Recap Burial Hex, Zola Jesus, and Drunjus at The Frequency

A small audience battled an ongoing winter shit-storm Monday night to get to The Frequency for a bill of musicians who usually don’t emerge in local rock clubs--local projects like Burial Hex and Drunjus, self-styled purveyors of primal, abstract "drone" music who tend to lurk in venues like the recently closed warehouse space The Tomb. They record prolifically but don't bother with promoting their improvised, disorienting, sometimes terrifying audio experiments to a wider audience: Almost by nature, it's an intensely insular creative community. The music instead is accessible only to those who come looking for it, people who'd rather sink into an immerssive trance than nod along to familiar guitar riffs. The music falls under the wide umbrella of “noise,” aptly and inadequately named for its emphasis on sonic tweaking over conventional song structure. But Monday’s show from Burial Hex, Drunjus, and Zola Jesus, however esoteric, revealed a variety and craft that isn’t so easy to sum up.

Burial Hex and Zola Jesus

During Drunjus' set, long-haired beardos Endless and Dan Woodman sat cross-legged amongst a monumental clusterfuck of vintage synthesizers, guitar pedals, and thrift-store electronics. The audience swayed and stared off into the distance as Endless rotated between three analog synthesizers to create the repetitive, sonically consuming force he refers to as "drone," frequently turning knobs and flipping switches to alter the speed and distortion of the throbbing pulse. He added sparse hints of melody with a couple of old Casio keyboards. Woodman crawled into Endless’ rumbling tunnel of synth-fuckery with a Moog pedal, shaping its feedback with two expression pedals. On top of that, he was running what he called “new-age whale cassettes” through a loop pedal, periodically using compression and delay pedals to mess with the tone.

Zola Jesus, the no-wave soul-trash brainchild of 19-year-old Madisonian Nika Roza Danilova, followed up. Danilova hasn’t played out much, despite putting out music on at least three small record labels, including an upcoming 12” on Troubleman Unlimited. Clad in a black dress, black leggings, and black heels, she led a synth player, bassist, and drummer through a brooding, improvised take on her industrial-pop. While the band didn’t quite summon the bleak sci-fi dirtiness of her recorded music, Danilova made up for it by heaving her voice between ethereal lows and maniacal shrieks. At times, Danilova evokes a haunting combo of Siouxie Sioux and Ronnie Spector, blending a pop sensibility into her abrasive but operatically full voice.

Dead Luke (who also opened the show as half of the duo Absinthe Minds), held the backing band together with his Mini-Korg synthesizer, pushing it as far as it could go to add swirling textures and scattered melodies. The minimal two-note bassline of Lindsay Mikkola proved crucial to the pulsing set opener “Odessa,” as Danilova repeated a line that sounded like “Don’t wake the baby” in her nervous vibrato. Drummer Max Elliott’s redundant tom-tom pounding sounded out of step with the rest of the band, though, as he fumbled against the beat.

Also dressed head-to-toe in black, Clay Ruby closed out the night under his Burial Hex moniker, fusing power electronics, Occult philosophy, and fractured industrial rhythms. Ruby didn’t say a word when he took the stage. Instead, he began by holding down continuously droning minor chords on an old keyboard. The table in front of him was completely covered in self-modified gadgetry, from an antique drum machine to an old sampler. As he began building a slow, industrial loop, he slowly waved his microphone in the air, letting it feed back into a sampler. When he did bring the mic to his face, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he gargled out a mash of words that sounded like the guttural heaves of a demon.

As the noisy loop got louder, and his vocals intensified, Ruby began slamming a reverb unit (ripped from an old amplifier) against the table, creating a thunderous roar. A couple terrified customers in Badger sweatshirts peeked into the music room from The Frequency’s bar to see who the fuck was opening this sonic portal to hell. The set climaxed in a genuinely eerie fit, as Ruby flailed around the stage, howling like a guy who’d freaked out in the middle of a séance. The loop reached a screaming pitch, and Ruby’s eyes stayed rolled back. At this point, even Decider thought it would be a good idea to take a few steps back. The loop built to a massive swirling crescendo or terrifying noise blasts. Ruby slowly turned a knob, making the loop grow faster and more intense. When the noise reached its peak, he cut it off abruptly, and the set ended. Portal closed.