The third and final day of All Tomorrow’s Parties New York started with a mighty bang that didn’t stop banging for an hour and a half: The Japanese noise troupe Boredoms dominated the early afternoon with their “Boadrum 9″ performance. The Boadrum series began in earnest in July of 2007 — 7/7/07, precisely — with 77 drummers arrayed in a snaking spiral on the Brooklyn, New York, waterfront, bashing away in a constantly morphing pattern. They wrote a fresh piece for 88 drummers and performed it in Los Angeles on August 8, 2008. For the 2009 version of Boadrum, as so much of the world has been forced to do in these lean times, they downsized: nine drummers only, hammering away in a club. (On September 9, 2009, they performed the piece in Manhattan; Sunday’s show came with no apparent numerological significance.)
That reduction in workforce was just one of the ways you could read the fraught economy and general global anxiety into the performance. The first two Boadrums have been beefed-up drum circles not just in form but in spirit: hippie-ish odes to participation and communal experience, monuments to breathtaking, gradual change. Boadrum 9 was fiercer and more unsettled — when drums fell into a groove (which they rarely seemed to do for long), it was a brutal, shoving one. Frontman Eye shrieked and grunted constantly. This seemed less drum circle and more exorcism, riddled with jagged peaks and suddenly plummeting valleys.
At the opposite end of the events-per-minute spectrum was another heavy Japanese act, Boris. The trio proceeded at an almost unbearably slow pace. Songs moved forward not by increasing in complexity — one two-note riff tolled out for the better part of a half-hour — but by gaining in feedback and ear-bleeding volume. On hand in the crowd was J...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily