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“Experimental” music can be a frustratingly wide label. Here’s more precise language: An artist puts their mouth on a plugged-in glass shard and blows, alternately sounding like an elephant and a computer malfunction.
The musician in question is Lucas Granpa Abela, who will bring said presentation to Rochester this week.
“He sticks a contact mic on glass, squeezes some kind of lubricant or glue on it, and smushes it against his face,” said Carbon Records founder Joe Tunis. “It's amplified, and he makes a lot of like vocal guttural sounds that amplify through the glass. It's incredibly entertaining and a little scary to watch.”
Abela joins more than 20 other artists on the bill of a four-day festival celebrating the 30-year anniversary of Tunis's label, a longtime local haven for noise and so-called weird music. Tunis founded Carbon in 1994 and still runs it; he has released nearly 300 recordings on vinyl, CD, cassette and digitally since launching.
To mark three decades of releasing music slotted into the categories of "noise, improv, heavy, loud rock and weird music," Tunis booked the fest to reflect musicians of all varieties from around the globe. He will play with his own band, Pengo, alongside other sound-probing local acts like Nod and Only Vernal Pools.
Most sets will take place at Radio Social’s outdoor backyard space from July 26-28, with a kickoff night at the Psychic Garden DIY venue on July 25. Tunis also arranged an afternoon show at Needle Drop Records on July 26 to raise funds for the artists.
Other highlights include droning acoustic guitarist Erin Arn from Vienna, minimalist Philadelphia group Bitter Wish and homegrown performance artist duo Bloody Noes. A post-fest evening at Bad Bar Ending on July 28 caps off the experience.
“Most of the bands that are coming to town for this fall into two camps,” Tunis said. “They're either psych rock or shambling rock, which is how I describe Nod, or American primitive, like acoustic guitar players and fingerpicking guitar players.”
The two varieties represent Tunis’s personal taste, as does every project that he puts out on Carbon. After graduating from Rochester Institute of Technology, Tunis launched the label with a cassette release of his own lo-fi pop songs and “isolationist” recordings.
He has continued the label in the intervening decades largely due to stubbornness, despite his day job as a software developer. Still, he likes to celebrate Carbon’s milestones as they pop up.
“I usually do some kind of release, and they're usually compilations. This year, I was like, let's do a festival instead,” Tunis said. “I don't plan very well. So I asked a lot of people, and they all said yes. So then it became a multi-day event.”
He was inspired by a similar gig put on by the Philadelphia label Petty Bunco at a brewery. To pull off his own fest back home, Radio Social felt like a novel fit.
“It's somewhat outside of where most of the bands I deal with would play,” Tunis said. (To this point, Abela will bring his glass shard to Psychic Garden instead.)
Don Alcott, Radio Social’s general manager, said he’s looking to the Carbon bash as a case study to see if the venue can host other weekend festivals in the future.
“The experience of getting through a weekend, setting up and tearing down nightly, bringing things inside, all the gear — all that will be just sort of a test to see what something we can do on a regular basis,” Alcott said.
Tunis’s post-festival calendar is, admittedly, “a mess right now,” but he said he’s got his sights on organizing something special to mark the upcoming 300th Carbon Records release: “It’s going to be something, but I haven’t figured it out yet.”
Whatever shape it takes, it will be, by definition, experimental.
The Carbon Records 30-year anniversary festival kicks off Friday, July 25 at Psychic Garden and continues through Sunday, July 28 at Radio Social, with additional shows at Needle Drop Records and Bar Bad Ending. More information here.
Patrick Hosken is an arts writer at CITY. He can be reached at [email protected].
