Need That Nonsense Sound

Scraaatch, Holden Linton, Giant, gen/loss
PhilaMOCA
531 N 12th St.
Philadelphia
Nov. 28, 2025

“Bring me that nonsense sound and I’ll be back” (Micachu, “Golden Phone”)

I was thinking about dissonance and I was thinking about noise. Dissonance can be a gentle thing; it’s tension, an energy between sources, anything that’s unresolved, that hasn’t been addressed. You can notice, diagnose and feel it even when it’s not involving you directly, but being inside it (as source or, in art, as the conductor) is another thing entirely; the source can be miniature, but – like Hans Christian Andersen’s pea – is nonetheless life-altering, world-shattering. The beats between two notes that are uncomfortably close, a complex ratio that makes urgently real the metaphor of a world of difference – that violently proximal sound always kills me. Noise, and specifically I’m talking about deafeningly loud noise, is different. At a certain point it doesn’t reward your awareness or perceptiveness or observational prowess (your skills as a listener, as it were): a lot of the appeal is in challenging, if not obliterating, your senses, or at least being provocative about it. At its best it gives you the catharsis of being pressed against your threshold, a corporeal reckoning. At its worst, it’s merely sense-dulling, leading nowhere else.

I was thinking about a dB meter that didn’t exist at the show at PhilaMOCA, wondering how loud a moment was, worrying that I needed earplugs, thinking about wearing protective equipment at a concert like it’s a construction site. (Of course I used to submit to the threat, or promise, of permanent hearing damage with gleeful negligence when I was younger, but these days I’m playing the long game.) The first group, gen/loss, was loud as hell, and didn’t do it for me, essentially because the ingredients seemed randomly applied: we had insanely booming sub-bass and enveloping sawtooth synths and samples running from Ableton, long trumpet lines and snare-turned-off drum rolls (I liked the drummer, he was chaotic in a sort of Keith Moon way, playing like he was whisking a hurricane, though often drowned out by the computer stuff). The pieces, though they clearly had structures and occasionally achieved liftoff, couldn’t sustain interest or introduce increasingly fresh ideas over the course of their 26 minute set. It felt more monotonously interminable than that. The projected visuals (one worth remarking on: a swelling, undulating flesh-ball that looked like if the inside of a person’s mouth was the texture of the inside of a watermelon under a fluorescent light) were like a PowerPoint from hell, a reminder of doomscrolling when I’m trying not to be on my phone, and seemed to be there for no reason other than because there wasn’t much to look at on stage. I just can’t get that excited watching three guys stare intensely at their laptops. I can do that at ReAnimator Coffee. Even the incident when the trumpet player started screaming into his mic and rolled out of sight off the back of the stage struck me as an aberration brought on merely by feeling fidgety. It happened, then it was back to normal stuff.

I was much more into Giant. Like, new-favorite-live-band into it. They were fully airborne the whole time, kinetic and raw, doing a lot with a little. The two guitarists maneuvered like contortionists, mangling their instruments, in such magisterial lockstep that you could convince me I was watching a split personality made manifest, the first human to pass the double-slit test. One of them approached his guitar in an almost Arto Lindsay way, barely playing notes, mostly treating it like an alien drum, shortening the strings to the point of the edge of the pickups to produce piercingly high-pitched rhythmic slashes. Crucially, they had the physical, boundless energy of an elite hardcore band while having ideas. I thought of Palm if they were weaned on Universal Order of Armageddon, Don Cab if they were into Youth of Today. Punk aggression that grooves like The Rapture but gets in your chest. If you like YHWH Nailgun and Model/Actriz, you’d probably dig it. I loved the practical effects: a dumb-looking bucket on the drumkit; their frontman repeatedly jumping into the crowd and running into people, me included; the way one of the guitarists turned a repeated volume-knob roll-off swell into a sleight of hand like he was doing knife tricks, threat attached. They were a match made in heaven of dissonance and noise: rhythmic blasts of sound that carved up the air and the space into delicious new shapes, then filled it with flames. I hope they play more than 16 minutes next time.

I’d be remiss not to briefly shout out the next performer, the local multimedia artist Holden Linton. Donning a red jumpsuit, brown boots and belt and a racing bike helmet, with blonde Asgardian locks and a Mr. Incredible jaw, he was a sort of Evil Knievel in repose – until the set began. Some artists are accused of “pulling out all the stops,” but how many show up to the gig with an actual oil drum filled with flotsam and jetsam, a table and a doorframe and a dresser and a sledgehammer and a saxophone and a guitar and caution tape to ward off the crowd from getting too close? Watching him set up brought back Pay-Per-View visions of Extreme Championship Wrestling. This was capital-p, capital-a, probably-should-have-signed-a-waiver-for-this Performance Art, and I loved it for its genuine, unpredictable power. Linton’s projected visuals were telling a personal story and were in no way a substitute for a dearth of powerful live imagery: when he wasn’t literally destroying objects, he was teetering on a high perch, perilously blasting saxophone (I asked his mom, standing next to me, “Does he know how to play it?” and she laughed, saying, “Not really, he just got it”) or veering abrasively between spoken word, shouting, drumming and noise; it was a high wire act, a highly-choreographed theater of intense objects, both inanimate and flesh. Linton’s maximalist muchness actually felt like a lot, in a good way, plumbing mythic grandeur from found objects. We all teamed up with brooms and shovels after to clean up the incredible mess.