At the Mountains of Madness

There is a scene in the 1990 film “Mountains of the Moon” in which a bug crawls into the ear of British explorer John Hanning Speke while he is asleep in his tent in Africa. Speke is jolted awake, he screams, he cries, he thrashes around his tent. He digs at his ear with his fingers, no luck. Then he pours hot wax directly into his ear to try to kill the little bugger, still no luck. Screaming in pain and horror all the while, Speke finally, desperately clutches for his compass and jams the compass needle into his ear. The scene ends with a blood-curdling scream over a desert landscape.

The above scene is the best way I can describe the experience of last night’s WHITEHOUSE show at DC9. Openers Wolf Eyes and Pig Destroyer, while full-force noise reckoners in their own right, sounded like the Spice Girls when compared to the noise wrought by the two-man WHITEHOUSE crew. Their set was fantastic and everything I had hoped for.

Comparing WHITEHOUSE’s noise assault to that horrific Speke scene captures the demolishing power of their ultra-heavy beats and spiteful Dalek-voiced ranting – but it also works in that it draws a connection between Speke, the Nile-source explorer, and what I find most interesting about noise music, the exploration of sound. Watching a truly great noise act explore the full potential of sound within a given venue is miraculous. Like Speke and his partner Burton, WHITEHOUSE are a pair of explorers, only their territory is that mysterious sonic continent that audiences rarely get to visit. And for one night, last night, we all got the chance to fight, love, and die knee-deep in the sand of that far away of shore.

Originally published on March 3, 2006.

I always liked this write-up.