Altsounds - Rajinder Singh [LIVE at Noise! Noise! Noise! 21-03-09]

While numerous musicians have been inspired by the combination of mainstream song and avant-garde noise to be found in the music of MBV, JAMC and Sonic Youth (i.e. Smashing Pumpkins, Wavves and Nirvana, respectively and famously), I cannot recall many, if any, who have been inspired to strip away the accessible elements and embrace the turbulence solely, as appears to be the case with what I heard last night.

Or, to paraphrase Lester Bangs' infamous 1976 review of Lou Reed's legendarily divisive 'Metal Machine Music', if you ever thought that the feedback break in MBV's live renditions of 'You Made Me Realise' was the best thing to happen in the song, well, Rajinder Singh just got rid of the song.

Don't get me wrong: I am aware of non-mainstream Noise by such artists as Tony Conrad, Merzbow, Peter Brotzmann and Pan Sonic, and I also dislike comparing one musician to others (not only does it feel lazy and not only does it come across as game of 'Guess the influences', it often overshadows or even degrades the musician's own imagination), but what seems to distinguish Raijinder's work from other Noise musicians is that it appears to come not from an appreciation of relatively obscure sources but from a fondness for the abrasion subversively packaged within the aforementioned commercial side of Noise. I imagine him as a teen not so much banging his head to Alt. Rock but stroking his chin.

Playing as the opening act of the night he organises at Catch, situated in London's nauseously-trendy Shoreditch (think Vice magazine, skinny jeans, hair cut as if by a blind drunken one-armed dwarf, Hot Chip, 'Nathan Barley' and hundreds of people trying desperately to appear as if they started the trends they slavishly follow) and armed solely with a guitar, an effects unit, a microphone, drum sticks and a tom drum, the initial sound was harsh, piercing and seemingly confrontational. However, as is common when confronted with such volumous tenacity, my ears soon adjusted to the sound like eyes adjust to bright light and suddenly I found myself, as Rajinder himself refers to it, actively listening, finding frequencies resonanting in the dense, awe-inspiring squall of slowly evolving chords melded together by distortion and delay.

After what may or may not have been 10 minutes of fiery feedback forcing my ears into submission, a knob was turned on his effects unit and suddenly the sound was transformed into an aquatic drone (like whale song, for example). A few minutes later and I'm dragged back into the flames; this time, looking away from the stage to note down my thoughts, I hear screams buried within the blast but swiftly turn back to find no one even close to the microphone. Later, he grabs a drum stick and violently penetrates his guitar between its strings and body, creating a new bridge and a new sound resembling an atonal bell cacophony.

It's this variety, the way in which Rajinder drags the audience to hell, to heaven and to everything in between, revealing his personal lack of differentation between such states, and the semi-improvised lawless abandon with which it's all achieved that impresses the most. Too few artists deal with extra-ordinary emotions and states, too few artists risk being misunderstood, too few artists seek to understand and consequentially embrace their own idiosyncrasies, too few artists take risks and too few artists realise they should take risks.

Last night after I congratulated him on his set he told me to be as critical as I want in my review and I assured him I would be... by giving him a good review. Nevertheless, it's difficult to listen to 30 minutes of music without having some reservations, even if they may be entirely subjective.

While at the start of this review I noted and praised his ability to see past the conventional within Alt. Rock and extract the unconventional, I think this background hinders his music by at times giving it a lack of clear intellectual and emotional focus. The best example of this is his infrequent but reoccurant decision to walk into the audience playing a guitar solo (of the wholly unconventional kind, of course) and collapse in what was perhaps a parody of 'Rock God' ecstasy, a decision which lead me to question the seriousness of his music and ponder whether he merely wanted to "Be loud. Be really fucking loud".

The answer I arrived at was that these were the moments he felt most vulnerable, as if he was doing something he believed in and feared that the audience were confused or bored, and thereby broke the tension by obstensively saying, "It's just a bit of fun." The Alt. Rockers from which his love of noise seemingly grew had structures and 'hooks' with which to hold an audience's attention and long-established and (overly-) familiar themes (e.g. love, rebellion, etc.) to provide emotional content.

Without such conventions to guide the confused uninitiated listener it may be tempting to give them something they recognise, but by doing so intiated listeners such as myself are left confused: Is the music art for art's sake? Or is it art for emotion's sake? Or is it art for ironic spectacle's sake?

However, despite these reservations about the possible substitution of 'cool' for content, this was a thoroughly majestic show by an auspecious talent.

Rajinder can be found at http://www.myspace.com/rajindermakesnoise, while more information about his night, which occurs every 3rd Saturday upstairs at Catch, and occasionaly at other places too can be found at http://www.myspace.com/noisex3.