SeanCarnage.com

Eleven months after it’s release, 40 BANDS 80 MINUTES! is still making the news. Watch for a new round of publicity to commemorate the 40 BANDS! one year anniversary in mid-November. (Oh, and contrary to what the review re-printed below says, the *production time* for 40 BANDS 80 MINUTES! was seven hours—the music *really* lasted just 2 minutes per band!!)

Various Artists
40 Bands/80 Minutes!
Sounds Are Active Films
www.40bands80minutes.com
DVD Rating: 7 / 10

by Dan MacIntosh

You might want to think of 40 Bands/80 Minutes! as the anti Coachella. Although Coachella also offers more music than one mortal can reasonably digest in a short period of time, it also presents alternative music that is relatively easy to swallow. Not so with this film, however. Most every group is loud and unmelodic, which means essentially forty different varieties of straight ahead noise. The press materials boast of punk, hip-hop and jazz in this mix, but these participants represent the edgier wing of all three genres. Most casual fans won’t recognize these band names, but it’s hard not to chuckle at monikers like Bipolar Bear and Veer Right Young Pastor.

If, by the way, you happen to be a right-veering pastor, an act like the dirty talking Karen Centerfold is certainly not for you. It’s basically an aging porn star – or a porn star wannabe – telling naughty stories over minimal music.

But whether participants behave like adult performance artists, as does Karen Centerfold, or just make a sandwich with their feet, as does Rob Williams, every act is forced to stick to the strict rule of only playing two minutes on shared equipment. And all this commotion took place on one night – March 6, 2006, to be exact – at one small club. The II Corral, this film’s venue of choice, is an experimental noise house and many of these group’s regularly participate in producer Sean Carnage’s Monday night concert series there. Seven hours of music was whittled down to a mere 80 minutes, with no retakes.

Although not exactly musical, Rob Williams is the Guinness World Record holding foot sandwich maker. He’s also a friend of director Carnage, and both worked together on QTN, the gay network. Williams fits because this scene is all about breaking conventions. Nobody does sandwich making performance art at House Of Blues, but this scene has a much bigger, less commercially-motivated umbrella…

Read the complete review here!

The new Urb magazine has a great review of the 40 BANDS 80 MINUTES! DVD. He’re what the cover looks like, not like you could miss this issue… “Gay and Gangsta in L.A.” Wasn’t it cool of them to salute us on the cover!?

J/K!

The Urb reviewer says stuff like “the bands are alive with adorable underground grit” (see even your dirt is animate and pretty darn cute) and asks, rhetorically, “Can you taste the baloney of happiness?” I think I like the sound…er… taste of that.

So thanks, Urb, for the review and the nice photo, too. I think it stands out on the page. On newsstands now… Check it out.

**Apparently the show Kyle did with me and Aaron Anavan is mentioned in the Clipd Beaks tour diary in the new XLR8R, so look out for that, too.

DON’T MISS THE SHOW TONITE WITH 40 BANDS! STARS WEEKEND WARRIOR!!!!

This one is in Carbon 14 Magazine. Get the new issue—this is the best write-up yet because the reviewer (punk legend & L.A. Weekly scribe Falling James [& Courtney Love’s hubby #1]) actually comments on the DVD extras. Woo-hoo!

40 Bands/80 Minutes!
(Sounds Are Active Films)

Every Monday at Il Corral in Los Angeles, the appropriately named Sean Carnage presents a night of musical carnage with all manner of experimental, anti-rockist noisemakers and offbeat solo art-folk singers. This DVD documents the 40 performers who played at his club in one night last year, March 6, 2006. The catch was each band had to play a two-minute set, which most folks did by squeezing in one or two really short songs, or by geeking out noisily and randomly until they reached the 120-second limit. The idea is fascinating, even if some of the bands from this Hollywood avant-rock scene tend to be amateurish and abrasive instead of truly experimental and/or enjoyable. It’s surprising how many bands are boring long before their two minutes are up, including a few who make those two minutes seem 10 times longer. But there’s also some pretty freaky stuff that will grab your attention and spin your head around, like Bacon Tears Up Business, which is one just guy playing drums, trumpet and sound effects, and he cooks up a driving, droning groove. Some of the various guitarists sound like they’re out of tune because they don’t know what they’re doing, and then there are bands like the Amazements and Bipolar Bear, where the guitars seem purposefully sour to create an effectively new and bendable, Beefheartfelt sound. Veer Right Young Pastor also have an intriguingly rusty, twisted roots vibe. Captain Ahab and I Rape Nick Lachey put out a more synth-based, Screamers-style aggression. Anavan puts even more juice and swagger to its Screamers/Crass-like hybrid, and are one of the standout bands overall. Extreme Double Bubble spazz out until the singer’s shouting vocals are drowned in echo, while Erebus, Nyx & Stx are nightmarish in a Babes in Toyland vein. Faux for Real have a goofy, Gravy Train-like lo-fi rap-dance thing going on, and the saxist for Slutty Knuckles literally falls all over the place to get the proper manic tone out of his instrument. There are noisy outfits like I Heart Lung and Wives (their last show ever) dishing up landslides of chaos, though Halloween Swim Team steps away from its own ranting and raving long enough for a soothingly shadowy midtempo break. Abe Vigoda (um, not the actor) cranks out some neatly serrated post-punky riffs, Explogasm bursts with a kinda frightening heliumized-Chipmunks disco mania, and Harassor marches through the metalcore sludge.

BONUSES: There are two audio commentaries with the director and bands, backstage scenes, a photo gallery, and a mini-sequel called “10 Bands/20 Minutes” with “all the bands that wouldn’t fit in the feature.” Several of these extra bands are among the most interesting on the DVD, especially the creepy piano pop of Bavab Bavab and the out-there noise of Camarillo Blues Triangle, who are closer to the Stooges’ “L.A. Blues” than they are to real blues. Ironically, the best and most memorable song of all comes at the very end. It’s by the Health Club, and it’s one of the few tunes here that has a tune, pushed along insistently by doomy Joy Division/Middle Class-style chords and a nicely dour atmosphere. A successful experiment in rocking out.
-Falling James, Carbon 14 Magazine

HERE’S A GREAT NEW REVIEW FROM UNDERGROUND METAL MAG, DECIBEL!

Click on the magazine cover and follow the link (or read the text below):

40 Bands/80 Minutes
Sounds Are Active
Not recommended for use with Ritalin

“I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is,” might be the best chorus for any song under two minutes. Then again, it’s all in the conviction that unsigned L.A.-based electro hip-hop group Faux for Real sells it with. Challenging bands to prove their worth in two minutes or less, the producers of 40 Bands/80 Minutes rounded up a motley crew of acts from all imaginable genres. Extreme music standouts include bearded doomsters Harassor (in the Asunder vein of screamy doom), Converge worshipers Weekend Warrior, like-minded punk rockers Abe Vigoda (too bad it isn’t really Abe Vigoda), Slutty Knuckles, with their free jazz-laden scream-core, and Bipolar Bear (great name!), with their annoying-core punk.

Naturally, a lot of the bands are pretty awful. Groups like the grating noise ensemble Halloween Swim Team and weird-dude-in-a-trucker-cap Unwrinkled Doctor seem more interested in making a racket than making their two minutes of fame count. In this regard, as a documentary of the L.A. music scene, the film is very fair. Perhaps the whole show’s highlight is Wives’ final performance. Watching these decent punkers squeeze three songs into two minutes on a borrowed rig, it’s too bad they didn’t get more credit when they were around. One cool special feature is how you can select the bands alphabetically (too bad you can’t play them that way), and there’s also 10 more bands in 20 minutes. (Notably, Debaser do a low-end, synth-metal hybrid).

Also, extra special props go to the band I Rape Nick Lachey, a spacey grindish concoction, for actually coming up with the idea of raping Nick Lachey. They’re not gay, but their boyfriends are.
—Kory Grow, Decibel Magazine

HERE’S AN AMAZING REVIEW OF HEALTH, FOOT VILLAGE, & OTHERS…. THEY MENTION 40 BANDS! BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THEY DISCOVERED THE L.A. UNDERGROUND… GREAT TO HEAR, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE DVD WAS DESIGNED TO DO—TURN PEOPLE ON TO NEW MUSIC!

“We first saw HEALTH in that nice 40 Bands 80 Minutes doc about the wonders of LA scene…” (Follow the link and read the rest for yourself… this one’s LOOONG)