Description
At the turn of the millennium C. Spencer Yeh was performing and booking shows in Cincinnati, OH, when a young noise band from nearby Lexington, KY, caught his attention, "immediately kicking a hole into the weirdo eye and ear of the surrounding region," as he later wrote. Shot at venues and house shows around Lexington and on a coast-to-coast tour between April 2001 and October 2002, Hair Police '01-'02 includes virtually none of the on-the-road vignettes, affable mugging, or contemplation that characterize band portraits. Rather, it's a pure distillation of the band's gloriously cacophonic essence—a half-hour wash of sonic sludge and grimy lo-fi imagery with a feature-length impact. Yeh writes, "Hair Police '01-'02 doesn't try to convince you or sell you on these legendary times—rather it just barrels out the gate and rolls around the floor in front of you. This is the portrait of one particular young band making crazy music and throwing it at the world, tuned to the fever pitch of their present."
The video's unique non-linear, non-narrative editing style suggests cross-over with Yeh's sound work. In 2010 his recording project Burning Star Core, variously at times including Hair Police members Robert Beatty, Trevor Tremaine, and Mike Connelly, released the live album Papercuts Theater, an hour-long assemblage edited and collaged from over sixty-six performances spanning a decade. On a condensed time frame, Hair Police '01-'02 functions similarly, crafting a now-legendary band's early years into a single, unrelenting set that reflects a specific time and place as well as a certain way of being obnoxiously young and astonishingly loud.
Hair Police '01-'02: Robert Beatty, Mike Connelly, Matt Minter, Trevor Tremaine.
Camera: Tim Aher, Ivanna Bergese, Alison Busch, Ross Compton, Tara Connelly, Bruce Gauld, Markus Lunkenheimer, Irene Moon, Ron Orovitz, C. Spencer Yeh.
