The most expansive roster at a Cheap Fest to date has its curators excited. Extremely excited, because this year’s lineup of over a hundred bands represents an outrageously diverse selection of noise rock staples, local acts, new artists and performers from far far away.
The most expansive roster at a Cheap Fest to date has its curators excited. Extremely excited, because this year’s lineup of over a hundred bands represents an outrageously diverse selection of noise rock staples, local acts, new artists and performers from far far away. While Cheap Fest was only birthed four years ago, it’s growing into a big deal locally. This weekend-long sound installation is by far the biggest annual event happening in the local scene.
“Noise music people are freaks,” Matt Boettke told me. “Cheap Fest represents a ridiculously diverse group.” He and Gary Stevens are the co-curators of Cheap Fest IV. Stevens is the founder of Cheap Fest and Rat Ward, a local noise music do-it-all company, and plays in local noise groups Mutwawa and Head Molt. Boettke is a recent transplant from DC, and joined forces with Stevens to help expand the scope of the Cheap Fest event.
The International Noise Conference, an annual event that has been the premier noise festival for over a decade, served as the model for Cheap Fest. 10-15 minute maximum sets, free admission with donations at the door, and crazily long line ups comprise this well respected format. There is also a unique quality of non-cohesion present at noise festivals, Cheap Fest IV being no different. There is no headliner–nobody plays longer than anyone else. If you aren’t feeling a certain act, that’s not only normal, but usually not a big deal, as the next act is likely to be wildly different.
Cheap Fest IV will take place at Strange Matter and Gallery 5 this weekend. There will be noise music. Noise music is, in a gargantuan understatement, eclectic as hell. It’s fair to say the outside world is largely unaware of what making noise is all about. In part because of it’s lack of stylistic similarities to other types of punk and rock music, people have a mix of uninformed and ill-informed ideas about the genre. This is also in part because the musical product within the genre is so wildly varying that the sound of one noise act provides no useful insight into the sound of the genre as a whole. Any release by a single noise artist could sound entirely different from not only all the other noise music acts in the world, but from anything else that artist ever did.
It’s safe to say that noise music is more about a common process than a common goal- create music via noise, via anything you find fit to do so. Expanding on the childlike tendency to consider anything that will make a sound an instrument.
A massive cross constructed from a colorful array of toys, bits of guitars, and what-have-you adorns the back of Scotty Irving, also known as Clang Quartet. He is a weird guy. Much like many of his noise co-conspirators, he uses a bunch of different props to make music. He gets down on the floor for intermittent, albeit extraordinarily passionate, drum solos. He yells about his “life before and life after Jesus,” he said in an interview with the Miami New Times. He has dozens of cymbals and plenty of things to strike them with. Regardless of all the things he has in common with other noise acts, he is famous for his faith.
One could surmise that Clang Quartet’s brand of evangelical noise doesn’t fit with the aesthetic. One would pretty much be wrong, though. The weirdest thing (in an endearing sense) about noise music isn’t what makes on act different from the next, but rather the fact that people from all different backgrounds have a passion for being so weird together.
Clang Quartet is abrasive in its sound but not it’s message, which was important to local artist and music producer Gary Stevens. “He’s not preachy. If he was, we probably wouldn’t have [invited him],” he said. If only to project the message that noise is about the noise, and not about being a political soapbox, that kind of thing wouldn’t really fly at a noise show. But almost anything else would.
On another end of the nonlinear spectrum at Cheap Fest this year is Bryan Lewis Saunders, an artist based in Tennessee. He is known for his experimentation with drugs and self-portraits, but is also a spoken-word performance artist, who delivers jarring stories of tragedy and experience in an almost beatnik meter.
If you aren’t feeling the rock and roll insanity of random girls playing guitars alongside kinda-frontman Rat Bastard in The Laundry Room Squelchers (their website has a pretty hilarous collection of show reviews) perhaps the “early industrial, sort of” sound and “weird techno” that Mutwawa plays would bring about a change of pace in only a few minutes. In spite of his hometown pedigree, former Richmonder/current New York uber-noise act and scene legend Narwhalz (of sound) is one of the many acts that are coming a ways for Cheap Fest. “It’s like being at a big ass chinese buffet, really.” Boettke said. “It’s gonna be such an overload, in a positive way.”
After the success of the last three editions of Cheap Fest, the Rat Ward blog, which also functions as the fest website, has a note on the bottom of the set list: “Please do not ask to play!” it reads. Boettke confirmed that this was added because of how many artists were vying to participate. “We just had too many people who wanted to play,” he said. “Roughly two thirds of the bands are not local.”
The fest’s continued expansion is exciting for Stevens, who founded Cheap Fest as the antithesis to the Bonnaroos of the world. The music festival scene, which has been expanding in the past ten years, is notorious for being pricey and driven by an indie-culture star system that seems no different from the mainstream dinosaur rock culture it was originally intended to replace. Cheap Fest, by contrast, is so cheap that admission is free. And certainly none of the bands names are written bigger on the flyer. However, the event does incur costs, especially due to featuring so many touring bands, so donations are greatly appreciated. This year, Stevens and Boettke also set up an indiegogo fundraiser for the fest, as some of the associated costs come prior to the event. Check it out here to give what you can.
Cheap Fest takes place Friday, October 25 through Sunday, October 27. The shows on Friday and Saturday take place at Strange Matter (929 W. Grace St). Friday’s begins at 3 PM, and Saturday’s begins at 2 PM. Sunday’s show is at Gallery 5 (200 W. Marshall St) and begins at 1 PM. There is a $5 suggested donation for each evening’s show. For a full list of performers and schedules, check out the facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/678957982120452
