The above video, Memorial Day 2000, is one of the greatest pieces of found Art that I'm aware of. That’s right, Art with a capital A. There are so many ridiculous details to notice it gets better with every viewing. It’s about as addictive as phencyclidine. Doubtless, a lot of what's going on in the video is contextualized pretty extremely because of the editing. I'm not even completely confident if some of the events depicted are from the same place and time. It's true, this condemnation of all of jock-dom would definitely be less heavy handed if it weren't shaped by noise-freak Carly Ptak, one half of the infamous Nautical Almanac.Last week I looked at the Baltimore noisenik DJ Dog Dick—I'm not branching out too much by covering another Baltimore based noise band this time around. Nautical Almanac, which is the longstanding project of Carly Ptak and husband Twig Harper, has been one of the biggest influences in the background of all the freaky stuff going on in Bodymore Murderland. Their venue, Tarantula Hill, has hosted countless noise shows since 2001. The venue's founding involved nothing more than Twig and Carly stumbling upon a weird abandoned building and breaking in to build out the top two floors – Tarantula Hill's first show featured a then little-known Lightning Bolt. After several years of hosting shows in the squat, a group of volunteers and Baltimore city officials actually made the repairs to get the building up to code. No small feat.From playing so many shows at their home and doubtless witnessing so many out-there musical concepts, Nautical Almanac's live sets have developed into a complete multimedia mindfuck. I saw them play a few months ago at NYC's video residency space Outpost. Carly had set up a giant tee-pee with flowing white cloth. She picked up a projector with a video of Twig and Carly visiting Disney Land (one of the funniest parts featured the two of them standing with Mickey and waving for an absurdly long amount of time and smiling…Mickey really must've been wondering what the deal with these weirdos was) and flashed it over the tee-pee. Carly took a flashlight and started waving a branch in front of it so that the leaves made patterns all over the venue's walls. She got inside of the tee-pee and held it up on her shoulders, walking it around through the audience with the Epcot ball superimposed on her.Meanwhile, Twig was holding down the musical end with a complicated bunch of electronics and a homemade bowed string instrument with contact mic attached. An array of textures flowed out from the instruments, which Twig subbed in turn by turn with a mixer. It was one of the trippiest things I've ever seen—I do say trippy, since the band is definitely influenced by psychedelics. In fact, Twig has participated in some government tests on salvia in which he was given large doses multiple times and was observed by scientists in white lab coats with clipboards. They took notes as Twig entered an alternate universe.A lot of the circuit bent instruments Twig utilized are homemade—he’s been working with manipulated and shorted electronics for over a decade. Many of Twig's instruments were also built by Baltimore's analog electronics mastermind Peter Blasser, whose company Ciat Lonbarde sells electronics and synths that are as genius as they are eccentric. One of Blasser's synths is a massive tapestry with paint splattered all over it. Inside the synth are a series of interconnected theremin, so that anybody who walks near the synth plays the theremin just by moving and interacting with the surrounding electromagnetic field.Between those two, you can really see some things that are quintessential to American noise: electric synthesis techniques that aren't academic in feel despite their seriousness. All of the unearthly sounds the produced with heady home-brewed electronics are covered in skuzz and smeared with a punk-as-fuck aesthetic that's colored the work of an entire generation of American noise artists. In point of fact, Twig went to high school with Andrew WK in Michigan (you didn't know Andrew WK had an early noise project called AAB?) and was involved very early on with the crew up there that became Wolf Eyes. Evidence is seen in the very early Hanson records VHS "The Beast People". Witness that nonsense below…
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