The Conformists are an experimental rock band based in St. Louis, MO, formed in 1996. This show will serve as their 30-year anniversary, which is, frankly, ridiculous.
“Listening to The Conformists is like stepping into another dimension where every second, every note is a surprise that sweeps away the one before it. It’s a chaos that organizes itself, breaks apart, and rebuilds itself only to be shaken up all over again. The musical ideas are relentless, remarkable, and ever-shifting — enough to make metronome needles spin out of control. Anything is possible, anything is achievable, and everything is a musical feat — from breaking the sound barrier to the slightest breath. The St. Louis-based band indeed crafts with disconcerting mastery a unique, virtuosic, and boundless universe that plays with the conventions of music.
Barely recovered from Three Hundred — their bewildering and exhilarating previous album — None Hundred once again shakes us up and knocks us to the ground. With a relentless succession of minimalist and sublime passages, haunting and hypnotic repetitions, shifts in rhythmic direction, bass and guitar constantly teetering on the edge of dissonance, and a deep, intelligent voice whenever it appears, this new album is a blend of ceaseless, disorienting, and unexpected surprises, where each track is a feat of composition and production — an unparalleled and inventive work within the noise genre.
Although None Hundred stands as the logical follow-up to its predecessor, it becomes clear from the very first notes of the opening track, “Jesus Was a Shitty Carpenter,” that The Conformists won’t need more than the six tracks on this true gem to once again unsettle and bewilder us. Throughout the album, we’re swept through a whole range of emotions that come and go in record time: we’re overjoyed, we can’t sit still, we find ourselves smiling, left speechless — whether listening to “Swim Home” and its skipping-record-like ending, the intense 7 minutes and 34 seconds of “Times Beach,” the rhythmic drive and dissonance of “Quality” and “Fire at the Horsephanage,” or the remarkable closing track “Pro Gear, Pro Attitude”, where the bass and guitar interplay hypnotizes us before the drums finish the job alone. So, for thirty minutes, we’ll have listened to the music in a different way, with the utmost attention. A record by The Conformists isn’t just listened to. It’s experienced.”
-Thierry Mabon, Mowno Magazine (France)
Imelda Marcos is an avant noise rock band from Chicago whose sonic palette is pointillistic, percussive and rhythmic. NPR Music Viking’s Choice described the band as, ‘… hypnotic, buzzy, technical, but oh-so-fun noise-rock.
Radiator Greys is the long-running psychedelic noise music project of St. Louis-based artist Josh Levi. Since 2011, Levi has created a haunting assemblage of harsh noise, power ambient, and layered tape loops that borders on any number of expanding, experimental soundscapes.
