Audio By Carbonatix
They have no visible tattoos or notable piercings, and their clothes are just clothes, unrent by strategic rips or tears. But looks aren’t everything: The members of the Carbon Dioxide Orchestra just like to make noise–actually, a kind of sculptural, engineered noise–and that’s how they distinguish themselves in Denver’s more-avant-garde-than-thou community of cutting-edge artists. CO2 is on the roster for the Denver Noise Festival, a two-night who’s-who sampling of the local noise community slated for this Friday and Saturday nights at the Bug Performance and Media Art Center.
“We’re two and a half old farts and two and a half young farts,” says LeRoy Jaramillo, who’s the main spokesman, if not the outright leader, of the group. He contributes spoken-word segments to the orchestra’s repertoire, plays an electronically rigged violin–something he taught himself to do a couple of years ago–and occasionally cues the other noisicians with a wave of his bow. And then there’s Bill Valdez, whose instrument involves rubbing two cakes of dry ice against a suspended copper plate cut in the shape of a heart. The resulting sound is reminiscent of the screech of an ancient BMT subway car in the bowels of New York City: an eerie, acrid, echoing shriek that’ll give you the shivers even in the dog days of summer. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” notes Valdez. He also plays a length of respiratory-therapy tubing that he whips around in the air as if it were an Aboriginal bull-roarer, producing a ghostly, high-pitched moan.
Rounding out the ensemble are Dave Dickson, the technologist of the group, who manipulates effects pedals, electronic beats and samples; slide guitarist/didgeridoo guy Eduardo Mendez; and theremin player Victoria Lundy. It’s a weird mix of odd and not-so-odd instrumentation that somehow melds, resulting in noises both ethereal and subterranean.
Lundy knows of only one other theremin player in town, Geoff Cleveland of the Emergency Broadcast Players. “But I’m more into making music, and he’s more into effects,” she says. An odd electronic device played by moving one’s hands through the space between two electrodes, the theremin creates that unearthly, wavering, creature-feature whine used in ’50s sci-fi flicks to give the audience a chill. “It’s the ultimate fretless instrument,” Lundy says.
Dickson, an avant-garde composer who also organizes an ongoing noise series at Rebis Galleries, adds a formal facet to the ensemble by shaping the group’s improvisations into something more meaningful than a blob of sound for sound’s sake. Mendez, who’s almost self-deprecating about his dive-bombing guitar work, comes into his own when he honks on his didgeridoo, contributing to some delightfully spooky duets with Valdez’s plastic tubing.
These seemingly disparate aural gizmo-wielders interact to create something that sounds a lot like a strangely terrific, compelling bad dream–one you don’t know whether you want to wake up from or not. “A lot of free-form groups just make a wall of noise,” says Jaramillo. “They’re not trying to make music or to even attempt to make something out of the disparities.” Not so for the Carbon Dioxide Orchestra: For them, the noise is just the start of something beautiful.
–Froyd
The Denver Noise Festival, 8 p.m. June 26-27, Bug Performance and Media Art Center, 3654 Navajo Street, $7-$9, 477-5977.
