If there’s anyone on this planet who gets to rightly call their new band Murderous Again, it’s Lydia Lunch – she has almost surely murdered at least one person in her lifetime, and more importantly, she has clearly gotten away with it, too. The chance to check out Murderous Again was enough to get me moving on an expectedly disgusting Sunday summer evening here in Philadelphia, the land of no trees, over to South Street’s newest punk dive, Nikki Lopez. (It’s like that Agnostic Front Live At CBGB intro: the bar is named Nikki Lopez and run by a guy also named Nikki Lopez.)

When I write up these gigs, I try to be present for the whole thing, but a late dinner with some of the Murderous Again crew kept us from catching Spiritual Poison, the opening act on what was a four-band package tour. I understand Spiritual Poison to be a male solo project that centers harsh industrial soundscapes and dystopian drones, and while that would have been cool to see, I did get to witness bassist Tim Dahl fret over his choice of two dipping sauces for his wings (from the six available flavors) at the steadily-bougifying Royal Tavern for at least a full five minutes, even with the server right there waiting. (When the revolution comes, it’s the restaurants that charge extra for a side of fries that will burn first.) As it turns out, the air-conditioning system in Nikki Lopez hasn’t been upgraded (or probably even looked at) since the venue was called The Pontiac Grille earlier this century (with stints as JC Dobb’s both before and after – look it up, both Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine played their first Philly shows there!), so the stifling air inside essentially matched the heat-warped blacktop outside. Come to think of it, with all the various transgressive noise performances that have taken place, has any artist ever worked temperature-play into their set? Imagine being blasted with some harsh feedback as the room descends to fifteen below and you’re caught in a t-shirt and shorts, or probably more technically doable, rises to a sauna-like 190°F. That would put Spiritual Poison’s name on the map!

Today Is The Day were on as I walked in, a band that I had been familiar with for decades but never actually heard. The artwork for their 1999 Relapse album In The Eyes Of God was a constant presence at its time, from ads in zines to posters in the record shops I frequented, and the whole thing reeked a little too much of a Dark Horse Comics-style professionalism that I didn’t want mixing in my extreme underground metal. You think I’m a judgmental prick now, imagine me as a teenager! Time has certainly softened my views on the various underground bands I ignored over the years, and I was surprised to see that the current Today Is The Day is a two-piece setup, bandleader Steve Austin on guitars/vocals alongside a drummer who almost certainly still lived with his parents when Today Is The Day were touring in support of In The Eyes Of God. The band has gone through significant changes over the years (I count no fewer than twenty-four ex-members on Discogs), and watching the two of them perform felt like an unintentionally minimal version of what was probably a menacing, pummeling force of sharp-tongued doom-metal back at its peak. Even in this diminished state, I could see the appeal to their songs – Austin’s riffs found common-ground between sludge, stoner, noise and doom, like if that Melvins / Mudhoney bootleg live seven-inch became a sentient being with a Southern Lord contract. One thing’s for sure: Austin himself looked nearly as cool as the other, slightly more famous Steve Austin, sweating through his black, pearl-snap button up, gaunt cheekbones and wild hair looking as though he were John Brannon’s mean skinny cousin who ran away from Texas and needed to feed on something (or someone).

It wasn’t long before Murderous Again took the stage, whose “psycho-ambient jazz noir” was said to meld spoken-word with loosely improvised music. Except, for whatever reason, at the last minute Lydia decided she didn’t want to do that at all, and would instead play through a short set of material from other groups she’s fronted, namely 8 Eyed Spy and Big Sexy Noise. I’ll level with you here: I always assumed something called “Big Sexy Noise” would be decidedly not my thing, that it must be some sort of quasi-edgy cabaret act that goes over big with horny elder European audiences. Amazingly, it’s not that at all – the material she ran through was exquisite stoner space-rock, in league with Pentagram, Skullflower and Hawkwind, not Diamanda Galas or Strawberry Switchblade. Lydia’s a skillful organizer, and the band she assembled for these songs was impeccable – alongside Dahl’s seismic bass activity was Kevin Shea (of Storm & Stress and Mostly Other People Do The Killing) in perfect restrained posture on the drums and Timo Ellis (of, wait, Cibo Matto and Spacehog? Seriously?) on guitar, replete with a pedalboard the size of an AI data center. Shea and Dahl could make any couple of chords sound respectable, but the simplistic space-rock riffs they had to work with were thrilling and downright shocking to my jazz-noir expectations. Lydia was channeling El Duce – not a feminine El Duce, just a straight-up revolting El Duce – when they absolutely ripped through the particularly memorable “Ballin’ The Jack”. I have seen Lydia Lunch perform in a variety of configurations now (including what I would designate as a public solo performance-art aktion wherein she chased a fully-grown guy into the men’s room while singing “snap ya dick!” to the tune of Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Azz” in a bar) and this was easily, far and away, the heaviest and most triumphant set of hers I’ve witnessed.

Prior to the Murderous Again, err Big Sexy Noise(?) set, Lydia asked me if I could find a fan to set on stage, which gave me the quiet authority to walk through the employees-only door and check out the rest of this halfway-repaired venue. I found my way upstairs to the quote-unquote green room, which must’ve been ten degrees hotter and featured three members of Buñuel splayed side-by-side on a couch in silence amidst the asphyxiating lack of ventilation. Vocalist Eugene Robinson was seated at a small desk reading, his impressive physique bursting from a leather vest (and leather shirt), when I quickly explained that Lydia asked to have the sole fan in the green room for herself, hoping that if he refused, I could at least make a break for the door before he got up to dislocate my arms and legs. Instead, he graciously allowed me to snag it, and when I pointed out the obvious hot-as-fuck misery of the room, he said “it builds character” with a winking smile.

I can’t think of anyone who needs to build character less than Eugene Robinson, whose performances with Oxbow are the stuff of legend, on par (and let’s be real, surpassing) Henry Rollins in basically every category (from biceps diameter to crowd-punching to quality of prose), his level of fame tempered in no small part by America’s commitment to racism. Following Oxbow’s sudden and unexpected dissolution, Robinson focused his attention on Buñuel, an avant noise-rock group featuring bassist Andrea Lombardini, drummer Franz Valente and guitarist Xabier Iriondo, three Italians who look like typical metal-head movie extras. Robinson already looks like pretty much nobody else, but he sauntered onto the stage with shiny black electrical tape covering both ears, either as rudimentary hearing protection or further proof that he hails from some other distant planet. The band leaned hard into the experimental aspects of noise-rock songwriting, where the songs themselves consisted more of unexpected starts/stops, segues and discordant freak-outs than actual verse-chorus riffs. Their music centered slippery edges, trap-doors and rocky cliffs as opposed to solid ground, and Robinson vibrated through and over it, gesticulating with muscles and tendons most human bodies never manage to grow, and singing with seemingly no concern over the mic’s proximity to his mouth. The band were tight – a rigid, studious tightness seemed to be a pre-requisite to playing the songs – and Iriondo leaned into Robinson’s weirdness with a dose of his own, often posing statue-like and unblinking for extended periods of time. Playing material from their new Skin Graft full-length, it became common for Iriondo to hold his guitar at an awkward angle and freeze, a comical hypnosis that added to the group’s entertaining presentation. No matter that the audience numbered less than fifty and the air wasn’t really working – Buñuel weren’t playing because it was a savvy career move, self-indulgent ego-boost or sizeable payday, they were on stage because it’s simply where they were meant to be.

Philadelphia’s avant-garde music scene has a loyal ally in Solar Myth and its Ars Nova Workshop promoters, who put together a 2025 show calendar (celebrating Ars Nova’s 25th anniversary) as jam-packed as it is dazzlingly comprehensive. (What’s up with Philly experimental bookers going over the top… have you seen the last couple of Making Time lineups???) All the “big” names of the experimental underground seem to make it a point to swing through Solar Myth nowadays – I’m pretty sure Marshall Allen has a private bedroom suite upstairs – and as I live a mere ten-minute walk away from the club (and a pleasant one at that), the only thing stopping me from attending on a weekly basis is the average $40+ ticket price. On back to back nights in early May, I splurged on incomparable noise-guitar duo Body/Head and multi-faceted virtuoso percussionist Valentina Magaletti.

Night one– Prompt to the minute, video curator 1-800-HOT-DUCK aka Chrissy Marie Jones opened with a half-hour edited montage at 8:00 PM, the footage true to her indispensable Instagram account (which is, easy enough, @1800hotduck). Clips were plucked from a variety of odd and off-the-beaten-path sources like public-access comedy, nihilistic underground art film, fetish clips, funny news reports and even an incredible Johanna Went music video, which reminded me to pull out her LP again soon. Though the typical Sonic Youth-enthusiast audience seems to somehow maintain an average height of six feet, I’m on the taller end of the spectrum and was lucky enough to view a good 70-80% of the projection screen broadcast in front of the standing-room-only crowd. Not everyone could say the same, however, so I hope they found their way to her Instagram page, or picked up a VHS at the merch table.

The crowd thickened in the interim between 1-800-HOT-DUCK and Body/Head, and I maintained my spot towards the center-back as well, a glass of rosé steadily warming in my hands. As luck would have it, Aaron Dilloway appeared on stage first, setting up one of his reel-to-reels, an unannounced guest added to the advertised Body/Head duo of Kim Gordon and Bill Nace. Fans will of course recognize that Body/Dilloway/Head released an album on Three Lobed back in 2021 – I confirmed that this was only their second time performing live as a trio. I didn’t purchase my ticket with the expectation of witnessing faithful renditions of my favorite Body/Head “songs”, and I’d assume the same went for the rest of the audience, so Dilloway’s addition was a welcomed surprise.

The set, consisting of a single piece that neared an hour, opened with one of Dilloway’s tape loops, a soft cyclical pattering as Gordon and Nace assembled themselves. Unhurried yet focused, the two guitarists linked into a harmonic web early in the set, a loosely psychedelic moment of beauty that I hadn’t anticipated. I was prepared for dual cascades of frothy feedback to attack my senses but the set lacked much in the way of outward aggression – another nice surprise. Even Dilloway, celebrated for his uncontrollably spastic physical performances, barely twitched in place. More time was spent in transitional phases than any sort of locked-in mode, with melancholic or buzzing motifs reacting to the patterns and varying intensities of Dilloway’s tape rig. Gordon would crouch down for minutes at a time, hidden by the crowd’s front row while presumably tinkering with her various effects, leaving Dilloway concentrating hard at his desk and Nace the energetic cornerstone of the trio, steering his guitar from an arrangement of angles and applying varying degrees of pressure, as likely to furiously strum the strings at the bridge of his instrument as grab the body of the guitar with two hands and shake as if he intended to pour martinis from it. Gordon sang infrequently, and when she did, the stark body of her voice took over – she wasn’t mixed any louder than her fellow performers, but her bassy frequency and unblinking delivery commanded our full attention, even as her words were affected enough as to remain inscrutable. Her final vocals were two full-bodied, Junko-esque screams, a pair of blood-curdlers that would normally communicate a lack of control, but even those felt impartial and constrained in her hands, one of the many sonic implements she’s spent decades accumulating. After navigating minutes of blissfully abstracted terrains, Dilloway and Nace eventually opened their eyes, looking like graduates of rival vo-tech schools in their navy-blue and army-green button-ups; Gordon shifted her gaze away from the middle-distance to acknowledge her fellow players for the first time, and as easily as the abstract and distant storm-clouds of their performance rolled in, their set concluded.

Night two– For as much as I enjoy the claustrophobic thrill of smushing myself into a packed room of bodies being blasted by loud music, I was relieved to note that Valentina Magaletti’s performance was billed as a seated show. Ars Nova takes care right down to the smallest detail, so these folded chairs weren’t standard issue Home Depot cheapos – they offered some padded support that only twenty-somethings would take for granted. (If anyone in attendance was in their twenties, I didn’t clock them – it felt like a safe space for the forty-and-up crowd.)

As soon as the house lights dimmed, Valentina Magaletti hopped onto the stage and crawled towards a small assortment of hand cymbals, wood blocks and resonant metal pieces. On her hands and knees, and fully enveloped in the array of pieces before her, Magaletti displayed the posture of a curious child deep in the throes of Lego. She clattered, clacked and popped the implements in front of her, all of which were run through actively-evolving forms of echo and reverb; the sound of a shaker might reproduce its own backwards mirror image, the smack of a drumstick on muted metal tumbled into cavernous echo. It was a small highlight of her set for me, the sheer incomprehensibility of how and why the sounds were mutating in real-time. The dim lighting and her huddled position obscured any chance I had of gaining answers to my questions, but that was a good part of the fun – I had no choice but to sit back and allow myself to be dazzled.

While still on the floor, Magaletti began to engage with the expensive-looking trap kit (the kick head adorned with a box-fresh Ars Nova Workshop logo) from the outside in. Maneuvering her way around the kit, she rose up and proceeded to tear it a new one, hustling through the swirl of influences that echo her recorded and collaborative material: jazz fluidity, airtight breakbeats, studied funkiness and playful exploration. She let out a loud cackle, and then proceeded to shout “hit / after hit / after hit / after hit” with each subsequent, uhh, hit, maybe a baker’s dozen she deemed worthy to describe out-loud to us. The set then led her to the other arranged gear on stage, including multiple tuned wood blocks, various toms and a brief tryst with a vibraphone. Throughout, additional backing tracks were piped through the PA, a variety of sounds ranging from steady rhythm tracks to more obscure sounds I’d associate with chains dragged across a table or idling dirt-bike engines. The backing tracks provided a bit of guidance, pushing her into different rhythmic conversations (and percussive stations). I’m of two minds with this: on one hand, it sounded dope as hell and her choice of backing sounds was inspired, but on the other, I would’ve been perfectly content for my ears to only hear the sounds that Magaletti cooked up live in front of me – if that meant the occasional silence or awkward moment, so be it. It’s clear to me that pre-recorded music in a live setting has become the norm, no matter if you’re a kvlt power-metal band or a fashion-forward cold-wave duo or a global pop-star, but its all-encompassing infiltration doesn’t mean I have to uncritically embrace it. Or at least, I can regret for Milli Vanilli’s sake that they were born two generations early. I could also say “Han Bennink wouldn’t need a backing track”, but I’m sure if he was here right now and I asked him, he’d be totally down to play with one and see what might happen. Maybe I need to loosen up and embrace a little technology once in a while… or not.

The best part of the set, in my estimation, came about forty minutes in, when a young woman ran up to the stage, hopped on, and started going buck-wild on the floor cymbals as Magaletti hammered away at the kit. I could feel the audience tense up around me for a good four or five seconds, all sharing my same confusion – was this person invited, or are the bum-rushing the show? – but as Magaletti seemed entirely unperturbed, we relaxed and settled into the added cacophony of this unknown guest’s rapid-fire clanging. After a good five minutes, the guest hopped back off, and Magaletti settled us back on solid ground with some soothing tones and a slowed, conversational approach to her kit. The backing track provided a calming loop, appropriate for end-credits, Magaletti thanked “Jessica”, and the lights came up. Back to the bar for a drink with Chris Forsyth, who was in attendance at both gigs as well, it turns out. Hell, he’s probably back at Solar Myth right now, and I wish I was too.