Note: This review was originally published on Dennis Cooper’s blog in June 2011. In 2016 Google removed Dennis’ then-14-year-old Blogspot from the internet, in what appears to have been an act of censorship (here’s a contemporaneous Guardian article about it). Some of it was recovered (and Dennis is now blogging here), but this post never came back. Re-upping it here as this in retrospect was one of the most memorable performances I’ve ever seen, among thousands.
I booked some shows at South by Southwest 2011 for a Chinese noise band, Carsick Cars. Since music is my work and I’m a Texas native, it was a chance to both take in the manic week of industry-saturated overstimulation that is SXSW and to catch up with local friends operating on the fringes of the festival.
Each of these two worlds offered one band whose presence in Austin was, to my mind, disproportionately hyped. The “industry” touted the arrival of Odd Future, an avant rap collective from LA who, after years of building an alternative online fanbase, jumped on the cover of Billboard magazine and headlined some of SXSW’s most prominent events. Coverage of this group is by now ubiquitous, but the most interesting to me (and most pertinent in this context) is an article on the Poetry Foundation website in which Bethlehem Shoals compares the group’s lyrics to a passage of transcendental violence from [Dennis Cooper’s novel] Guide (see: Odd Futurism).
Though the vast majority of the people at SXSW will never have heard of them, the band I was most interested to see was Yellow Tears. They were invited to play an underground power electronics/harsh noise/hardcore showcase by a friend of mine, Austin-based artist and filmmaker Rusty Kelley. Despite the fact that most of the people who told me about Yellow Tears are veteran obscurists desensitized to all forms of extreme music, this band uniquely inspires obsessively hyperbolic reviews: “the best band in the world,” “almost life changing,” “One of the most important groups of any genre in the current decade” are some direct quotes. Needless to say, I planned my schedule on the last night of SXSW around this show.
Yellow Tears – Austin TX – March 19 2011 – SXSW from Hunter Shaw on Vimeo.
One fact must be stated at the beginning, as it grounds most conversations about Yellow Tears: the band is all about piss. Immediately on arriving at the venue — a bombed-out east Austin warehouse space called the Broken Neck — I was informed/warned by different people that Yellow Tears had collected several buckets of urine that would be used in their performance. Their set began with nondescript atmospheric sounds — vague moans and scattered gargles — while the band screened urine-themed porn on the wall behind the stage, pissed in backlit yellow vats, and ladled the resulting brew into small glass bowls. Back on the the stage the bowls were positioned above a camera and mic’d so that the audience was fully immersed in the opening ritual, the band members one by one dunking their heads into the bowls, gargling, retching.
After this blunt opening salvo Yellow Tears moved into real assault mode. The visceral gargle was warped into a monstrous roar via seemingly random knob twisting, but this music was not improvised. They knew every detail intimately, moved with it. Their faces contorted in reaction and anticipation. They raged to the sounds they had procured and manipulated. About halfway through their set is when they moved from cliche power electronics schtick to something deeper and harder to classify. Ethereal operatics created an almost Catholic/Satanic atmosphere while the band again descended on the urine vats, their perverse self-baptism enthusiastically cheered on by the crowd. Highly coordinated, Yellow Tears regrouped for an incongruous island music break, then an unsettling laugh track sample.
This music is aggressively manipulative, as are the musicians, whose sneering laughter is met with applause from the audience. As people clap the band claps with them out of apparent disgust.
I usually can’t identify a “highlight” from a harsh noise set, but there was one moment of Yellow Tears’s performance that stuck in my brain like a thorn. After more mixed and chopped gargling, they sample a middle-aged sounding man speaking in a moment of candor: “Most of the time, I’m fine. But every now and then, they say that my mind sort of… drifts off. But… I always find my way back.” This soundbite is innocuous enough on its own, but Yellow Tears knew exactly how to bend the words — both as sounds and symbols — to create a real terror of slipping consciousness. Listening to some of their recorded work after the fact, it seems that this careful re-contextualization of otherwise inoffensive samples into a broader landscape of vague, distant despair is characteristic of their approach. It can be heard on “Buffalo Slaugher,” the opening track on their Paint Gurgle cdr, where a polite, if panicked voicemail message later reverberates with a deep pain of separation when folded into their music.
Yellow Tears @ The Whitney Museum 20100326 from Baked Tapes on Vimeo.
Ultimately, Yellow Tears is a hard band to pin down. As I mentioned before, I’ve been surprised by the number of hardcore extremists who champion Yellow Tears as a paragon of the form. After seeing them live, I was equally surprised by people who brushed off their show as “not music” and “not a show I could bring my parents to.” Coming from people I’ve known almost exclusively in the context of hardcore, harsh noise, and other inherently anti-aesthetic/antisocial musical territories, these comments are exceedingly odd. It seems that Yellow Tears strikes a deep aesthetic, moral, even phenomenological nerve that divides people already on the extreme musical fringes. Personally, I was strangely nonplussed after seeing their performance. I realized what I’d seen was important and moving in some way, but I wasn’t sure how or why. I talked to a similarly affected friend after the show. Though she didn’t really know what to think, she pointed out that older generations of her family drank urine for medicinal benefits so she wasn’t turned off by that particular aspect of the performance.
While they are certainly theatrical, I don’t think shock and disgust are the point of Yellow Tears. Their antics are not in line with GG Allin’s ritualized self abuse, early punk’s obsession with smearing and hurling condiments, or black metal’s animal sacrifice. They trade not in blood, vomit or mayonnaise but in urine, the most naturally occurring substance in the human experience. Whether to purify or debase, they meditate on piss, immerse themselves in it, use it as an instrument, incorporate it into their recordings and performances with a comprehension that is nothing short of religious. I mean religion here in the sense of ritual action and personal sublimation, a set of behaviors that blurs the line between sacred and profane and elicits a specific set of reactions from onlookers: instinctual rejection; rubbernecking fascination; Pavlovian cheering; obsessive, cultish fervor.
I had originally intended for this post to recount my gut reaction to their performance. I got preoccupied and I’m afraid that some of my most visceral, immediate reactions have been buffed by the time that has passed and I was left with this overly analytical rationalization. In any case, there’s really no substitute for seeing Yellow Tears live. You can find a list of upcoming performances on their site. My personal recommendation would be to catch their show on June 17th at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, where they’ll play along with Hospital label-runner Prurient and the teenage anarcho-posthardcore Danish group Iceage, who will be making their US debut.