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"We'd book ourselves as a band, then we'd show up, and then we got out crowbars and started wrecking the place," Jupitter-Larsen explains.
After a few years it became difficult to book gigs, he says, recalling a performance at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"At this one particular performance, one inside agitator got a little excited, and instead of lighting the smoke bomb after 20 minutes, he did it after two minutes," Jupitter-Larsen recalls. "Now, these weren't like your ordinary Halloween smoke bombs. These were military smoke bombs that we were using. So the air went from being perfectly clear to being this milky white smoke in a matter of a few seconds. So it was complete pandemonium. The Police Department came; the Fire Department came because there was so much smoke. They evacuated not just the club, but the residential buildings that were adjoined, and the entire student union building had to be evacuated. Then the poison control board had to come, because people were having allergic reactions to the sulfur, and, um, so we were banned from the campus after that.
"And, in fact, in '88 I had to leave Colorado, because I was banned from every venue there."
Indeed, the smoke bomb is still legend among University of Colorado police, officers there say.
So Jupitter-Larsen headed to California, tired, he says, of bashing clubs to bits. Besides, club owners had taken to chasing the Haters off with firearms, which gave Jupitter-Larsen the jitters.
"After 10 years of wrecking venues, the novelty wears very thin," Jupitter-Larsen notes. "I personally thought I had made my point, and there was no need to go on."
But entropy remained to be celebrated. So Jupitter-Larsen changed his approach.
"I got more and more interested in erosion, in sanding and grinding things," Jupitter-Larsen says. "So I'd do shows like pushing live microphones into power grinders. So the amplification of erosion has become the recent theme. It's kind of like this year's motif. During most of this decade, it's been things like that, just amplifying things getting sanded or ground up."
Helpfully, Jupitter-Larsen's new compact disc, Drunk on Decay, is adorned with this black-and-white sticker: "All sounds on this CD were produced from a suspended, amplified funnel dragging and eroding on rotating sandpaper."
And that's exactly what it sounds like: Bzzzzzzzzzzz Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz Bzzzzwrrrr oooombbzzzzzzzz Bzzzzzzwrrrr oooombbmmmmzzzzz ....
For what seems like hours, and hours, and hours, and hours.
Maria Moran, aka Zipper Spy, aka Pauly Ester, blinks into the sunlight as she opens the door to her southwest Oakland industrial warehouse. It's 3 p.m., and she's just waking up for the day. She often spends her evenings composing and recomposing synthesized snippets of noise, she says, and she has just finished a particularly long night of it.
Maria is a tiny woman -- slim, wiry, shoulder-high -- and her shy, halting manner hints at a past life as a smallish version of Rocky Balboa's wallflower girlfriend, Adrian.
But Maria's no Adrian. She helps make ends meet doing professional industrial welding jobs. She worked for years as bassist in a touring L.A. punk band. She's created soundtracks for B-grade horror films, and still does sound work for movies and television. She's a producer for local rock bands. She's a sculptor, and her steel, human-esque figures sprout up sporadically from her warehouse's gray pavement floor.
Her true love, though, is her noise, which she makes by assembling subtly altered natural sounds into eerie waves of groans, chirps, clangs, thuds, and buzzes. Recorded, looped back onto themselves, layered over each other, and faded one into another into the next, the sounds Moran creates contain subtle rhythms that are at times monotonous, and sometimes startling. While distinct, each composition seems to evoke that uncomfortable horror-movie feeling that something untoward is about to happen.
Moran first started making weird sounds as a college student in Colorado. This early noise began as a form of therapy, she says.
"I was wondering why I was so crazy, so I started to take samples of sounds with my tape recorder, and I started making weird instruments out of garbage I found. I was able to make these big pieces and make sounds out of them, and I ended up getting a grant," she says while nervously trying to occupy her delicate hands. "Me and a friend started to write music for those instruments, and I thought, 'Even if I'm crazy, I will at least be heard.' "
She started recording soundbites from talk radio shows -- "I was just amazed at the things they would say," she says -- and then looping the words into her groaning, chirping, clanging noise worlds.
The effect is quite disturbing.
"We have confirmed things you couldn't believe: about extraterrestrials visiting the planet Earth; ghosts walking on the planet Earth; demons from hell appearing; angels from heaven; the sightings of the Virgin Mary; and the dead walking among the living. I wonder America!" is a transcription of one of her more alarming splices of radio samples.
She arrived at an artistic crossroads about three years ago, Moran says, when she was out with her digital audio tape recorder, grabbing snippets of sound. She happened to have a parka on, and her microphone picked up the noise from her zipper. Run through her sound mixing equipment at home, its muffled, crackling buzz became a wonderful, haunting, "most amazing" sound, she says.
"Now, I try to include amplified zippers in everything I do," she says.
The zipper sounds -- run through synthesizers, mixed via her dining table-size studio sound board, slowed down, warped, then looped into endless hums, rattles, and chugga-chugga sounds -- become part of the crawling aural montages that make up Zipper Spy's brand of noise. One track on her new CD, called Watch Your Damage, consists of an echoey, clangy, clanking noise, which repeats itself amid far-off buzzing, muted, drowsy-sounding, train whistle-like cries, and a constant, tidal-wave roar.
