the space through Olenka Budanarskij-Gunn, a Ukrainian who did a show with Leah Rico in the building’s basement the previous spring. She showed me to the 2nd floor ballroom in hopes that I would see potential in a space that she had grown up with, and I immediately fell in love as she had expected. Although the final form of the party merged previous events (MTW and others), Basta concerns and the available creative output, I basically used the space as a way to organize the event formally. Another significant part of the building’s appeal had to do with having to drive down Genesee at night, past the empty buildings and boarded up bars which evoke a romantic ennui in me that I hoped would be the first sensation audience members experienced that night. * When considering safety issues, the event’s name was the source of no small, paranoid anxiety. If by some massive stroke of ill luck somebody not familiar with the neighborhood found himself in a bad situation, the evening news would have had a field day. Initial confusion as to the nature of Murder the Word is would be followed by condemnation by those suggesting that I had been playing with fire (speaking of words that have come back to haunt me: the other day I found a pin for sale at Rust Belt Books that read, "Basta," under which was written "(enough)," so I bought it. Later, at the Broadway Market, where my wife, my brother, his friend from Italy and myself were having breakfast, I used it as a conversation piece. That evening I realized that the pin was no longer with me and wondered if Dario, the Italian, had mistaken it for a gift, so Betsy joked to Steve Bazjkowski that Kevin’s communist friend had stolen the Basta pin, to which he shrugged and said, "what can I say? Onward to crime!" [Onward to Crime! was the production name under which Basta! organized its events]). * Some pieces that did involve Buffalo included the entrance vestibule slide show, which featured various statements drawn from issues of Basta! (it was also supposed to include EMPIRE, a 6 hour film in which a video camera was pointed at an abandoned grain elevator for the tape's duration, an ironic homage to Warhol); Gayle Gorman’s found photos of slain buffaloes on the western frontier; Julian’s installation tracing the migration of shopping carts from Buffalo’s urban landscape out into the world; and Leah’s slapstick machines, which were meant to initiate the cathartic transcendence, through inevitable failure, of the city of Buffalo. * One other piece that gleefully drew the streets of Buffalo into the environment we created inside the Ukrainian home was by Mike Zebrowski and Chris Siano, architecture students at UB who installed a revolving door leading into the noise room, on which was projected slides of Main Street doorways (if there had been enough time, they would have taken more pictures of East Side doors as well). The piece collapsed space and time, literally providing a gateway into the city through art, and into art through the city (which is, after all, one of the primary objectives of the event). * Explaining the visual art program, Leah Rico, Assistant Visual Art Curator, said, "We tried to bring together artists of different disciplines, including photography, installation, video, and kinetic sculpture, that rework traditional ways of seeing. Together, they’re sure to create a surreal environment grounded in different points of view about Buffalo. The artists were all chosen because their work negotiates the visual terrain between the depleted, defeated city and its rebirth as a cultural metropolis." * In keeping with an event driven primarily by the creative energy of younger people just coming into their own artistically, the push towards interactivity also manifested itself in references to games from our youth, which of course allowed us to revisit the signs and symbols of our early lives. For example, Mark Hogan’s comic books, which featured warped narratives of subverted childhood morality tales (exploited to disturbing ends) recontextualized the simplicity of childhood meaning from the perspective of someone now in his 20s. On a non-interactive level, Maia McLeod’s photos, which conjure mildly disturbing scenes played out by dolls, similarly juxtaposes youthful naivete and the urgency of young adulthood (one involves a doll’s "list of things to do," including the direction: "leave Buffalo"). My own GODMA boxes, 3’ x 3’ x 3’ alphabet blocks haphazardly stacked high into the air (last year, they spelled out Dogma, but this year I cut straight to the chase, steepling God in a crumbling tower of Buffalo Pisa) and Leah’s slapstick machine, which had antecedents in playground playthings, drew complex meanings from basic devices of youth. Some of the other game pieces involved specific references to our generation, such as Betsy’s Rubik’s Cube Poems (she replaced the colored squares on a half dozen toys with statements and letters), which turned the popular early-’80s matching game into a recombination device, and the Atari/DJ Symphony for Turntables and Video Games performed for the first time by The Knowmatic Tribe. Betsy and I also prepared lollipops with statements dangling from the sticks, manifesting a 500 part poem fragmented across the space (the concept was originally also supposed to refer to an idea I had––"Media Jam Karaoke"––that hoped to subvert the tendency towards mimicking cultural norms. The lollipops, a childhood lure, put words--but subversive words--in people’s mouths). In this way, a sense of play prevails at Murder the Word even as heavy issues rise to the fore. * Artistically, the event is designed to be experienced on high and low levels simultaneously. Audience members can go for the challenging music and art, for the philosophical ideas, or for the ridiculous, self-deflating installations, such as last year’s amplified toilet bowl and "roomful of buttocks," or this year’s slapstick machine and other assorted absurdities. * The idea for the Atari/DJ interface has a complicated history that illustrates the working method of many of the artists in this circle. Originally, Leah and I discussed the idea of doing a giant, multi-screen Atari tournament at Big Orbit so that she could play Defender on a large screen. When it came to Murder the Word, I knew I wanted to put DJs in the downstairs barroom, but hoped to make it more interesting (this was Murder the Word, after all, not Club Crystal). What I really wanted to hear was a multi-DJ symphony such as those I’ve witnessed at various experimental music venues in New York, so I asked Marcos if any crew in Buffalo was capable of pulling off something it off. He said The Knowmatic Tribe could, so I suggested they spin on 6 turntables simultaneously and then we’ll have Ataris around the room, which they could then link into the mix. 3 months later, I wanted to recreate the interface in expanded fashion at Big Orbit, so we contacted Marcos about The Knowmatic Tribe spinning on 6 turntables (with Atari loops) after a screening we were doing of the film Modulations, which traces the development of electronic music from its roots in avant-garde exploration through current manifestations of digital culture. Instead of doing a boring, basic screening (which seemed completely inappropriate to tell the story of a music which fundamentally de-centers traditional listening circumstances), we decided to fragment the film through showings on 6 surfaces (2-sided scrims and walls) and 20 monitors, through which the audience could flow. Afterwards, we would link the Ataris into the projectors, so that people could hang around and perform the symphony in collaboration with the DJs on 20 monitors and 6 screens, thereby realizing Leah’s original idea for large-screen super-Atari action. * Over 60 artists, musicians and performers will occupy three floors in this almost-forgotten architectural jewel, flooding the space with video projections, abstract musical performances, large-scale slide shows, kinetic sculpture, walk-in environments and roaming performance pieces. * In addition to the Atari/DJ interface, there were several other performances which involved trans-media exploration, most particularly the interaction of live sound and video visuals. Chris Borkowski’s work installed in the basement of the building, which consisted of 4 projections conjuring blue washes of blurred imagery and text modulating in and out over a soundtrack of ambient drones, was a personal highlight. Upstairs, in the hallway entrance to the DJ room, Mike Bouquard’s 2-screen video installation involved a soundtrack performed by Treelinedhighway. Down the steps, in the hallway stage in front of the credit union, David Mussen, Jonathan Hughes and Niryhan Pavimadha’s performance of synthesizer sweeps, Middle Eastern clarinet and percussion, transistor radio and other effects also included a wash of rapid-fire imagery projected on a side wall. * Perhaps the most developed instance of video/music interaction came by way of Hylozoa’s performance in the 2nd floor dining room. Featuring video feedback manipulation by Koji Tambata, Steve Backzkowski and Ravi Padmanhaba performed their stunning and explosive music against a backdrop of stacked television sets and a scrim on which past footage, newly gathered material and visual feedback merged live. Come to think of it, 3 of the 4 bands that played the 2nd flr dining room stage featured significant visual accompaniment. The Casiophonic Marching Band, a technological marvel every time they play, also had projections shining off their disco ball outfits (until they blew a fuse, knocking out one projector). Treelinedhighway’s performances also featured samples taken from the film Buffalo 66 and vintage ‘70s basketball footage played in slow motion against repetitive riffs. * "The sheer number of people involved last year, as well as the number of people willing to come to see what was basically an avant-garde happening, proved that there is a huge interest in challenging art and music in Buffalo," says Betsy Frazer, Assistant Curator. * One of the oddest MTW occurrences happened before the event actually began, when a guy from channel 4 arrived to do a story for the evening news. He videotaped the ballroom, Chris’s installation, the outside of the building, and my comments. It’s hard enough to describe Murder the Word in my own magazine, so imagine trying to condense it into a 10-second soundbite without sounding corny. I tried to rattle off some specific details and/or theoretical points but the cameraman kept trying to get me to say, "expect the unexpected," which I would not do. After circling around it for 10 minutes, I finally said, in pure Barnham and Bailey glory, "people can expect to see and hear things they’ve never seen and heard before, and probably will never hear and see again," which is of course the clip they used. The funniest thing about the situation was that when it ran, the piece began with the host ad-libbing, in pure Trent McClure fashion, "now a story about an art event taking place on 3 floors, if you can believe that!" Well, I could believe it. I’m not really sure why it was such a surprise to him, but I guess that’s local tele-journalism for you. * Murder the Word announces a new era of progressive sound and vision in a city too often maligned as being ten years behind the times. If you still believe that boring cliche, then you best leave your corner bar stool and come party the last century away once and for all at Murder the Word 3. You will never say that Buffalo’s ten years behind the times again. * One of the most exciting conceptual musical experiments will take place in the ballroom, where a massive sound orchestra consisting of ten different noise ensembles will trade solo "sets" and collective improvisations in which every participant plays simultaneously. Deconstructed musical forms will blend and multiply, utilizing strange, "found sounds" generated from amplified rakes, saws and children’s toys in the "NoiseRiot" sub-event. Pure noise, experimental drum ‘n’ bass, electronic soundscapes, guitar feedback and experimental spoken word will all enter the mix, evidencing local music on the cutting edge of stylistic abandon. * The NoiseRiot experiment attempts to shift the very bedrock of performance dynamics instead of simply layering interesting sounds above a traditional rock structure (which is the danger towards which avant-pop will forever careen). The way that Chippewa provides an attractive makeover without structurally altering the conditions that made Buffalo sorry in the first place is music's public counterpart. In life and in art, our experiences testify to the need to abandon structures that no longer sustain us. * Non-musical treatments of this theme at Murder the Word 3 included artworks whose temporary nature, whose fleeting, entropic and/or disposable nature, mirrored the building’s gradual hedge against collapse in a neighborhood defined by implosion. Perfectly bridging the theoretical connection between language and social phenomena (murder the word), Jan Nagel’s deconstructed alphabet photos featured flimsy letters on a bed of visual noise. Last year, the scroll poem that had been created by the audience over the course of the party was stolen at the last minute, so these letters were meant to be stolen, in hopes of creating a further deconstructed alphabet poem (she also created some book objects the narratives of which encouraged their theft). Similarly, Ang created a replica of a belly made from detergent, which was placed on the floor of the basement stairwell. The idea was that by the end of the night, either through vibrations in the floorboards or people’s movement through the space, the belly would soften and expand to nothing. * For my part, I created a multi-turntable installation at the bottom of the stairwell connecting the 1st and 2nd floors. Entitled “Time Will Pull Us All Into Eternity If We Let It”––followed by Michael Baumann’s reaction to it: “you know what Christian Marclay would say: ‘you’re not fucking those records up, you’re fixin’ ‘em,’”––the piece consisted of 8 obsolete stereo consoles on which were playing various records whose effect had been rendered moot by time. Into these documents I scratched new texts meant to deliberately decenter the old narratives contained within them (and to highlight the role of the medium in legitimizing meaning). Manifesting a continuous chance collage-text “read” and “performed” by the needle skipping from place to place in response to my scratched interjections, the piece, like Murder the Word itself, was intended to crush the authority of old narrative structures but also to use the remains to create new forms on the open playing field of collapse. The result was a cacophonous mess, my own addition to the NoiseRiot sub-event even though I couldn’t devote myself to performing as part of it in person. * I personally love the music of Robotetanus, whose manipulated electronic soundscapes create their own ebbs and flows mid-performance. For Murder the Word, they collaborated with Terry Klein, who did a spoken word piece generated from texts by Camus. On their own, Robotetanus’s music tends to have the sweeping intensity of clacks and bleeps generated by sound interacting with itself. Here, the performance was ferocious, a noisy electronic tidalwave washing against Terry’s hyperdramatic spoken word. * RivadeneIraWhitmanSack is an incredible, indescribable avant-garde sound/noise/music group whose members play everything from saws and amplified metal to scraped guitar and dirty free jazz sax. The band’s freely improvised performances of noise, squonk and musique concrete provide some of the most interesting musical entertainments available in Buffalo. Dave from the Global Village Idiots turned to me during their set and asked excitedly if the group was from here. I said yes and he noted that it was interesting that they were making this kind of performance from relatively old school materials as opposed to the relentlessly looping samplers and electronic effects that define most younger noise performances. * Other performers who added awesome textures to the NoiseRiot sub-event included Stu Fuchs, whose solo set of deconstructed Hendrix-style licks performed on electronic toy guitar raised the bar on inventiveness among guitar players; Spacefly, whose weirdly disembodied electronic giggles and bleeps created an unexpected aural tension; Joshua Constant and friends, who made noisy soundscapes over found percussion riffs; and the Gaussian Surface Project, a multi-media industrial noise and ambient experimental group that hypnotized everybody. * 2 other bands that need mention include The Living Sound Ensemble, a free jazz group from Cleveland whose wild, hour-long set of howling jazz noise extended the collective NoiseRiot aesthetic into a totally different place. Downstairs, David Kane’s new group The Infants of Prog reinvented Jazzbeards harmonies and ‘70s Prog rock on the hallway stage in front of the credit union. Although I didn’t get to see their performance, it was the highlight of the evening for many people who did. * One weird thing about Murder the Word this year was that it took people a while to realize they could snake through the building ... but then again, I didn’t exactly want to announce this fact. I wanted people to learn as they went. I wanted the audience to feel as if they were wading into the unknown. * Speaking of the unknown, when Christ Sinister and God Morgen arrived to set up their gear, they asked Betsy where they should put the cow. She said, "you’ll never get that cow in here! I mean, look at all these stairways, hallways, things to step over, etc." She took him around the place, detailing every reason why they would never be able to get the thing into the DJ space. By the time they got back to the bar, the cow was parked next to Chris, who was drinking a beer. Betsy’s mouth dropped in uncomprehending awe. * Mary Begley’s giant text boob piece, entitled He Said/She Said, is one of those interactive pieces that characterize Murder the Word. Consisting of tape rolls by which people could strip written statements onto the text mounds, the piece, like Jan Nagel’s typewriter installation last year (which consisted of a long roll of paper on which the instruction to add one line to the poem was typed at the top), becomes a way for people to either criticize, celebrate or subvert the event, and/or spew pseudo-intellectual or overwrought emotional babble. Although the literary nature of this year’s piece and the random tape-over method initiated a degree of erasure and fragmentation that made it doubly significant, there were a few legible comments that stick in my brain now. The first, "Craig Reynolds is a Tony Billoni for the new millennium," cracks me up. The second, a quote from Andy Warhol, "Chaos is not art," is interesting because it most likely refers to the noise event going on in the same room. This intrigues me because I consider that whole scene to be fairly orchestrated and under control, for one thing. Sure, improvisations occurring simultaneously are deliberately cacophonous, but unlike the abstract expressionist paintings to which the original quote probably refers, they are not meant to be emblematic of a genius creativity as in the days of Jackson Pollack but of information overload. They actually are chaotic, so Warhol’s ironic putdown in this context would have to be read literally, which I find interesting because the disassociation between creative output and deeper meaning on which Murder the Word rests has its antecedents in the work of early postmodernists like Warhol. Kind of a packed statement in a way, but also testament to why absolute statements tend to fade as new developments render them permanently locked in cold reaction to circumstances that no longer exist. *