Noisy musicians crash into Eugene with ambient sound

It's the sound of World War II planes flying overhead. It's the unrehearsed sound of crumbling concrete walls set to projections of silent films. It's the sound of the fourth-annual Eugene Noise Fest.

Featuring more than 24 regional and national acts, Eugene Noise Fest is one of the largest experimental electronica concerts of the Pacific Northwest. Performances from The Sunken with IDX1274, Chefkirk and Klowd will entrance audiences with homemade synthesizers and medical equipment (some guitars too).

"There will be a wide variety of noise," said the event's founder, Don Haugen of Eugene. A graphic designer by profession and musician by passion, Haugen, aka Warning Broken Machine, was careful to define the "noise" genre.

"It's less music-based and more sound art," he explained. "It's about breaking the rules and conventions."

Haugen, whose personal favorite is Klowd, grew up a punk-rocker before he discovered noise at a Northern California festival 12 years ago, inspiring him to build his own oscillators and primitive synthesizers. "It has so much freedom and there are more creative ways to have an outlet for emotion," he said.

Noise is sometimes described as electronica or ambient, but it also breaks from most music in that it isn't defined by a single dominant emotion. There are no set guidelines; it can be simple or complex, harsh or soothing.

"It's like improvised jazz, without the jazz," said Curtis Rochambeau, of Springfield. "Some test the limits of how we perceive sound and what we can hear. There is little composition. Composers have definite aims, but the live set is incidental."

Known on stage as [view], Rochambeau will be performing at Eugene Noise Fest for his third year. Rochambeau began playing music at 8 years old, when his mom bought him a basic analog synthesizer. He would play with the laser sounds and pretend he was flying in outer space.

Years later, Rochambeau and his uncle were surfing Ebay for medical equipment built in the '50s and '60s. "The shipping cost more than the auction," he said. "Even if it didn't work, I wanted to see what I could get out of it."

Rochambeau connected nerve and muscle stimulators to synthesizers to control the frequency and pulse of his music. Operating on dials and signals, Rochambeau uses a brain surgeon's malfunctioning testing equipment to get the bass notes, undertones and simple drone you often hear in the decaying tapes of '50s science fiction films.

They are sounds you wouldn't normally think of as music, sounds you may not even notice, but the sounds have a heavy emotional and hypnotic impact on the suspense-filled listener. "I like to think of it as listening to robots think," Rochambeau said. "But you have to be careful because the muscle stimulator can get up to 150 volts."

It might sound like there is more math than music involved here, but when [view] performs, he tries to be "that little kid" who experiments with sound. And as diabolic as the scratching-finger-nails-turned-art might seem, Rochambeau assured that noise fans are surprisingly nice, normal people. You can find blues festivals in every city, he explained, but this is something new.

"Experience it," he said. "It's well worth seeing at least once." otammik@dailyemerald.com