Images of last Friday’s Noise and Smoke

today is saturday and being saturday today is ramon’s day. his intention was to let me guest post and put up fotos of last friday’s Noise and Smoke show at Notsuoh (that’s Houston spelled backwards, hoss) and i said ‘no, no, no, today is your day’. but after a few minutes of me fussing over justification and such i ended up volunteering anyway. so here’s some fotos.

this is Tyler. he performs by the name Eat Grapes. his vocals are light and his strumming isn’t heavy-handed and the addition of tape loops kept me sitting in one spot. the sound is best described as shroomy and i love that he futzs with cassette tapes throughout his set. this is the only photo i took with a flash. i get really self conscious with flashes around folk singers. the other rolls of film i took of him are on another roll that is swimming somewhere the bottom of my camera bag.

this is joey and liz, the organizers of noise and smoke. i just sat here for a full five minutes trying to word my love and admiration for these two but i think that the only way to express it is through interpretive dance which doesn’t quite translate to this forum. suffice to say that if things were different, i would marry both of them…er…either one of them. i mean, i’d rather live in hawaii rather than utah given the choice.

i love jana. she never ceases to charm me. some people might say that she peppers her speech with non-sequiturs. i say you need a whiskey on the rocks. that’s her brother john hunter behind her with matt brownlie on drums and will adams sitting cross-legged.

here is austin’s Finally Punk. i got dizzy running from side to side of the stage trying to capture all their configurations.

zlatan and craig warmth aren’t humping each other, they’re trying to leap frog each other to get onto stage. i heard they are now forming Finally Punk Fan Club Deluxe – Bayou City Chapter.

zlatan and omar of the sporatics in a quieter moment early in the evening. pasadena emits not only high levels of benzene, but high levels of beautiful souls.

bring back the guns are matt, erik, thomas, and and ryan. though not pictured here, the potted plant threw aside its rooted nature and joined the dancing denizens. bbtg went on to perform at Verizon Theatre opening for the Toadies.

local yokels John and ADR, editor of the blog Skyline Network. Skyline Network is part Spy Magazine and part National Enquirer celebrity section. John is part Alex Keaton part Weekly World News.

The Ka-Nives are a garage outfit that sound exactly like these pictures look. I can’t add to their mystique in words. Ramon lifted me onto his shoulders and i managed to hang on long enough to capture the Walker twins floating on a canopy of hands.

Ramon Medina, founder of Nonalignment Pact. And sexpot.

Ume performed last, after nearly six hours of non-stop performances. I was pretty tired (notice i couldn’t even center the subject) but i snapped a few before collapsing in a heap at a barstool at Warren’s around the corner.

this is Jim Pirtle, owner of Notsuoh. He declared Warren’s the “Green Room” of Notsuoh that night. So true. Unfortunately the Green Room was so well stocked that one of my “breaks” made me miss Satin Hooks. The lack of photos of them here is completely coincidental to my drinking Whiskey Sours.

so these are the first few rolls of N&S. hope it gives you a sense of the evening. the above images are raw scans of the negatives. no photoshopping as that takes work. these are taken with my trusty Nikon FA, on either Ilford FP5 or fuji neopan 1600.

my apologies if the bands don’t approve of the images but it’s almost 3:pm and i don’t have hardly anyone’s phone number . let me know if you disapprove and i’ll take it down immediately. also these images are “copy-lefted” which for the benefit of those who don’t know (i bet all these bands know already) simply means ‘be cool’: it may seem like simple courtesy but in this day and age of google images remember your p’s and q’s and credit the artist/photographer whenever possible. and don’t significantly change the image without saying so.