A Place to Bury Strangers
Seemingly every few months since the dawn of Sonic Youth, a new buzz band emerge using messy, puke-brown guitar squall to wow critics and annoy everyone else. A Place to Bury Strangers are not one of those bands. They’re noisy, but their squall is sculpted, obsidian and wrapped around seductively sad vocals. Excluding My Bloody Valentine, these Brookynites’ set promises the weekend’s coolest opportunity for hearing loss.
Closer Ocean has front man Oliver Ackermann tearing the strings off his guitar while much of the audience close their eyes to avoid the nauseating strobe. Lunches stay down and all is forgiven when the band finish their set and walk into the crowd, chatting, signing merchandise and posing for pictures with anyone and everyone who asks.
Their concentrated musicality is so intense that unwanted feedback and implicit intention melt into a wash of calculation through ‘Ocean’, ‘Breathe’ and ‘Half Awake’.
That though doesn’t even begin to prepare me for one of the best performances i’ve seen in a long time and it is a performance, their is no feeling that you are part of this, it’s just three people in their own little world, playing the best 40 minutes of sonic, wall of noise guitar, with brutal drums and a vocal that somehow manages to soar above, yet be part of the whole mix, you will ever see. They are that good and I say that despite the fact they don’t utter a single word to the crowd, the stage is filled with smoke, the video rolls behind them and they are just unstoppable.
When I opened it up, I noticed that it has hand written “Octave Clang #1, 2004, Oliver” on the inside lid….I assume this means it was the first Octave Clang ever made/sold and it corroborates where it was found(in Brooklyn where DBA was based out of). Also note that this one is built into a smaller footprint than the production model ones.
There is variety to the album with the constant fuzz bringing everything together. I love the sound. It is definitely worth the listen, and I am sure that anyone with the appreciation will thoroughly enjoy it, but I could not recommend it to someone who exclusively listens to old-fashioned rock or insert other non-shoegazing genre.
The three new songs they play this evening seem more about poise than power; ‘In Your Heart’ and ‘Forcefield’ particularly sharing a healthy kinship with Pornography-era Cure or even the tumultuous roar of Killing Joke circa Fire Dances. If anything, tonight’s show more than amply demonstrates their ability to craft deft songs of ubiquitous beauty and even though familiar set closer ‘Ocean’ is bathed in a halo of muddy noise and delay, there’s a general feeling here that A Place To Bury Strangers wish to be seen as more than just a government health warning for tinnitus.
Theirs isn’t so much white noise as nightmare rock, a volcanic eruption that couldn’t be any less bothered with melody and tune, rather creating a din that threatens to turn the venue into rubble.
A Place to Bury Strangers at La Mecanique Ondulatoire Tonight.
If you like the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and a louder “wall of sound” Raveonettes, check this band. They are the torchbearers of contemporary melodic noise rock. High feedback, but catchy. Bring earplugs or roll up bits of toilet paper. This venue is smaller but well worth a look if you don’t know it.
Curtis turned Edge on to an over-the-top new fuzz pedal by a company called Death by Audio, which ended up defining the grinding rhythm-guitar sound of both No Line on the Horizon and FEZ-Being Born. “No Line blew my mind — he’s using that pedal in a textural way that it wasn’t intended to be used at all,” says Curtis. “The Edge makes the guitar seem like such a beautifully simple instrument.”
Thank God for A Place To Bury Strangers’ Missing You. It has ‘HATE’ tattooed on one hand and ‘GRRR’ tattooed on the other, rocks like Charles Manson swinging the J&MC and feels like being chased by Leatherface out of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Intensely intense but oh, way cool. Single Of The Week.
The Brooklyn based trio, hold their own against such cult comparisons as heard on the intense wall of sound that makes up their self-titled debut album.
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I love reading Paul Auster, following his stories as they go in and out of fantasy and reality. In “Man in the Dark: A Novel“, the man creates a story in which he is bewildered, loved, and final destroyed as he tries to reconcile two realities, and his own fate. His own life whose events have taken him to a place where he doesn’t quite fit and can’t really help the ones he loves. As usual, Auster provides excellent work for us to experience and enjoy.
Enigmatic psychedelic rock at its finest, A Place To Bury Strangers have the crowd fixated within seconds as their kaleidoscopic projections engulf the stage and audience and ‘Missing You’ explodes into our ears. The barrage of percussion, echoing guitars and frenetic noise melts away the distance between band and audience with fuzzy rock perfection. ‘Don’t Think Lover’ with its mellow refrain and hypnotic drumbeat is fabulous and puts a smile on everyone’s face. ‘I Know I’ll See You’ is frantic and really gets the crowd moving to the careering beats as frontman Oliver Ackermann paces the stage, thrashing his guitar around and slamming his tremolo at a hypnotic rate.
Reminiscent of the Shoegaze Era, with typhoons of static fuzzing distortion and echoes that take away all vocal clarity, ‘Missing You’ would sound pretty damn good if it didn’t sound like it was recorded in a tin can.
During the finale, the sound reached a stage that even watching members of Dead Confederate retreated backwards. Guitarist Oliver Ackermann said nothing throughout, only stopping to give a quick wave as he left the stage. His band’s music had already done the talking in fine, and extremely loud, style.
Torchbearers of contemporary noise rock, NYC’s A Place to Bury Strangers blast their way back into Paris after passing through last November. Blurbs brag, ‘NYC’s loudest band’. Maybe, but what’s important to remember for this show, besides earplugs, is that while this reverb-loving bunch is part of a fine tradition stretching from Hasil Adkins, through the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and the Raveonettes, they are above all a colossal hommage to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Which means it’s not cacophony, it’s melodic noise, if you don’t mind the oxymoron. Going deaf has never been so much fun.
Their music has ambition though, and this might just be the beginnings of something quite impressive. They might be shoe-gaze, but they are looking to the stars.
We present an approach for teaching design patterns that emphasizes object-orientation and patterns integration. The context of computer game development is used to engage and motivate students, and it is additionally rich with design patterns. A case study is presented based on EEClone, an arcade-style computer game implemented in Java. Our students analyzed various design patterns within EEClone, and from this experience, learned how to apply design patterns in their own game software. The six principal patterns of EEClone are described in detail, followed by a description of our teaching methodology, assessment techniques, and results.
Object serialization is the process of saving an object’s state to a sequence of bytes, as well as the process of rebuilding those bytes into a live object at some future time. The Java Serialization API provides a standard mechanism for developers to handle object serialization. The API is small and easy to use, provided the classes and methods are understood.
The answer to the question “A Place To Bury Strangers’ Oliver Akkerman is noted for what other music related endeavour which has seen him become tenuously involved with the likes of U2 and Lightning Bolt?” was that Akkerman handmakes the Death By Audio range of boutique guitar pedals which are used by the above as well as the likes of Wilco’s Nels Cline.
Having just signed a deal with Mute Records (Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp), Brooklyn band A Place to Bury Strangers are bringing their wall of sound to Whelan’s on March 31.
If Oliver Ackermann is doing what I think he’s doing here—making his guitar sound like soul-sucking bagpipes—then he’s an even shrewder mad scientist than I thought.
The ‘loudest band in New York‘ are back in Ireland next Tuesday, March 31st; a must-see band for fans of noise and shoegaze and general sensory overload!
I was very impressed with APTBS last year when they made their Irish debut in Andrews Lane; lots of hellish customised sounds, guitar thrashing and tripped-out visuals making for a memorable evening!
