Josh Feola presents … Yellow Tears *

* (restored)
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I booked some shows at South by Southwest 2011 for a Chinese noise band, Carsick Cars. Since music is my work and I’m a Texas native, it was a chance to both take in the manic week of industry-saturated overstimulation that is SXSW and to catch up with local friends operating on the fringes of the festival.

Each of these two worlds offered one band whose presence in Austin was, to my mind, disproportionately hyped. The “industry” touted the arrival of Odd Future, an avant rap collective from LA who, after years of building an alternative online fanbase, jumped on the cover of Billboard magazine and headlined some of SXSW’s most prominent events. Coverage of this group is by now ubiquitous, but the most interesting to me (and most pertinent in this context) is an article on the Poetry Foundation website in which Bethlehem Shoals compares the group’s lyrics to a passage of transcendental violence from Guide (see: Odd Futurism).

Though the vast majority of the people at SXSW will never have heard of them, the band I was most interested to see was Yellow Tears. They were invited to play an underground power electronics/ harsh noise/ hardcore showcase by a friend of mine, Austin-based artist and filmmaker Rusty Kelley. Despite the fact that most of the people who told me about Yellow Tears are veteran obscurists desensitized to all forms of extreme music, this band uniquely inspires obsessively hyperbolic reviews: “the best band in the world,” “almost life changing,” “One of the most important groups of any genre in the current decade” are some direct quotes. Needless to say, I planned my schedule on the last night of SXSW around this show.

One fact must be stated at the beginning, as it grounds most conversations about Yellow Tears: the band is all about piss. Immediately on arriving at the venue, which took place at a bombed out east Austin warehouse space called the Broken Neck, I was informed/ warned by different people that Yellow Tears had collected several buckets of urine that would be used in their performance. Their set began with nondescript atmospheric sounds — vague moans and scattered gargles — while the band screened urine-themed porn on the wall behind the stage, pissed in backlit yellow vats, and ladled the resulting brew into small glass bowls. Back on the the stage the bowls were positioned above a camera and mic’d so that the audience was fully immersed in the opening ritual, the band members one by one dunking their heads into the bowls, gargling, retching.

After this blunt opening salvo Yellow Tears moved into real assault mode. The visceral gargle was warped into a monstrous roar via seemingly random knob twisting, but this music was not improvised. They knew every detail intimately, moved with it. Their faces contorted in reaction and anticipation. They raged to the sounds they had procured and manipulated. About halfway through their set is when they moved from cliche power electronics schtick to something deeper and harder to classify. Ethereal operatics created an almost Catholic/ Satanic atmosphere while the band again descended on the urine vats, their perverse self-baptism enthusiastically cheered on by the crowd. Highly coordinated, Yellow Tears regrouped for an incongruous steel drum break, then an unsettling laugh track sample.

This music is aggressively manipulative, as are the musicians, whose sneering laughter is met with applause from the audience. As people clap the band claps with them out of apparent disgust.

I usually can’t identify a “highlight” from a harsh noise set, but there was one moment of Yellow Tears’s performance that stuck in my brain like a thorn. After more mixed and chopped gargling, they sampled a middle-aged man speaking in a moment of candor: “Most of the time, I’m fine. But every now and then, they say that my mind sort of… drifts off. But… I always find my way back.” This sound-bite is innocuous on its own, but Yellow Tears knew exactly how to bend the words — both as sounds and symbols — to create a real terror of slipping consciousness. Listening to some of their recorded work after the fact, it seems that this careful re-contextualization otherwise inoffensive samples into a broader landscape of vague, distant despair is characteristic of their approach. It can be heard on “Buffalo Slaughter,” the opening track on their Paint Gurgle cdr, where a polite, if panicked voicemail message later reverberates with a deep pain of separation when folded into their music.

Ultimately, Yellow Tears is a hard band to pin down. As I mentioned before, I’ve been surprised by the number of hardcore extremists who champion Yellow Tears as a paragon of the form. After seeing them live, I was equally surprised by people who brushed them off as “not music” and “not a show I could bring my parents to.” Coming from people I’ve known almost exclusively in the context of hardcore, harsh noise, and other inherently anti-aesthetic/ antisocial musical territories, these comments are exceedingly odd. It seems that Yellow Tears strikes a deep aesthetic, moral, even phenomenological nerve that divides people already on the extreme musical fringes. Personally, I was strangely nonplussed after seeing their performance. I realized what I’d seen was important and moving in some way, but I wasn’t sure how or why. I talked to a similarly affected friend after the show. Though she didn’t really know what to think, she pointed out that older generations of her family drank urine for medicinal benefits so she wasn’t turned off by that particular aspect of the performance.

While they are certainly theatrical, I don’t think shock and disgust are the point of Yellow Tears. Their antics are not in line with GG Allin’s ritualized self abuse, early punk’s obsession with smearing and hurling condiments, or black metal’s animal sacrifice. They trade not in blood, vomit or mayonnaise but in urine, the most naturally occurring substance in the human experience. Whether to purify or debase, they meditate on piss, immerse themselves in it, use it as an instrument, incorporate it into their recordings and performances with a comprehension that is nothing short of religious. I mean religion here in the sense of ritual action and personal sublimation, a set of behaviors that blurs the line between sacred and profane and elicits a specific set of reactions from onlookers: instinctual rejection; rubbernecking fascination; Pavlovian cheering; obsessive, cultish fervor.

I had originally intended for this post to recount my gut reaction to their performance. I got preoccupied and I’m afraid that some of my most visceral, immediate reactions have been buffed by the time that has passed and I was left with this overly analytical rationalization. In any case, there’s really no substitute for seeing Yellow Tears live. You can find a list of upcoming performances on their site. My personal recommendation would be to catch their show on June 17th at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, where they’ll play along with Hospital label-runner Prurient and the teenage anarcho-posthardcore Danish group Iceage, who will be making their US debut.
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Tracks

Portrait of the Penis as a Young Garden Hose

Theme From “Golden Showers May Bring Flowers”

The Golden Family

3 Heads Underwater Experience

The Pissmop

Liquid Shimmer

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, yes, me too, about the meeting. We’ll definitely know more, it’s just a matter of degree. I read, I think, two Stephen King books ages ago, ‘Cujo’ and … I can’t remember the  other one. Based on them, I think he has great ideas, but his clunky prose was too hard on me. But I know serious writers I respect who love his books, so there you go. I’ve never heard of ‘The Institute’, but, if I dip back in, I’ll try to make that my way in. I really should give him the old college try again. Yes, Paris’s and Budapest’s sloppy kiss would definitely be a waterpark, so commands G. Fantasy booking a trip to the wilds of Australia as we speak. Love disguised as an attachment to the first email you open today, G. ** Chris Kelso, Hey. Really glad you liked the post and her. She’s great and severely under known considering. I’ve done posts here about two of my favorites of her novels: ‘Textermination’ and ‘Life, End Of’. That is curious that she’s sometimes considered a sci-fi, but why not. Huh. You sound like you’re maxing out the solo career period of your life quite understandably. I have a number of artist friends who’ve had kids in very recent times, and, based on my observance, it is an intense alteration for them, but all of them are still making excellent art as if nothing had happened. Wow, thank you a lot for sending that book. That’s amazing, thanks! ‘Weird Little Boy’ … hm … It’s pretty weird and quirky. Some great musicians involved: Zorn, Mike Patton, Chris Cochrane, … The packaging (by artist Nayland Blake) is cool. Most of the people involved seemed to end up hating the record, I’m not sure why. So, … I guess so? It’s fun and extreme, but I would be surprised if you ever listened to it more than once. Paris will be patient. xo. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, my pleasure, my friend. My PT-indoctrinated friend is already spreading the link. A new David Keenan? Is he really prolific? I feel like there was another novel by him just recently. Which I haven’t read. I gotta get on that/him, and, darn it, I will. ** Gus CaliGirls, Hi, Gus. Yeah, I’m all right. Back to working like a beaver and all that. The process … it depended. I tried all kinds of angles and different orders of doing things. Most often I found/liked the images, and liked them because they were haunting in some way that the images themselves and the usually somewhat well known sources they came from hadn’t supplied. So I felt like there was a gap in them or something that made them malleable/ vulnerable? Then I think I usually uploaded them and kept looking at them until I figured out a counter-narrative that would work with and, at the same time, oppose the meaning that the images inherently had, i.e. in ‘Simplicity Itself’s’ case the content of the ‘Flipper’ TV show from which they’d derived. A lot of trying and feeling my way along, I guess. I fear that isn’t very clear or helpful. I love your ideas/ plans/ description of the writing you’re doing. It excites me to imagine it. For what it’s worth, a number of the fiction writers I find most exciting developed their writing while in fine arts programs. In some cases, first they made image/text combo visual art pieces and then visual art pieces that were all text, and eventually they abandoned the visual art framing and just wrote. Anyway, I greatly encourage you in what you’re doing. It seems explosive and yet formally tight. I hope to get to see some of what you make at some point. Australia does seem to be a particular mess on the Covid front, at least from way over here, but I’m happy to hear that you have a good hide out. Thanks for filling me in, man. It’s revving me up. xo. ** Dalton, Hi, Dalton. Thanks for the welcome! I’m glad the post had a percolating effect on your thinking. ‘Kinda seems like choosing what to read is a moral endeavor which is disturbing to me’: that’s very interesting. I’m going to think about that. I don’t know if that’s naive, and, anyway, naivety is an underrated value and approach. If that makes any sense. Thanks a bunch. It’s good to see you. What are you up to? ** Right. Today’s restored post by the excellent music writer/critic Josh Feola comes from quite a while back. It covers the wild (and since defunct) Yellow Tears who made very interesting music/noise with the heavy use of urine. That’s something special, right? Check them out. And I’ll see you tomorrow.