Our dirty little secret: We did not make it through all 33 bands spread across all three days of this year’s Maryland Deathfest at Sonar. With only slices of pizza and $3 Cokes on site for sustenance, our live report had to be tempered with periodic trips for vegetable-based food and occasional bathing and changing of shirts. (It was sweaty enough to leave each night feeling like deflated scrotum skin that had just been gingerly peeled from a sticky thigh.) So this inventory should be caveated with the fact that, while nearly everyone we talked to agreed General Surgery played the set of the festival, we were off huffing paint or napping or something. Our bad.

As old-school thrash fans looking for love in all the wrong places, rock-identifiable riffs, mucho energy, and/or a healthy sense of humor were the quickest ways to win us over. (T-shirt of note here: “Shut up and die so I can grind.”) So the opening night was a split decision between Piss Christ (an Australian politico-crust band whose mowhawked frontman threw himself at the barricades so often you worried he might crack his sternum) and Pig Destroyer (frontman J.R. Hayes’ head bulged with Jack Nicholson’s evil eye from The Shining). Special Friday-night note should probably be made about the vocal range of one-man-band Putrid Pile, who went from spoon-jammed-in-a-garbage-disposal low to whistle-only-dogs-can-hear high so effortlessly that it was even scarier than his music.

On Saturday, the hulking Gauls in Gorod and the four diminutive ladies of Japan’s Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation also gave good riff. But the festival’s highlight was, without a doubt, Ghoul from “Creepsylvania” on Sunday, the weekend’s most purely KISS-pleasurable spectacle. The four ghouls complemented their pitch-perfect–and nearly, gulp, catchy–mid-’80s throwback thrash/death metal with self-referential shouted choruses, a good deal of campy banter, unison stage moves, and ghostlike masks that made them look more like squids with bloody noses, earning the band the most thrown horns of the weekend. Second funniest (and most fun) band of the weekend was Birdflesh, three guys dressed in ladies muumuus who sang 15-second grindcore songs about evil cats and had their ultrastilted demeanors down until they sounded (and kinda looked) like three Swedish Borats.

Still, the real heroes of Deathfest are the fans, the shirtless dudes in the pit first thing on Friday night who were still there Sunday when we ducked out, the folks who traveled from across the globe (or just across town) to support a music that lives and dies simply by the support of its fans. To the hardcore who took it all in, every last double-bass breakdown and goregrind grunt, we can only salute you.

So we’re reading web zine Pitchfork over our morning coffee, and we open the recurring “Guest List” feature where the site gets current indie-rock hot commodities to talk about their favorite songs, video games, or flavors of Altoids, and we get smacked with this at the top of a list from Klaxons guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis in a section marked “Favorite New Songs of the Past Year”:

WZT Hearts: “1″ This blew my mind into fireworks. . . . It’s all I listened to when we toured Europe. It was just abstract being completely obsessed with this, to this then going onstage and playing three-minute pop songs, then going back to this crystal neverland.

Then again, Taylor-Davis goes on to say that Chris De Burgh’s “Lady in Red” is his favorite song of all time.

But seriously: Wait, what? The Klaxons are inescapable Britpop phenoms in their homeland at the moment (though judging by the rate of turnover for Britpop phenoms, there’s a good chance they won’t be by the time this Noise post goes up) who write, as Taylor-Davis says, “three-minute pop songs” and are hellbent on reviving Day-Glo rave while sounding like a sloppy cross between EMF, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Blur, and 2 Unlimited. (Between the Klaxons and the TMNT movie, when did 2007 suddenly become 1990?) The idea of a British electronic pop-rock band going into the studio with the tribal roar of Wzt Hearts on its mind is kinda weird, kinda exciting. If NME is suddenly touting “nü-laptop grind” in a year, Baltimore should really claim partial dibs.

There’s sad news circulating around the internet right now that Landis Expandis, drummer and lead vocalist for Baltimore’s long-running and much beloved funk-rock party band the All-Mighty Senators, is currently in the hospital undergoing dialysis for renal failure. Like most professional or semipro musicians hit with major medical expenses, this will undoubtedly be an uphill climb for Landis, both in terms of recovery and paying off the bills. A MySpace page has been set up for eventual donations; right now you can only post get-well messages, though those are surely appreciated, too. We’ll post an update as soon as we hear that the site is accepting donations.

It’s probably a measure of how much we love the Death Set that we were willing to pay $10 for what we knew would be a 10-minute set–15 on the outside. That’s a dollar a minute; even Netflix and iTunes offer more value for money. But this was the duo’s triumphant return-to-Baltimore show after Johnny Sierra’s brief exile back to his Australian homeland, and, well, we didn’t name Death Set the Best Live Band in last year’s Best of Baltimore issue for nothing.

Following an incredibly protracted wait–they were supposed to go on at 10, finally rolled on closer to midnight–when we were forced to find alternate ways to entertain ourselves (i.e., drink more), Death Set took the Ottobar stage. That was the first odd part of the evening, considering the band usually crowds the floor with the audience. Second odd part was that second guitarist/singer Beau Velasco was nowhere to be found, replaced with Ecstatic Sunshine’s Matt Papich. No one seemed to want to talk about what the deal was, but this–new? temporary?–Death Set lineup still played a pretty killer set, the metal edge of Ecstatic Sunshine coming out in the cartoon snarl of Papich’s more aggressive, furrowed-brow playing.

While we’re not yet sick of Death Set’s shtick–punk rock drum machine rat-a-tat shot out of an iPod and buttressed by samples of Three 6 Mafia and B-more club; shouting along with the joyous punk Chihuahua shriek of the pint-sized and childishly charismatic Sierra, climbing the walls and spastically rapping along with his samples and looking like he should be cast in a art-school squat version of Oliver Twist–we do think they need to write some new songs soonish, if only to prevent burnout among their Baltimore faithful. But the set did go on for about 17 minutes. They’ll always surprise you.

Baltimore club legend Scottie B then spun an Ottobar-friendly set, light on “tear the fuckin’ club up” rowdiness and heavier on the cutesier, kitschier, cuddlier side of club music’s staple diet of immediately recognizable pop-music samples, starting off with, of all things, a rework of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” (Scottie dropped Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” later just in case you needed another fix of ’80s butt rock set to the “Sing Sing” break.) There were the expected, crowd-pleasing ’60s pop remixes–the Beatles, the Supremes, the deathless “Mr. Postman”–and a string of nonclub house and techno tunes, including Thomas Bangalter’s “So Much Love to Give” and that inescapable Switch record with the spaghetti western horns. (If we have to hear that one more time after nearly two years, we’re going to hang up our dancing shoes.) Implacable behind his laptop like an obvious pro as the rather small audience got down, Scottie’s set was the most purely enjoyable part of the evening.

But what’s this?

Baltimore club beef? Even after talking to him we’re not quite sure what Scottie’s problem is with former friend/business partner Aaron Lacrate, but one thing he did want us to know is that while he’s not responsible for the shirt itself, someone who cares about him is.

We weren’t quite sure what we were expecting from Brazilian threesome Bonde Do Role–OK, we were expecting absolutely nothing–but you could have easily guessed “rock band,” considering these kids are grouped with fellow Brazilian indie sensations CSS and still wear Manic Panic in their press photos. We certainly weren’t expecting three “rappers”–two Brazilian Dave Matthews fans just back from a totally bad-ass extreme Frisbee game and one diminutive female cutie with regulation indie-shag bowl cut and squeezed into a pair of none-too-flattering leopard-print stretch pants–with passable Portuguese flows rhyming over a canned version of the Brazilian booty bass beats known as baile funk.

You couldn’t really call Bonde Do Role’s indie-rocker version of baile funk “crude” or “lo-fi” since the real thing sounds like a Brazilian tourist found an ancient Tone Loc cassingle in an Ohio Salvation Army and dreamed himself up a genre on the flight back. And you couldn’t really call BDR’s Alice in Chains samples hipster kitsch since baile funk is just as likely to sample Collective Soul or the Toadies. To go by the baile funk evidence, Brazil is even more obsessed with quoting the recent pop-cultural past than the programmers at VH1. After Scottie B’s own battery of quotations, Bonde Do Role probably felt right at home.

The crowd loved it instantly, the band telling us how they met John Waters earlier in the day and gingerly humping the air like a Pretty Ricky made up of MICA students–it felt like it was trying too hard to be loved. When the inevitable broken-English command to throw our hands in the air finally came, one of our companions obliged, only to quickly roll her eyes: “I’m such a cynical bitch.” And yet we’re not quite sure when Bonde Do Role finally won us over during the brief set–was it during the song that sampled Europe’s “Final Countdown” or when singer Marina Ribatski stuffed the microphone down the front of those stretch pants?–but win us over they did. We’re not sure if there’s an exact term for that unsettling Damascus moment when your hard-won old-folks cynicism slips in the face of corny youthful exuberance, but someone needs to coin one, stat.

But we had invites to the grand opening of the new indoor digs for PPL! club-cum-lounge staple Mosaic, so what the hell. We were also, admittedly, drawn by the two greatest words in the English language: open bar.

And those new digs, they are indeed swanky, a no-expenses-spared feeling with mucho new-club smell. Coming out of the nasty weather felt like stepping into the world’s most fashionable cave, dark and warmly lit in understated (if that’s even possible) red neon and glowing orange, the building materials more dark woods than shiny metals, and couches that probably cost more than our rent.

With the rows and rows of untouched booze bottles and plasma screens touting itself, the new Mosaic also felt, as one companion pointed out, like drinking in the airport duty-free shop. Like most nightclubs without an all-ages night, a mechanical bull, or a healthy dose of postdated Von Dutch, it feels like a place where you should be self-conscious about bad hair and scuffed shoes, even if you just bought them.

All that’s fine, even expected; we’re as grown and sexy as anyone, and sometimes it’s nice to get away from the ware- and punk houses. But the music, and maybe this was just to ease us in on opening night, felt more conducive to after-work happy hour than disco dancin’, unless you were really moved by seeing some dude make his “o” face while playing bongos. The DJ–safe in a fairly elaborate raised booth flanked by some the-future-is-now monitors or CDDJ decks–spun a vocal- and hook-free tapestry of polite house and downtempo.

We don’t usually get too rose-colored about our raving days, but we weren’t sure, while sucking on a soon-to-be-banned cigarette from a $7 pack and sipping an expensive cocktail, if fringed throw pillows and bottle service were what we signed on for way back when. Still, despite the caveats, the new Mosaic is an island of the urbane in the midst of PPL!’s ocean of the inane, and your best nightlife bet if you’re around the Inner Harbor and don’t feel like doing Jäger shots out of someone’s breasts. Though if you ever outgrow that, seek help.

Blues Control, Chris Grier, Snacks, and Beastmaster, at the Bank, 2013 Frederick Ave., Thursday, March 8, 9:30 P.M.

Occasionally, there are live musical events that we’d like to single out for special appreciation, or that show up on our radar too late in the game to make it into the dead-trees version of our fine newspaper but that we still think you should check out, even if in this case it means the painful choice of skipping out on NBC’s Thursday night “comedy done right” lineup. (Except for Scrubs, man, fuck that.) Blues Control is a New York keyboard/electronics and guitar duo that makes “stoner rock” with all the grand and spacy ’70s third-eye-vortex-of-swirling-black-tar tempos and probably-most-interesting-when-you’re-baked repetition, but that ditches most of the metal signifiers (pounding drums, fuzzy power chords, etc.) that usually come appended to the tag “stoner rock.” It’s on Holy Mountain (the label of fellow duo and former Sleep-ers Om and B-more’s own Daniel Higgs’ most recent solo album), its two members have long hair in the photos, and they’re definitely gonna keep chasing that one note over the hedges and through the woods, if that triangulates the sound for you.

Meanwhile, Chris Grier is a noisy member of To Live and Shave in L.A., we babbled at length about improvised electronics nogoodniks Snacks in our very first Noise post, and we’re probably most intrigued by local subterranean one-woman hardcore techno machine Beastmaster, her beats rumbling under the concrete and through the alleys of the west side.

Last week, sex-happy foursome Pretty Ricky–less an R&B boy band than four pairs of blue balls come to life–did the world a solid by keeping mimsy-ass indie-pop schlockmeisters the Shins off the top of the Billboard Hot 100, proving once again that while you can’t teach teenagers good taste, at least their natural affinity toward bare-chested soft-core will at least prevent the pop charts from becoming overrun by dudes in cardigans. (It also proves that instant-message transcripts are this generation’s love sonnets, though that goes just as much for the Shins as for Pretty Ricky.) Sadly, Pretty Ricky is nowhere to be found on the Sound Garden’s list of its weekly top sellers, though the Shins did manage to claw their way to the top spot of this list, which inexplicably winds up in our fax machine’s tray every week. So let’s see what Baltimore is currently spending its non-iTunes dollars on.

In second place is the new solo album by Sean Price, former member of Heltah Skeltah and erstwhile member of ex-hardcore NYC street crew/current indie hip-hop titan Boot Camp Clik, moving an astonishing 40 copies–and since this isn’t New York, we have to assume that someone other than his mom bought them. Except on the Sound Garden’s web site, the No. 2 slot is occupied by the sleepy new collaborative effort by Britpop’s sallow-looking Paul Simon, Damon Albarn. The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, aside from its asinine title, isn’t a particularly bad record, but if you’re going to use the bassist from the world’s last great rock ‘n’ roll band and the fella who manned the drum stool for Fela Kuti, you might want to, you know, pick up the pace a bit. The rest of the Top 10 is rounded out with a local mixtape by Bossman, releases from nonentities Dropping Daylight and Damien Rice, schmindie stars Deerhoof and Of Montreal, hip-hop from Mos Def and Young Jeezy, and inexplicable blue-eyed soul heartthrob Robin Thicke. Only Pretty Ricky can save us now.

| Image by Frank Hamilton

People are going to start to think that Noise is on Wham City’s proverbial and collective dick, but really, we just went out to see Beach House for an early show before jetting a few blocks over to Sonar for the world-famous Beatnuts, one of the most schizoid two-shows-in-one-night combos we’ve experienced in some time. (For more on the ‘Nuts show, check this week’s forthcoming old-school paper version of CP for Jason Torres’ take on the intoxicated demons.) So color us surprised when we got to the Current Gallery–after an hour’s layover at an Inner Harbor bar enjoying $8 rail bourbon and nervously eyeballing the “Irish” band setting up in the corner while the Current, running behind, was still prepping the show–and it turned out to be a taping for a Wham City “talk show” featuring host Ed Schrader, interviewees Rjyan “Cex” Kidwell and David Yaffee of Food Not Bombs, as well as musical guest Beach House.

The mock talk was pretty funny, with Schrader’s ultra-deadpan, what-me-worry? host “character” coming off like a smart ass whose rapid-fire, slightly nervous repartee desperately tries to disguise the fact that he’s got no idea what the fuck he’s doing onstage. (Plus the usual Wham City goonery: The house band was a noise-rock drums-and-guitar duo.) A small sampling of what we learned: musicians are “gayer than most people,” according to Kidwell; the last album David Yaffee paid money for featured (shockingly!) “protest songs”; and both members of Beach House would choose the Zombies’ Odyssey and Oracle as their desert island disc.

The House’s lease holders, Victoria LeGrande and Alex Scally, were both apparently under the weather that night, but since their drowsy, afternoon-nap sound already feels like it’s popped two or three NyQuil gel caps, we can honestly say that our enjoyment wasn’t compromised by any viral infections or influenza strains. We were treated to a video beforehand, a dreamy wash of late-night party imagery that went all digital-video pixilated and made good use of its high-tech-meets-lo-fi production methods. Ditto the band’s music: Its shuffling rhythm tracks were triggered by Scally pausing and unpausing his laptop, as LeGrande’s hands crabwalked up and down her keyboard, producing creaky melodies and harpsichordlike runs. The handful of new songs weren’t too different from the heavily sedated mood music on the band’s excellent 2006 self-titled debut album on Carpark. (Overheard outside after the show: “Those new Beach House songs . . . I can’t wait to take drugs to those.” Now, kids, c’mon.) Scally’s guitar played high-register, heavily treated notes that hung in the air like country slide guitar pickled in heavy syrup, and LeGrande’s voice did something similar with vocal chords. The set was cut a bit short due to illness, and then it was back out into the cold, with Beach House’s summer-idyll-gone-to-seed music being the perfect accompaniment to freezing our asses off.

This morning Noise went to City Hall. Not one of our usual haunts–we only break out the suit when someone dies or, worse, gets married–so it was nice to do a little reporting from a place that wasn’t a band’s practice space/flophouse. The reason we were there was an audience with our city’s new mayor to announce this summer’s Paetec Jazz Festival, which will be causing traffic snarls in and around downtown and the Inner Harbor Aug. 9-11. We didn’t learn much that couldn’t have been distributed in a press release, but we did get to see Mayor Sheila Dixon unveil a giant business card to polite applause, so that’s something.

The mayor told us that “numerous other cities” were considered by the Paetec Corp.–a Rochester, N.Y.-based billion-dollar communications conglomerate hoping to replicate the jazz festival success (read: $$$) it’s had over the last six years in its home city–and that jazz was “probably my favorite of all the music we could have.” Festival director Marc Iacona told us that the “direct economic impact” on the city of Rochester during the festival is around $10 million, and that might be why this press conference focused more on the financials than the music. Mostly we got a lot of backslaps for the new administration and the festival’s local and national corporate sponsors, and a lot of corporate doublespeak about “bringing the community together” and the place where “business meets music.” Artistic director John Nugent seemed to have his heart in the right place as he said that, but when we hear people use the word “synergy” we still want to throw our coffee cups at them.

So we do have some unanswered questions which will presumably be answered in the next few months. Like, who’s playing this thing anyway? Mr. Nugent played it coy, saying that, in the music industry, until all the contracts are signed you don’t announce anything officially. He then asked the room who they’d like to see; someone to our left voiced the obvious choice of sax colossus Sonny Rollins, and Mayor Dixon threw out Earl Klugh. (We stifled ourselves from being “cute” and throwing out some free-jazz band.) Nugent also made sure to assure us that the festival would “definitely incorporate regional artists,” so maybe we’ll get to see some Red Room regulars or the New Volcanoes downtown. As of right now, the only confirmed venues are Pier Six and various parts of Power Plant Live!, though there will be ticketed and free, indoor and outdoor, concerts at a variety of locations.

Which raises another question, maybe the most pertinent one: Who’s going to come to this thing? According to the brochure for the ’06 edition of the Rochester festival, “club pass” tickets for the whole event ran $95, with individual events running anywhere from $15 to $95, and with the “name” events–like, uh, Woody Allen’s New Orleans revival ensemble–not being covered by said club pass. Not only that, but the ’06 Rochester lineup seemed kind of, well, weak. Noise’s taste in jazz might not be considered particularly “salable,” but the only names that immediately leapt out in a nine-day festival with nearly 100 acts were old-timers Billy Bang and Wayne Shorter, with the rest seemingly made up of NPR/Starbucks-y stuff and what looked suspiciously to the naked eye like jam bands. Of course, when you’re trying to sell a full line of festival merch, from golf caps to iPod cases, that might not be such a bad thing. How many people go to Artscape just for the bands and how many go for the socializing and the chance to vomit warm Miller Lite in the middle of Mount Royal Avenue? The big difference, of course, being that Artscape is free, free, free, and the Paetec Fest is not, or at least not entirely.

Noise will have updates over the next few months as some, you know, actual information is announced like lineups and whatnot, but for now you can visit the festival’s web site for basically the same info we just gave you.

So this past Friday night, Noise braved the cold and our own fears about aging to head to Sonar’s Taxlo party for the second or third or 15th installment of local sugar-shocked art/music/weird kids collective Wham City turning the club stage into its own satellite loft party. With candles burning, the Fat Boys’ version of “Wipeout” on the turntable, and a few dozen kids in patchwork outfits dancing like they were remaking 54 in a dark basement at MICA, it almost felt like one. (Once the drinks stopped being a buck, the spell was somewhat broken.) The Whamsters provided an evening of theater, stand-up comedians, video-game countdowns, a monologue from Dan Deacon where he and Lenny Kravitz took a ride on a giant comb through a river of hair, and, of course, songs about dead dogs and the eternal question of whether you’re really better off with that BlackBerry and iPod. We even got jumped on/bear-hugged during a dance number when we were rudely text-messaging someone, which we took as Wham City’s way of saying, “Yo, jerkoff, put the cell phone away and pay attention to what’s actually going around you.”

If the night wasn’t entirely about music, it was something like the infamous Sun City Girls show, related in an old interview, where the Girls “performed” as a trio of hobos shooting the shit down by the train tracks. But even when the Wham kids weren’t singing and dancing, an anarchic punk feeling ran throughout the night, a confrontational absurdity that moved it beyond your standard “wacky” improv troupe. If a joke or a song just hung uncomfortably in the air, fuck it. That’s your problem. You could hear the steady boom of dance music in the big room, and occasionally a dancer or two would wander in and scope the scene, baffled, usually turning and going back but occasionally staying to figure out why that guy was playing an accordion and telling a story about his grandfather’s horses. Thankfully most of the jokes worked; it was the funniest show–that was, you know, supposed to be funny–that we’ve been to in some time. (Choice line: “For a while I thought I was gay, but it turns out I was just being childish.”) In a better world, some TV scout would give these kids their own Wonder Showzen last week. It’d be canceled after one season, but we’d always have the DVD.

At the beginning of the night, there was a bit of tension as some Taxlo regulars, we assume, who didn’t quite “get” the Wham City kids threatened to turn things into a freaks vs. squares rumble, but thankfully any fights were averted. As one companion said, we’ve all thought about doing these absurd and wonderful things; the difference is that Wham City actually does it. It’s certainly the most fun you can have at Sonar, a place where, even when it’s sold out, the cavernous spaces can feel like the least-intimate venue on Earth. (No disrespect to the Sonar folks. It’s an architecture thing.) It was a floor-humping, wig-wearing, Charleston-dancing good time, and the next time Wham squats at Sonar, you probably won’t have anything better to do that night. What was the last show you were at that ended with a birthday cake and all the players onstage dancing to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”?

For the record Noise voted for the following:

The Ronettes – “Be My Baby”

Quad City DJs – “C’mon and Ride It (The Train)”

New Edition – “If It Isn’t Love”

Destiny’s Child – “Say My Name”

The Jackson Five – “I Want You Back”

Blackstreet – “No Diggity”

Althea and Donna – “Uptown Top Ranking”

SWV – “Right Here (Human Nature)”

Foster Sylvers – “Misdemeanor”

(Best we could find, sorry.)

TLC – “Creep”

So we’re glad to see the man getting some love in the wider world, But it seems odd that a guy who provided Def Jam with a minor regional hit in Young Leek’s “Jiggle It” (and potentially another one with Duece Tre Duece’s version of “Hands Up, Thumbs Down”) is making his national debut via the auspices of that old colonial imperialist musical gadabout Diplo. Diplo’s Mad Decent label releases two Blaq Starr EPs this March, Supastarr and Shake it to the Ground, the second featuring reworks by techno dudes Claude Von Stroke and Switch. The press release describes our man BS as “Something akin to the marriage of The Clipse, Radiohead, Carl Craig, and Peter Gabriel,” which even in the overpopulated realm of overexcited PR has us ROFL’ing our asses off. (If you’re reading, BS, we’d love a club tune to the melody of “Solsbury Hill.”)

In addition, Blaq Starr has shopped beats to the forthcoming M.I.A. and Yung Joc albums. (The problem, of course, is that finding good beats isn’t really M.I.A. or Yung Joc’s main problem.) He’s also, as City Paper contributor Al Shipley pointed out, the guy whose tunes are playing in many, if not most, of the Baltimore club YouTube clips, making him the unofficial soundtrack composer for the “Best Reason for the Internet”. So if you’ve got someone else who you think should be in the fallout shelter instead, we’d sure love to hear it. (For more info visit www.blaqstarr.com, and order his sick solo mixtape I’m Bangin’, or www.maddecent.com, neither of which seems to actually have any information about these EPs yet.)

Some young folks kick it between classes in their socks:

A young gentleman rocking off in his living room looking like his limbs suddenly have no bones in them anymore.

Popping in the street.

OK, they’re not all winners.

There’s probably a whole essay in how much this stuff resembles dances like the Charleston.

Mostly, this stuff just makes us feel way old and our joints hurt just looking at it. But there’s tons of it. The YouTube dance craze appears here to stay.

Meanwhile, on the other side of internet prime time, local avant-pranksters and circuit-benders Snacks, better known to the people at the phone company as Dan Breen and Tom Boram, have been uploading their own sensory-assault clips to their YouTube account, sent to us via an e-mail tip from Snacks themselves.

Vintage summer ’04 live footage of the boys at the True Vine record shop dressed for a day at the beach in Slumberland. They’re almost as good at dancing as the club music kids.

Flashin’ lights and funny noises.

Wherein Snacks re-creates Deliverance for the High Zero set.

Snacks re-edits a Middle Eastern Star Wars knockoff with its own new soundtrack.

Oh, and welcome to Noise, City Paper‘s new online forum for everything music, kinda music, anti-music, or somehow involving sound in one way or another.