Beyond the Coyote is all about bananas for me...

The Banana Twins are d. stine, Mat Lombardi and Pat Seymour

Beyond the Coyote is this weekend in Wicker Park. After perusing the line up of participating music acts, I decided to check out their web, Myspace, and Facebook pages to see what fare I might like to take in this year after being particularly bored during the previous Around the Coyote's offerings of cover bands, white boy reggae bands and Dave Matthews seizure-inducing light folk rock.

Occasionally, the selection process for bands at music festival confuses me.  There is a mixture of the polo and khaki clad art buying folks; whom I can only guess are the target audience for the music acts selected for most of this years participating venues. The other attendees who represent what "Wicker Parkers" are more commonly associated with, the artist community; the colorfully eccentric tattooed and pierced and the probably well-educated scummy clothed panhandlers on six corners. Beyond The Coyote is about the Flat Iron building opening its doors and letting drapes and squares get a peek at the art decking the walls and halls. Therefore, shouldn't the music reflect the artistic interest of the festival?

After going through the list of performers and their subsequent web promo offerings, I finally stumbled onto one Myspace page with only three friends. The band's name is Banana Twins (BT). The site had a plain background, nothing gaudy, a respectable band shot, and no comments adorning the page, of which I appeared to have been the 41st viewer.

What the page didn't do to offend in its presentation, was overcompensated for as soon as the first track started playing. There were no offensive lyrics, skits, or anything that banal.  The first thing that happened was an unabashedly simple noise of confidently distorted guitar chording. After the bass and drums had come in, the vocalist mumbled a few lines, and then all hell broke loose.  The already distorted guitars upped the ante on energy while he freely let his voice distort just as much as the guitars-almost melodic cacophony. This was pure kinetics-this was rock music. Drummer Mat Lombardi feels, "the Banana Twins are just exploring the boundaries of music (mainly rock) by dealing with elements of noise. The BT program is to embrace all of the things that make up the definition of noise in a musical context."

The next track that popped up started off innocently enough for the first two verses and choruses, then shockingly all of my tiny computer speakers became filled with a textured fuzz, notes, clinks, noise and striking overtones, then right back into a bass riff leading into the song once again.

I was thinking to myself, doesn't this sort of music, chaotically controlled,  brashly shimmering and with anarchic confidence, lend itself to the ears of the folks that are this festival's audience?  I guess I do not really know the answer to that.  It seems that complicated and avant-garde noise rock with implied meaning would sit along side painters' approach to the canvas, photographers composing through a lens, or a sculptor removing clay from a block to build or reveal something that is more than it is. It feels like this music is more than just the popular radio music: it deletes the flashiness, machismo, or expectation.

I had my music fanatic friend look at the Banana Twins Myspace page and see if he could enlighten me a little on what I was hearing.  In his experience, the Chicago noise scene consists mostly of people using laptop computers and mixing boards, a sort of audio design experiment.  The laptops have incorporated manipulated recordings into loops, mostly processed grating or piercing close-miked sounds, then the sounds are sent into the mixing board and from there the artist(s) fade the noises in and out and pan left or right. My friend told me that this type of performance generally left him indifferent because there were minimal aspects of performance.

In regards to the Banana Twins, he said that the band is not as much of a noise band as they are a rock band that uses noise to push the perceived boundaries of the form. Banana Twins bass guitar player Pat Seymour agrees with my friend's generalization about their band. Pat says, "When I think of noise music I think of Wolf Eyes or Merzbow, and what we are doing in Banana Twins is far from that. We are a noisy band, we have very loud songs and like our distortion pedals, but to say we make noise music would be misleading (now maybe I am being too narrow in my definition, but that's what I equate with noise music). I like playing in this band because pretty much anything is fair game. We have been trying to find a balance between playing more abrasive distorted rock music and more textured ambient improvised passages or combining the two (sometimes it works real well and others it doesn't)."

It seems that the Banana Twins are not concerned with ornate song writing as they are with spontaneous interaction, using the rock song template only as a skeletal structure and celebrating what happens between the sections. It seems like what my friend heard were tracks consisting of intros and outros, with the result that as songs they never drag, because the tension never really stops building and there are no clear releases. Comparing them to minimalists, he said that using the tension was much more strident than any black metal or hair bands attempt at subversion. To Pat their "music is very punk influenced, or at least influenced by the bands that were heavily influenced by punk, early Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Husker Du, those kind of bands."

Using my friend's analysis and after talking with the band members, I have concluded that Banana Twins is certainly worthy, if not essential to the Coyote. So come to the Coyote to hear something loud, because as Lombardi warns, "we use volume and distortion (almost the definition of hard rock) to excessive degrees, but include several other ideas such as: dissonance, repetition, non-rhythmic patterns, non-tonality, and cacophony.  But at the end of the day, we're just a rock band with less boundaries than most."

The Banana Twins seem to cast a light on the otherwise staid, predictable line up of verse/chorus/verse rock bands. At least, maybe they will jolt some of the khaki clad, possibly even some of the hipsters into experiencing art. As Lombardi puts it, come prepared to see a band that is "standing on that edge and doing the work, but hey, we can clear out a room with the best of them."

Moreover, who is to say that being frightened, annoyed, or angry because of the music presented is not as relevant as a beautiful melody, a strong hook, or sing-along chorus?  I guess we will see this weekend. The Banana Twins are playing at Piece (1927 W. North Ave.) at 11:00 pm on Friday and Club Lucky (1824 W. Wabansia) 2:00 pm on Sunday. For more information about the festival, visit flatironartists.