The first time I saw DJ Dog Dick play was in a smelly basement with about 20 people crowded around. Dog Dick’s backing tracks, which he manipulated with a confusing rack of knobs and tangled patch cables, kept shorting out and sometimes all you heard was his screaming. Apparently whoever was running the venue was elsewhere, since his tourmate Brian Blomerth, aka Narwhalz of Sound, was running the board…sorta competently. Dog Dick kept wanting to stop his set, he kept mumbling “that’s it”, wiping off sweat and breathing hard after each song. Narwhalz kept making him continue, yelling, “one more, they’re loving this shit, you fucker!”A lot of Max Eisenberg’s (I’ll now refer to Dog Dick as Max because…you know…there’s only so many times I wanna type Dog Dick in a day) music is, to oversimplify, a combination of noise and rap. From Baltimore, one of the hive minds of scummy noise in the US for the past decade, Max has released a lot of straight up harsh noise barrage. For a while, he was playing regularly with Nautical Almanac, the completely out-of-their-minds barons of Baltimore noise. Max has also collaborated with notorious outsider Little Howlin’ Wolf. From this background, Max picked up a lot of electronic techniques using slimy sounding analog synths and deliberately shorted circuitry. I remember once watching Max sitting around for a while on a day off on a laptop and just staring at pictures of huge modular synths like it was porno. It’s from this world that he reached up into the more recognizable genre, rap.Last year, Max started a band with Sewn Leather called Dog Leather - they released an LP that’s pretty amazing along with one of the best music videos I’ve seen in a while, but they broke up a couple of months ago. Now Dog Dick is in the studio working on another new solo LP for Ehse Records. Lately his sets have been weirder than ever. When he played Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium last summer, he started by maniacally pressing a circuit bent toy that squealed out a high pitched pattern. Then Max belted out this karaoke-nightmare with nonsensical lyrics that he seemed to be making up on the spot. Only then did the beat drop and the crowd start to dance.While I’m writing this, DJ Dog Dick is finishing up touring Alaska (of all places) with Shams. TONIGHT he plays with Wu Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck TONIGHT at 285 Kent in Williamsburg.
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