DIY WORLDWIDE:
AUSTIN, TEXAS
NOISE & HARDCORE
Last September, I went to a noise festival
unapologetically organized on the anniversary of
9/11 in my home neighborhood of East Austin. It
hosted a logistical clusterfuck of a bill featuring over
50 acts from across America set to play during the
course of one night, impressively curated to include,
just to name a few, B L A C K I E, Guerilla Toss,
SSLEEPERHOLD, Dreamcrusher, Future Blondes,
Xander Harris, and Sobering. Midway through
the show, a two-piece act set up: one member was
perched above a briefcase full of pedals on a table
and the other set up a cinder block and pulled out a
handsaw with a contact mic fastened to it, the cord
disappearing back into her band mates pedal board.
This duo goes by Roy Wrenat the time,
on tour from their respective homes in Richmond
and Baltimoreand they proceeded with a short,
improvised exploration of piercing textures at
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Max Parrott
contemplates the future of
extreme music in the rapidly-
gentrifying Austin, Texas
high volumes. The performer on the floor abraded
the cinderblock with the handsaw while the other
manipulated the output from the contact mic,
blasting low end that was simultaneously deep
and abrasive. As the performer with the handsaw
thrashed around with it in her bare hands with her
legs exposed, she opened up a considerable stream
of blood that spread out in splotches where she was
sitting.
This spectacle transpired at a place called
Club 1808, a bar with an open kitchen, owned by a
black family that had been in the neighborhood since
the start of Austins population boom about twenty
years ago. That they opened their family-run bar
out to Austins prolific noise booker Johnathan Cash
is totally incidental: it was not because they sought
the self-immolating catharsis of noise music that
they hosted Johnnys shows again and again. The
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truth is that Johnnys shows have a strong following
of noise devotees, so he brings consistent business,
business of which Club 1808 was in desperate need.
For while it is located in a rapidly gentrifying Austin
neighborhood, the restaurant still sits on a block with
a reputation for being the crack corner of the east
side of town, a place that most of the tech-industry
gentry of Austin would probably like to avoid. The
neighborhood is changing fast, though. Club 1808
was sadly bought out at the beginning of February by
a local entrepreneur, who according to rumor will be
opening a skeeball bar that will not welcome regular
noise shows.
As a resu l t , g e n t r i f i c a t i o n
is inherent i n a n o t i o n
of urban D I Y a c t i v i t y
because g r a s s ro o t s a r t
movements a re g o i n g t o
rely on densely populated
areas in o rd e r t o g a t h e r a
fo l l ow i n g a n d a l ow c o s t
of living to fo c u s o n a
hustle that p ro d u c e s l i t t l e
to no mone t a ry p ro f it .
When said owners turned on the lights after
Roy Wrens set and were confronted with a puddle
of blood on their floor, they were understandably
dismayed. The woman in charge of the kitchen
sprinted over with screaming protests and bleach in
hand. In that moment, tensions flared. Johnathan
Cash told me later, The owner was not concerned
about anyones safety, he just came up to me and was
like Johnny, if a cop were to come in here I would
be in trouble. What Joan Didion said in The their head around the misogynist provocations of
White Album about her Hollywood neighborhood
in the late 60s was true about this scene at 1808:
It was anticipation of imminent but not exactly
immediate destruction that lent the neighborhood its
particular character. The landscape of 1808s block
is a tight grid of working class-inhabited one-story
bungalows, separated from the downtown high-rises
by Interstate 35. The desirability of this side of town
among University of Texas grads and other millennial
transplants has ballooned in the last fifteen years,
inflating the property values of these would-be blue
collar homes at an alarmingly fast rate.
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Though the cohabitation between the noise
DIY WORLDWIDE : AUSTIN TEXAS
artists and the owners of 1808 is an unlikely and
delicate symbiosis (easily agitated by the introduction
of flowing bodily fluids), gentrification is a heavily
looming threat for both parties. This is a tired fact
not only in Austin, but in American cities in general:
the emergence of artists in lower income areas often
marks the first wave of gentrification. As a result,
gentrification is inherent in a notion of urban DIY
activity because grassroots art movements are going
to rely on densely populated areas in order to gather
a following and a low cost of living to focus on a
hustle that produces little to no monetary profit.
Two years ago, lifer noise musician and
journalist Lisa Crystal Carver (known to many as
Suckdog) wrote a piece for VICE about playing Sux
By Sux West, a festival Johnathan Cash has been
organizing at 1808 since 2011, always coinciding
with South by Southwest. That year, Carver started
her act as a lame duck comedy routine, only to
have audience members she enlisted before the
performance loudly interrupt and goad her. She then
launched into what she describes in her piece as a
heckler-created meltdown directly quoting parts of
Michael Richardss 2006 N-word laden rant. There
arent many ugly moments in the last ten years of pop
history whose rehashing could have magnified the
racial tension between the patrons and staff of 1808
to a greater extent than Carvers act. But both staff
and patrons alike found a way to take it, if nervously,
at least in tolerant stride without shutting the rest of
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the show down.
The ethics of the situation are a jumbled mess.
It could equally be argued that hate speechhere
in the form of a racial sluris on one hand, an ill-
judged taboo worthy of investigation, and on the
other, not the appropriate domain of an artist from
the class that typically propagates that speech. This
is certainly not a new conversation in the realm of
noise performance. Anyone who has tried to wrap
Brainbombs or Whitehouse gets trapped in a similar
rock-and-hard-place scenario between dissecting
satirical intentions and defending hate speech.
Value judgements aside, its undeniable that such
conversations will cease to exist in Austin without
spaces like 1808 where art can defy etiquette.
Following its closing, Jonathan Cash expressed his
plans to scale down the amount shows he books
under the ATX Noise banner over the next few
months.
Beyond the more niche realm of abrasive art,
the past six months found Austins prominent DIY
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venues closing their doors. Sect One held shows every
two or three weeks, meaning that its life was busy
and its death inevitablesituated in a residential
area, it received one too many noise complaints. Both
The SLOWPUMP House (booked by Adam Jones
and Jon Slade of Holodeck Records) and The Owl
(an unvarnished, derelict recording studio run and
booked by Redding Hunter, a.k.a. early-aughts blog
darling Peter and the Wolf) were evicted by landlords
capitalizing on rising property values and a hot real
estate market.
As Johnathan Cash put it, DIY has been
struggling to stay alive ever since Ive been here.
Not because of lack of effort or quality artists, but
because of the rising cost of living. Even venues are
hard up for money due to increasing rent prices,
so they gravitate toward shows that are likely to
be more successful than the niche market that falls
under the umbrella of noise and experimental music.
The musical channels that rely on Austin
DIY venues as a platform tend to share a collective
spirit of alienation and anxiety. Like Johnathan
Cash, I would suggest that the perils of musical
commodification contribute to Austins collective
sense of Weltschmerz, a form of suffering rooted in
the discord between ideal and reality. For some of the
acts who adhere a little more closely to modern pop
form, getting booked in the normal channels is not
as much of a problem. But others, especially those
making abrasive noise and protracted ambience,
are not constitutionally suited to the tastes and
expectations of a typical bar venue. The deeper
an artist delves into shock like Roy Wren or crude
perceptions like Lisa Crystal Carver, the harder it
becomes for them to get booked by a bar looking for
cordial, milquetoast entertainment aimed at drawing
in passers by from the street in order to sell a few
more drinks.
Aesthetically, most noise shows in Austin
tend to be esoteric. While Johnathan Cashs ethos
for putting bills together values an outr spirit in
opposition to a specific set of rules about how to
approach music making, one of the acts on Holodeck
Recordss roster, SSLEEPERHOLD, is a distillation
of the rage and relief therapy Ive come to crave
from an ATX Noise show. With the project, Jos
Cota marries the sinister refinement of midi-
sequenced synth hardware with the noisy clattering
of tape manipulation. Live, Cota EQs his snares high
and dirty enough to give the sensation of a smack to
the back of the head, blasting them over driving bass
arpeggios that snarl and contort in timbre, at once
heavily mechanized and immersed in chaotic noise.
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That SSLEEPERHOLDs techno-futurism can
DIY WORLDWIDE : AUSTIN TEXAS
fit on a bill of non-rhythmic power electronics acts is
not surprising given the influence of genre-crossing
artists like Dominick Fernow and Pete Swanson by
way of the internet. After all, Austin noise music by
no means exists in a vacuum. The musicians would
not lose all outlets for transgressive art if Jonathan
Cash stopped booking shows. What one gets from
the ATX Noise scene is the tangible influence of one
artist on his peers, and the uplifting feeling of seeing
musicians cutting their teeth, hustling, and trying to
be in as many projects at once.
The popularity of the
s o c i a l m i s f i t n a r r a t i ve
s t e m s f ro m t h e a s s o c i a t i o n
b e t we e n c o u n t e rc u l t u r a l
s e l f - d eve l o p m e n t a n d
th e te n d e n cy o f c o u n te r-
cultural types to decline
i n to d e g e n e r a cy.
Displaying a different form of anxiety than
that at the heart of SSLEEPERHOLDs musical
dystopia, acts like Spray Paint and Total Abuse
explore the tension of living along the margins of
a social order. Not only are these bands musically
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distinct from the power-electronics-centric fare of
Sux By Sux West, but theyre quite different from
each other: Total Abuse tends to write aggressive
dirges skewered by feedback while Spray Paint has
developed a dissonant tuning system that defines
their erratic style of composition. What the bands
share are lyrics centered on a cast of societal outliers
ranging from murderers, addicts, perverts, and
sadists, all folks unable to resign themselves to
the social contract. The popularity of the social
misfit narrative stems from the association between
countercultural self-development and the tendency
of counter-cultural types to decline into degeneracy.
Both the decision to make outr music ones life
work and the forms of nihilism that these two bands
tend to document are linked by the impulse to flout
conventions.
The age of SlackerRichard Linklaters
portrait of Austin as a city without a professional
orderhas passed. The rapidly rising cost of living,
the unprecedented population growth, the growing
density of corporate interests, and a booming
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tech sector are all forces that are incongruous of many corporate-funded South By South West

DIY WORLDWIDE : AUSTIN TEXAS

with Linklaters vision of an Austin bohemia circa
1991. Meanwhile, as the cost of living drives
out DIY hubs, were confronted by the fact that
our DIY venues so far have not shown signs of
having the practical ability to sustain themselves.
Theres nothing comparable to the volunteer-run
structure of Brooklyns The Silent Barn. Its a more
ramshackle landscape here, a trait explained in part
by the antisocial impulse of the artists I have been
discussing. While the aspirations of noise acts to
channel the repressed drives of our id can be seen
as a protest against bourgeois democratic values,
its more an outlet for release, rather than a call for
directed action.
The fact that DIY spaces are struggling
however, does not mean that experimental artists
and labels arent growing as a presence outside of the
citys bounds, or for that matter that experimental
music is always at odds with business. Jon and
Adam from Holodeck Records (whose roster
includes a significant portion of the aforementioned
projects) are candid about their successes and future
ambitions to grow as a label. In a recent interview
on the Fade to Yellow podcast, they discussed how
a more streamlined non-profit business model with
a structured approach to budgeting and promotion
represents their desired road to self-sustainability, a
true DIY ideal. In fact it is their willingness to master
the business side of running a label that allows their
artists to focus on the music.
events next month will only lend this complaint
more gravity. One positive though, is that the new
management have decided to honor 1808s previous
owner Genes last request that one final Sux By Sux
West be thrown in the space. This will be the final
show at 1808.
There is a point where the urban dance of
exotic food trucks and fashionable cocktails ceases
to express individuality, and begins to reflect us as
targets of marketing and business strategy. This is
the moment when a pummeling wall of feedback,
threatening synth pulses, or a purgative scream can
help to engage with real experience by engulfing the
whole body. As Austin enters a new age in capitalist
growth, perhaps the voices of noise artists will be
the ones well need more than ever to balance the
Freudian dissonance between the individuals needs
and those of his social environment.

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There is a p o i n t w h e re t h e
urban dan c e o f exo t i c fo o d
trucks and fa s h i o n a b l e
cocktails c e a s e s t o
express in d i v i d u a l i t y, a n d
begins to re f l e c t u s a s
targets of m a r ke t i n g a n d
b u siness s t r a t e g y.

What is in danger of losing ground is the

ability to reject traditional venues, an important
aspect of the artists power to feel unimpeded, and a
performances power to alleviate cultural uneasiness.
The abrupt news of 1808s closing only emphasizes
the increasing difficulty of musics ability to
challenge taste in a city where nightlife is so carefully
monetized. Its a big hit. No doubt the appearance

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