NOTE: I wasn’t allowed to bring in my Flip camera, so you’ll have to deal with my wordy descriptions of the music…sorry about that.
After failing to see their 77 drummers thing on 7/7/07 (OGREN!!!!!!!), and failing once again to see the 88 drummers thing on 8/8/08, it was a no brainer when I saw tickets go onsale for the 9/9/09 Boredoms show.
I didn’t expect to see 99 drummers, although that would have been amazing. It was more scaled down, just 9 drummers, with Eye playing the role of demonic drum major (complete with awesome drum major hat!). It started at 9:09, with Eye knocking gently on a massive, 8 necked guitar, shaking out sounds that sort of did not make sense, huge sheets of tuned notes that laid over the crowd like a blanket made of brown acid. Then the drums came in, slow and building, then exploding. People moshed…their drummer was marched through the crowd by a crew of noise-loving slaves, and the whole thing built itself up and exploded over and over again. 99 minutes later it was done.
- The Drummer at Boadrum 9
Thanks to the girl for the photo
I know a lot of people who argue that there is some kind of intellectual exercise behind this kind of music. I’m not so sure thats the case. For everyone who wasn’t on stage, I would say that only 20 percent of the novel concept came through. For instance, I noticed that the rhythms came in sections of 9, or permutations thereof, but that kind of mental workout was straight up boring compared to what was going on in my loins. This was pelvis music, shit that happily appealed to the primal Sabretooth-Tiger-beating savages we all forgot we once were. And that is a cool place for a bunch of bookish beardy metropolitan types to find themselves, outside of all the hype and words, it was about rhythm, and there were 9 very skilled specialists beating that rhythm as far into you as they could fit it. Stop thinking and punch a bear in the face.
So for the musicians, they planned and practiced, worked hard and calculated – in order to unleash something that made me (hopefully the audience as a whole) feel the opposite. We were all uncalculated madmen once, and in the (Eye)s of Boredoms there is a strict intellectual plan, numbered and listed and directed, that will unlock that same madman, chest beating spirit.
Or maybe I’m missing the entire fucking point.
Anyway, I drank 9 beers in honor of the occasion, ended up getting stupidly drunk and talking noise music with my girl, and Lucas, the guy who took the first picture. Awesome.
Tags: 9/9/09, boredoms, punching bears in the face