Sightings - The Aesthetics of Noise

Though traced back to the thriving US free-noise scene, Sightings actually prefer to describe themselves as a trashy-artsy-fartsy-punk band, citing as guiding lights Yoko Ono, Fushitsusha, Cabaret Voltaire, kraut-rock, Led Zeppelin, early industrial, and so on. Theirs is a sound that manages to blend together musical syntaxes that are often aesthetically poles apart, grinding them down into one.

Sightings formed in Brooklyn, New York, in 1999 as a trio – Mark Morgan, Richard Hoffman and Jon Lockie, respectively on vocals and guitar, bass and drums – pursuing the idea of music that belonged to the Big Apple's no wave. As the compositional approach of masters like Glenn Branca, Arto Lindsay, Contortions and the like teaches us, it's cacophony and feedback that create the melody. The distinctive feature of the Sightings sound, though, seems to be an indistinct magma of noise that rises up overbearingly, leaving no trace of actual instruments. A brain-splitting splatter sound. From a certain point of view, the most extreme grind-core noise achieves a similar result, but Naked City or John Zorn have little to do with Sightings. It would probably make more sense to compare them to Branca's most extreme output, where symphonism is absent and what prevails is a bestial wall of dissonant shards racing along in a furious post-hardcore sprint.

The Brooklyn trio's sound lacks the rhythmic shifts, the tonal changes and the certain kind of "technicality" found in noise acts like Boredoms, Fushitsusha or the more recent Lightning Bolt or Flying Luttenbachers; their atmosphere is a violent grey blanket, a dark, cold, murderous schizophrenia that beats you to death with blind hardcore rage. The "illiteracy" of Dna is cited here as a model, stripped of any intellectual pretension. It's coarse-grained, primordial matter, raw cannibalism: compulsive urgency, the venting of perverse impulses. More in line with the extremist claustrophobia of Big Black, Mars, Merzbow, with European dark-industrial music and with the brutal aesthetic of early Atari Teenage Riot: Sightings' music is hardcore, specifically instrumental techno-hardcore. The trio reinvents rock's traditional instruments to showcase a new kind of noise you can dance to, which is why the more rhythmic moments and the more dynamic tracks tend to come out on top.

Already on their debut album, the self-titled Sightings, the contortions and demented screams overwhelm the listener, catapulting them into hell. Rumbling drums and shredded guitars, the clattering punk-noise of "45 On The Back", the noise'n'roll of "Cuckoo", the apocalyptic doom-techno charge of "I Feel Like A Porche". On "Hate Take Hate", amid shards of screaming guitars, a possessed voice apes David Yow of Jesus Lizard.

Overall, the less rhythmic tracks are also the less thrilling ones. "Pitch Of My Voice" is enlivened by noise tribalism bordering on industrial. "Wax Doors" too is driven along by a hulking, cacophonous rhythm section. The bass sits somewhere between a ship's horn and a mammoth's bellow. It sounds like a hip-hop sneer, but it's danceable industrial-noise. "Leather Pants Couple" is mad-punk, and "Waiting At The Steakhouse" howls filthy techno-hardcore.

A rotten record and a ferocious statement. Unlike Wolf Eyes, who use electronics to violently destabilize the matter they reshape – often managing only to brush against its smoking surface – Sightings move toward that same goal using rock's quintessential triad: bass, guitar & drums – battered, mangled, brutalized to the point of yielding an electric simulacrum that seems to spill over into a parallel, other world… A sound that is a magnetic field of "sonic" waste, stripped to the bone, to the point of conveying the idea of an indecipherable robotic mechanization.

The band's more violent, cacophonous side seems to take over on their second album, Michigan Haters, released the same year as its predecessor. A compressed, murky track that on the debut never broke the three-minute mark (the atmospheric dark of "I Feel Like A Porche") here becomes a hammering, eight-minute delirium of voice and guitar, losing much of its original appeal. The old-school-hardcore of "Ich/ic" and "Cargo Embargo" will end up dominating the rest of the record. Short, blasted-out tracks of an indistinct, infernal sonic magma, with bass and drums pounding under the skin while the guitars shred like crazed blades. The psychedelia of "Chili Dog" returns to inhabit Sightings' more atmospheric, more rhythmic noise, delivering eight minutes you can dance to with your eyes closed. On "Guilty Of Wrecking", a limping morse-code rhythm draws attention to different dynamics.

Those very dynamics would change considerably on the following record, Absolutes. Here the band seems to be reaching for the variety that was missing from their first two works, especially in the way tracks evolve internally.

Even the opener, "White Keys", shifts twice right from the start, looping a drum roll while Mark swallows the microphone, repeating the same phrase over and over in what sounds like baboon language. The sonorities shift frequently, and you can almost make out actual notes ("Anna Mae Wong"); there's the palpable beat of "Bishops", and the white noise is joined by the trotting gait of an industrial carriage ("Infinity Of Stops"). There's more variation, different moods across the tracks, and a drum machine used mostly as if it were a noise guitar.

Exceptions are the h/c of "E.E", the disjointed "Right Side Of The Hall" and the measured cadence of "Canadian Money". The robotic "Reduction" closes out a varied record that promises a different future.

Recorded by "guru" Samara Lubelsky (Sonora Pine), who also plays violin on the album, Arrived In Gold meets expectations and gives us a more mature band, one more willing to bare its soul. Even if it's basic arithmetic, here at last we can watch Sightings engaged in genuine sonic calculation. It's a different world compared to their early records. Every rustle, every whistle, every drum hit, every tick of wooden sticks on metal stands out clearly.

The angular, assault-like approach and abrasive speed haven't changed, but we're now at a different level of sonic definition, with a more dynamic use of instrumentation. Controlled chaos and eardrum-splitting ferocity rule over a sound that's far leaner, but more defined. It's no longer a single carpet of nails in which the instruments are impossible to tell apart. Beyond the band's characteristic expressive urgency, the compositions gain depth through a communicative drive and an unexpected skill in painting moods. The noise-industrial shades à la Throbbing Gristle/This Heat grow more pronounced, bringing the work closer to Wolf Eyes or Black Dice, though the claustrophobia still recalls Big Black. Pairing electronics with the trio's instrumentation serves to filter and transfigure the sound to the point where the instruments are almost impossible to distinguish.

"One Out Of Ten" opens the album with a sobriety previously unheard from the band, a pulsing arrhythmia, and closes with a haunting, strangled piano; "Sugar Sediment" is a hypnotic bass rising and falling under a guitar that grinds asphalt. The drums enter softly; it almost sounds like June Of '44 who don't know how to play. The beginning and end of each track start coming into focus. Though there's no trace of minimalism, the sound is lucid in its own filth. Heavy European industrial influences abound: "Odds On" is pure Einsturzende Neubauten; "Internal Compass" is tekno-samba-industrial with an automated voice. You can hear a double vocal line before the schizophrenic final solo; "Dudes", in a crescendo of vocal spasms (Jesus Lizard-style) and wah-guitar, twists and rises into a noise-rock catharsis. "The Last Seed" stretches out and catches its breath before "Arrived In Gold, Arrived In Smoke", another hammering industrial track.

The album, then, shows a maturity paired with an inspiration that can only leave us eagerly awaiting their next move.

Take a few hundred pounds of scrap metal and dump them on the roof of your car. That's End Times (2006): a cascade of metal debris onto sheet metal, with a result for the ears very similar to that of the aforementioned car roof. Smashed to pieces.

The album is yet another extremely risky intersection of noise maximalism, punk attitude and industrial rhythms. Sightings drop any hint of melody and return to the ferocity of their self-titled debut, reclaiming the claustrophobic, anguished sound that defined them and pushing the volume back up to ear-splitting peaks. In this respect, "The Brains You Were Born With" is their triumph: amplifiers collapsing in on themselves, a frenzied rhythm section and a sandpapered voice screaming from a distance, trying to be heard.

But End Times isn't just a return to their roots — the steps forward taken with Arrived In Gold haven't been forgotten at all: you can catch glimpses of Dead C's "Tusk" in the percussive work of the closing "Slow Boat", or find yourself tapping your foot along during "Only Below", swept up by its hypnotic crescendo. "Carry On" is a lament of voice and feedback over a circular rhythm, "All The Scams" proves the Harry Pussy lesson was well learned, and "My Due Potion" isn't far removed from the tribalism of certain freak-folk material.

Produced by Andrew W.K. (already at the helm for Wolf Eyes), Through The Panama (2007) pushes the band's musical evolution even further, cleaning up the sound and reaching peaks of unexpected catchiness, while also showing a remarkable artistic determination that bodes well for the future. "A Rest" has a hip-hop rhythm, an irresistible groove, more unsettling than Tricky. "Debt Depths" edges toward Trent Reznor, with a sickly voice later swallowed up by the instruments. "Cloven Hoof" recites sobs of disjointed tribalism. The cover of Scott Walker's "The Electrician" is a macabre futurist dance that, for the first time, lets us hear Mark actually "sing", lascivious and perverse.

The band surrenders to its darkest theatricality. "This Most Real Of Hells" recites poetry, panting through gritted teeth: by now Morgan sees himself as a poet: "No longer intent on destroying rock music, but focused on bringing into sharp relief the dust and debris it has left behind" (Adam Strohm, "Fakejazz"). "Certificate Of No Effect" revisits the tekno sounds of their early days. "Degraded Hours" intones a folk prayer-like chant. "Black Peter" warms up its muscles to gallop off again, unleashing the energy forcibly held back in Sightings' newer sound. And it reminds us that the first thrills they gave us were, in fact, techno ones; and we can only be glad of it… and keep on "dancing".

As shown on their last two records, the band can be both convulsive and relatively "rational", and City Of Straw (2010) seems to confirm this fully. A numbing noise-industrial furnace that starts clouding the mind right away, amid mechanical scansions, bursts of white noise and a degenerate, toxic vocal ("Tar and Pine"). The sound of the New York trio is, as ever, the illegitimate offspring of some of the most abrasive and radical adventures in popular music (Mars, Flying Luttenbachers, Einsturzende Neubauten), as shown by claustrophobic numbers such as "Jabber Queens" (storms of feedback and metal debris laying siege to the voice), "Saccharine Traps" (hideous japa-noise raving) and "Hush" (a deafening concert of assorted screeches).

The band shows a certain consistency in pursuing the definition of a rather original post-industrial anti-music, even if it often plunges into the abyss of pretentiousness. In reclaiming the unsettling urban snapshots of Throbbing Gristle, our heroes show, in fact, one too many hesitations (the title track) — hesitation that also affects their attempt at a ballad for a world that's survived disaster ("We All Amplify"). When, on the other hand, the material grows more substantial, veering toward more "rock" dimensions (the psychoanalytic nightmare of "Weehawken", essentially Crust redone by Wolf Eyes, and the blazing "Sky Above Mud Below"), things take on a more digestible shape. But, honestly, it's too little.

In 2011 comes Future Accidents, a work released on Our Mouth, the label run by Brian Sullivan of Mouthus, which confirms that the trio's health is not exactly at its best.

Two sides packed with cacophonies, feedback, elastic and shambolic bass figures, toxic vocals, murky atmospheres and rhythmic structures that resemble malfunctioning gears.

Compared to the previous album, there are only four tracks here, on average longer, peaking with the nearly twenty minutes of the closing track. But these more stretched-out compositions (in constant motion, since they lack any real center of gravity other than the near-instantaneous transformation of destructive impulses) seem to amplify beyond measure the uncertainties already evident on the previous record. The subdued post-industrial setting of the lengthy "Public Remains" reveals a sly taste for sinister, "elusive" tableaux, a will to weave sonic cobwebs that, in this case, lean decidedly toward pure and simple abstraction. This vicious circle of echoes, layers, loops, drones and so forth could go on forever, though by the halfway point a certain fatigue does start to set in.

This long immersion into a parallel world of mystery and dismay remains, nonetheless, the most interesting moment on an album that otherwise loses itself in the mere repetition of ideas expressed elsewhere with far greater conviction. Hence "To The World" (a noisy, disjointed pachyderm, wandering among bristling guitar exhalations and cavernous bass rumbles), "The Knotted House" (a lopsided dance that seems to aim at reaching a degraded hypnosis) and, finally, the derelict free-noise of "On A Pedestal".

Two years later, Terribly Well partly sets things right again. Wearing itself out amid rabid tribalism (“Mute’s Retreat”), slowly dissolving into the atonal miasma of “Yellow” or dancing dazedly through “Better Fastened” and “Bundled”, the album certainly draws on a good deal of experience, without introducing anything particularly new compared to the past.

The “mechanical” contraptions of “Take It In Trade” and “Bucket Brigades”, on the other hand, take the prize as the least convincing moments.

After announcing their breakup in 2013, the band posthumously released Amusers And Puzzlers, an album built around the long monolith of “Syllabus Of Errors”, which smears the space with a fragmentary succession of pulses, ramblings, feedback and percussive rumbles — a slow agony that leans on solutions that are anything but original (all things considered, it's the most banal track), yet still handled with the usual mastery. Around this emotional chasm, with more explosive clamor, gather no-wave legacies made of sordid bass maneuvers, noise-rock nausea, frenzied percussive dances and chaotic spirals (“Counterfeited”, “13”), disjointed p-funk as only Half Japanese can command (“1982”), repellent snapshots of sonic youth (“I Steal From My House”) and, above all, the hideous visions conjured by “Trials Of Peter”: a jumpy bassline, random explosions and guitar distortion pouring down like rain.

All things considered, a dignified swan song.

Contributions by Francesco Nunziata (“City Of Straw”, “Future Accidents”, “Terribly Well”, “Amusers And Puzzlers”) and Andrea De Pellegrin

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