Australia-born, Brooklyn-residing noise artist Charmaine Lee has committed to a three-month tour wherein she performs in all fifty of these United States before returning home. It’s surely an achievement as arduous as it is glorious, and oddly enough, one that was also completed by Boston hardcore group Haywire earlier this year, whose Philadelphia show I also witnessed back in July. Perhaps they should’ve made the trek together? Lee decided to inaugurate her tour on a Monday evening in Philadelphia, hosted by Partners & Son, an underground comics / comix shop that has been a lynchpin of Philly’s hand-drawn / hand-printed scenes. No sooner had I forked over my ten bucks did the gracious host fill my hand with an ice-cold seltzer (Acme brand), and like the other show-goers, I thumbed through the various art-books, riso prints, graphic novels and periodicals while waiting for the music to commence.

Frances Cordie was the perfect person to open the show, as she is not only a practicing musician but a cartoonist as well, whose thick graphic novel On A Cute One is hoisting up my to-read pile (and for sale at Partners & Son). Seated in front of a large keyboard, laptop angled within clicking range, she opened with a richly-filtered set of arpeggios, a harshly kaleidoscopic rendering that had me thinking of Fennesz’s Endless Summer were it performed in real-time on a single synth. Across segments that casually stretched out, Cordie’s lush chords hit like pastel-colored boxing gloves, reminiscent of that debut Molly Raben album that recently came out, or Colleen’s great A Flame, A Frequency. I’ve yet to hear any of Cordie’s recordings, but I can say that if her music were captured through a creaky old intercom system, it would be ripe for a Discreet Music release; if produced in a fancy studio, Editions Mego might be interested. Her final piece was different from the rest, some sort of chipmunk simulacrum of a ’90s R&B torch song. There were drums, and chords, and even vocals, all processed through what sounded like a thousand sheets of multi-colored cellophane. I don’t care if it turns out it was all pre-recorded and Cordie simply clicked the play button – I’d love to hear more of that.

Up next was another local performer, the ever-busy Anne Ishii. I first heard of the writer / program director / translator / musician because of a performance she did back in 2023, also at Partners & Son, that involved something like her aggressively narrating hentai over harsh noise? I’m probably remembering some detail of that wrong (and I sadly wasn’t even there to witness), but it’s the sort of gossip of which I make a mental note. As I had walked by but unfortunately missed yet another of her performances a few blocks away the prior weekend, I was excited to finally catch her in action. For this evening, she sat with her back to the audience, facing a guitar laid flat on an amp. For the next twenty minutes or so, she persistently tapped her guitar with drumsticks and mallets, the pitter-patter rolls of her sticks being the main audible component. There was a soft and constant groaning from the guitar, which somehow didn’t seem to alter much with her hits. Her performance was quiet enough that the opening of a beer can back near the entrance was disruptive, but Ishii was completely in the zone – after maybe five minutes or so of tumbling, playful rolls, she locked in to a simple drummer-boy roll on the guitar, never breaking momentum, only shifting in intensity. One of those pieces that gets better the longer you’re stuck in it, the shock of Ishii’s neon-yellow bob stared us down until she softly reduced her drum-roll to zero, paused, and switched off the amp. I kept thinking how great it would’ve been if when she finally turned around, she revealed Wes Borland-style face-paint and colored contact lenses (maybe a facial prosthetic too?), but I’m not here to tell anyone how to do their job. With no music or art to peddle, Ishii was selling homemade kimchi, with the profits going to the South Philly Food Not Bombs. We are lucky to have her among us.

Thus we are ready for the final act of the evening, Charmaine Lee. With her tour also acting as an informal introduction to the record label she’s debuting alongside producer Randall Dunn, Kŏu Records, she pointed out that Partners & Son was an ideal location, as Kŏu is proceeding with a mission that also centers visual artists, and in fact, two of the four inaugural releases feature the work of Philadelphian artists. With the artists contributing both front cover art and artist portraits on the back, it’s a theme I look forward to following.

The room was certainly on Lee’s side as she provided us with that brief introduction, although she didn’t need any goodwill to immediately suck us into her peculiar world of sound. With essentially no breaks in forward motion, she jumped into a vibrant and virtuosic performance of the mouth. Raspberries, ASMR clicks and pops, jump scares, jabbering, blathering, cooing and sighing… if the human mouth was capable of creating the sound, there’s a good chance it was in there somewhere, Lee ripping through it like an Olympic athlete. Phil Minton and Jaap Blonk are obvious forebears (and, I suppose, John Moschitta Jr. too – you know, the guy from the Micro Machines commercials), but I see no basis for filing away Lee as a tradition-keeping student of the craft – her moves were too vibrant, too inspired and dazzling. With the use of a mixing board and a contact mic taped to her throat, her voice was frequently manipulated in real time, resulting in distorted volleys, swept-out caverns of sound and high-speed, on-the-fly remixes. You’d probably assume that a voice-based noise performer would feature plenty of screaming, but amazingly, Lee pretty much never screamed at all, a power-move in avoiding any obvious or rote concepts of “experimental” sound. About halfway through, she started integrating a handheld black box, shaped like a small drinking flask. It clearly had some sort of microphone component, as Lee managed to really whip up a wild storm of confusing sound with it. It looked like a mass-produced piece of equipment, but what was it, and what else could it be used for, if not Lee’s chaotic vocal improvisations? I still don’t know. I had plenty of time to ponder this as a late-arriver posted up directly in front of my seated view for the last five minutes or so, swaying out an enthusiastic noise-dance as it is meant to be done – in a shifting time signature only understood by the dancer themselves.

After the set, Lee and Dunn sold LPs and t-shirts to the eager show-goers, myself included. I couldn’t help but take notice of how perfectly coiffed their hair was, freshly washed, dyed, combed and styled (and in Dunn’s case, pomaded), and wonder what they’re gonna look like after their final, 65th show of the tour, set to wrap on November 16th. Will Lee’s throat survive this epic test? Will they evade bloodthirsty polar bears in Alaska, and the deadly Portuguese Man O’ War in Hawaii? Or perhaps most perplexingly… will they be responsible for the first cool show in the history of Newark, Delaware???