Brian Slattery Photo
“I’m trying not to be a slave to what I’m looking at. I’m trying to create an accident, and then use that accident. It’s the same thing with art and music. You’re trying to make it happen deliberately. I have entire albums that came about because of an accident.”
Mike Miglietta (pictured), a.k.a. Parlay Droner, one of the organizers of the Elm City Noise Festival, was talking about the connection between Ralph Steadman’s art and the music Miglietta makes. But it tied in more broadly to the philosophy behind the entire festival, a three-day, multi-venue extravaganza celebrating raucous music that takes a risk.
The Elm City Noise Festival appears on Thursday at Anna Liffey’s, Friday at Cafe Nine, and Saturday at Three Sheets. New York art-rockers Oneida — now marking 16 years since their first album — top a sprawling bill, from New Haven’s own Procedure Club, Black Fluff, Rivener, and Intercourse, to Tick Hive and The Forest Room, to the New London-area Watermelon, to former Fake Baby Justin Courtney Roberts’s project TOYZ.
Graham Honaker Photo
The Noise Festival comes on the heels of the success of the Elm City Folk Festival, a similar multi-night, multi-venue set of shows that Margaret Milano (of Cafe Nine) threw back in April. Shortly afterward, Miglietta said, he and Margaret “started talking about the avant-garde, underground music scene in CT, and how there’s an entire platform of music that promoters overlook, and they do interesting things.” Some of that music might appear at a bar gig now and again. But “a lot of the underground music stuck to house shows and DIY venues.”
Miglietta himself has been throwing shows for experimental bands for years. He organized gigs at the New Hawaii, a DIY venue out of a house bordering a cemetery in Southington. “We started booking shows once a month,” Miglietta said. “Between 2007 and 2008 we started doing one show every two weeks, even one show a week.”
One of the bands they booked was Future Islands, which broke big a couple years ago after a dynamic appearance on Letterman in 2014. A few years before that, however, they were playing in Miglietta’s living room.
“That was sort of like the training camp for what we’re trying to do now,” Miglietta said, meaning he and Milano. With the Elm City Noise Festival, “we wanted to celebrate unknown artists and pull in some bands that people are familiar with.” So they talked to Michael Kiefer of Twin Lakes Records — based simultaneously in North Branford and Brooklyn — to get Oneida to headline (see above for a video of the band performing in Paris); Kiefer also plays drums in Rivener.
The sense of growing a close-knit community permeates the Noise Festival the more you look. Miglietta and Milano are hoping to “bring new groups into the fold,” Miglietta said. “The idea is to try to turn some heads and help musicians build their own networks.” Thus each night features performers from here and elsewhere, playing together.
But, Miglietta added, it’s also about “reconnecting with old roots.” Tick Hive is from New Haven and “used to come to the New Hawaii when he was 14 years old.” Now he’s part of the festival himself.
City of Weird
New Haven struck both Miglietta and Milano as a natural place to throw the Noise Festival, and not just because of the success of the Elm City Folk Festival. “Margaret’s got a strong promoting base here,” Miglietta said. As the audiences for Firehouse 12 and Uncertainty Music Series shows attest, there’s also something of a built-in crowd for the music at the Noise Festival.
“It’s easier to garner respect for noise music in New Haven because, let’s face it, New Haven is a city full of weirdos,” Miglietta said. “It’s a place where people play frisbee with their dogs on a mass grave.”
Miglietta and Milano have an eye on using the Noise Festival to build that audience further. In addition to the packed bills, they’re thinking of ways to make sure the audience has more to do than just sit and listen. Miglietta’s set as Parlay Droner, for instance, is what he called a “feed me tapes” set: “if anyone has a tape they want me to integrate into the set — something they’ve made, preferably, or something unusual,” Miglietta said, he’ll integrate it immediately into the music he’s making.
Of such things are the accidents that create great music — and community — made.
“If there’s another side trying to speak through us, it happens like that, through an accidental thing that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Miglietta said of the music. “A lot of bands, entire genres of music, are made that way.”
The same thing can create stronger bonds among the people who come together to hear it. “Someone can also say something out loud that kind of blossoms into a friendship,” Miglietta said.
So Miglietta and Milano are hoping that many of the people who came out for the Elm City Folk Festival will come out for the Noise Festival, too. There are already plans afoot to throw the folk festival again next year — and ideas for punk and metal festivals are in the works, too. Because in the end, nothing brings people together quite like having a good time.
The Elm City Noise Festival runs Sept. 17 at Anna Liffey’s, Sept. 18 at Cafe Nine, and Sept. 19 at Three Sheets. Click here for full details.
