When
you look at publicity photos of the band on its Web site and
elsewhere, stereotypes about hippies come to mind. There are rural
settings, and some long hair, and some naughty bits - yes, a pair
of breasts, pubic hair, and even a penis or two.
If you read some literature from this Canadian quartet - playing at East Moline's Mixtapes music store on Friday - you'll get confirmation of those stereotypes. This comes from a document called "The Nine Principles": "One's aesthetic inclinations regarding sound should bleed over into and flow from all artistic disciplines as easily as they do from daily experience. There is no reason a sonic composition cannot be inspired by or contribute to a drawing, a tasty curry, or one's choice of socks."
And then there's contradictory information, such as the band's name: AIDS Wolf.
And this, also from "The Nine Principles": "If you can't convert 'em, make 'em run crying and holding their ears."
And this, from an interview last week with AIDS Wolf vocalist Chloe Lum: "I like the idea of the jam band as a concept," she said. "But I've actually never listened to or seen a jam band. ... For us it's more of an idea than an aesthetic."
The AIDS Wolf aesthetic owes its biggest debt to Captain Beefheart and Black Flag, which is to say that it's aggressively and purposefully discordant, with harsh guitars, unconventional structures, and whiny, howly, indecipherable vocals. The most accessible track on the band's 2006 album, The Lovvers LP, is called "Panty Mind" and is distinguished by its propulsive lead-guitar lines - nearly creating a melody - and a beat to which one could dance. But it's a rarity in this cacophony.
AIDS Wolf has generated a fair amount of indie buzz, but reviews of the band and its recordings have ranged from respectful and puzzled to dismissive and nasty. (Pitchfork called it "shit in wolf's clothing.")
When
we talked, Lum had just finished a live radio set and sounded excited
and out-of-breath. "I guess we don't get a lot of invitations,"
she said of AIDS Wolf's appeal to radio stations.
Yet there's something undeniably cathartic about the band's unsettling din, and it's easy to admire a band so devoted to a noncommercial sound. It almost borders on an obsession, which sounds consistent with Lum's life generally.
She said she owns 3,000 vinyl records. "I'm someone who would write 30-page letters to people in bands I liked," she said.
Her first musical love was U.S. Maple, which she first saw in her native Ottawa in the mid-1990s. "My brain just kind of opened up, like an origami box," she said. "I ended up throwing out half my record collection a couple days after."
An even greater influence was Beefheart. Lum said she first encountered the avant-garde artist through her father's record collection. She said she "obsessively" went through his LPs, "just looking at the covers, because I didn't know how to use the record player. ... I was more interested in the artwork than in the music at the time." Trout Mask Replica grabbed her attention (along with Elton John's Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy), even though she was bored by Beefheart's blues-based music when she finally heard it as a pre-teen punk-rock fan.
At the age of 16, working at a college radio station, she encountered Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station and became a convert. She said that 13 years later, Beefheart and his Magic Band remain a "bottomless well."
The high point of AIDS Wolf's current tour, she added, was meeting Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas. Lucas, on his blog, said that Lum's band "generated a furious insectival drone of extreme noise, howling feedback, pummeling drums, manic and precisely splattered/detuned/re-jiggered guitars ... . They did themselves proud."
Lum and AIDS Wolf bandmate Yannick Desranleau are also in-demand poster artists with their Seripop outfit, and she said their art and music are of-a-piece. "They're tapping into the only vein that the two of us have - the same sort of creative or noncreative pool of ideas that floats around and gets applied to different mediums," she said. "I guess you could say that we're sort of one-trick ponies in that sense. Either that, or dedicated. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. We don't have a choice. It's just what comes out."
AIDS Wolf will perform at Mixtapes on Friday, November 30, with Eyes, Old Man Lady Bug Or Officer Rattlesnake, and Space. The show starts at 7 p.m. Mixtapes is located at 830 15th Avenue in East Moline, and more information is available at (http://www.myspace.com/mixtapesrecordstore). Admission is $8.
