Eyelash Carpets at the 2006 Voodoo Fest (w/ photos)

The Voodoo Festival, an annual music event in New Orleans, is over for 2006. I went down there this October with the Eyelash Carpets, who were invited to play at the Noo Moon stage on Sunday morning.

The day of the show was much like the rest of the trip, devoid of any truly remarkable events. I had expected nothing but chaos, as there were six of us traveling from North Carolina to New Orleans in two separate cars, and two more joining us once we arrived. Maybe my imagination is more vital than my faith in human beings. With eight of us involved in a long road trip and then an equipment-heavy musical performace, I was sure that something would go drastically wrong at some critical moment, making for an entertaining story which I could type up and post here.

But no, the Eyelash Carpets made it to the stage and performed their set without the slightest trouble. (I swear I'm going to start carrying fire crackers or something around with me.)

I did use up a couple of fun savers during the trip. (Visit the full gallery at 23hq.com.)

The Eyelash Carpets played courtesy of the Noo Moon Tribe, which hosted a side-stage area at the Voodoo Festival. There were two stages on a lawn at the edge of City Park, featuring a long list of local bands and DJs. The Carpets played at 11:11 am, which meant that the sun was bright and the audience was sparse. The Carpets are not designed for outdoor music festivals during the daytime. They are better suited to dark nightclubs full of fog machines and laser beams. But a gig's a gig, and the Carpets performed their set of psychogothic electronica with total perfection.



For the finale, Areck Laws joined the band to play piano on "Burning Kisses". This was probably the best part of the show. There were six musicians on stage, all adding parts to a complicated sonic object that pushed heavily in several directions but always kept its fingertips on the fundamental tempo, so that the whole thing evoked the impression of an elephant coming off of anaesthesia.

Afterwards, the band and its entourage broke up into groups and struck off to enjoy the rest of the festival. I caught some of the acts at the Noo Moon stage, and then went to see the Morning 40 Federation and get some of the food that was for sale at tents along the main lawn. After a couple hours, Pantopon Rose and I went back to Bunny's apartment to crash out. Bunny and Pulvis Opii showed up at Bunny's place a few hours later after seeing the Flaming Lips and Duran Duran. According to Bunny the Lips put on a mind-blowing, eye-popping show. I vaguely regretted missing this, but then I had been duly entertained when Ratty Scurvics, at the Noo Moon stage, passed out 75 hula hoops. Sitting in the middle of a crowd of 75 people spinning hoops around their waists and arms to the rythm of a single guy who plays drums and keyboard while screaming songs into a microphone is pretty mind blowing and eye popping in itself, even if it isn't as expensive as thousands of cubic feet of confetti and colored fog.

The Morning 40 Federation were also fun enough to constitute an entire day's entertainment. Just the fact of the band's being on such a large stage was an amusement. The one other time I've seen the Morning 40s play was at a tiny quasi-legal bar in slums of New Orleans. Their personnel has changed a little since that time, but they still play their purposefully degenerate rock and roll with unstable furvor. Their sound, which includes wicked saxaphone lines and playful song construction, perfectly reflects a facet of New Orleans' culture that has been underrecognized. The drunknen sunrise junkyard environment of the 9th ward, Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods of New Orleans breeds a perverse culture of fake furs, big sunglasses and old syringes sharpened against matchbook covers. Thrift-store chic mashed up with hungover psychosis combines into a sense of style that is too busy choking back the vomit to realise that it isn't slick enough to make it to the mainstream. But the Morning 40 Federation manage to transcend the debilitating effects of substance abuse in a city with no infrastructure to the point that they play live shows on a regular basis and grow in popularity with every passing year. The 40s have been a band for a long time, now, and they will remain a band for a long time to come. Certainly they will eventually put out an album under the auspices of some multinational record label, play the late night shows and have a radio hit. When that time comes, American culture will change in deep and subtle ways. These changes will likely coincide with an increase in the rate of our empire's decline, resulting in a normalization of daytime drinking and an overall decrease of personal responsibility. The Morning 40 Federation, and their kind, will be blamed for this acceleration of popular decadence, but remember this: they are only the messengers. The fact is that America is a failed concept. Democracy and liberty will eventually fold to unimpeachable timeless power of the feudal system, and as the optimism of our society fades away, there is nothing left to do but get loaded and dance around in the rubble.

At least, that is the message that I hear in sound of the Morning 40 Federation. And it seemed a painful message for many scowling people as we walked back across the main lawn away from the M40s performance. The words "Let's do some cocaine and talk talk talk" cut sharply through the air and seemed to stick like knives in the backs of the middle class kids that we passed on the way. I saw one young man stop in his tracks and turn angrily toward the distant stage at the sound of these words. I wanted to grab him by the collar of his Cheerios t-shirt and explain to him that the future is too big to fight. The ship is going down and you can either row far far away or be sucked down into the whirpool of your puritanical guilt.

But I didn't. Instead I got myself a barbecue pork sandwich and a lemonade and then I went back to Bunny's apartment and took a nap. We are not at the end of the world, only the slow deterioration of a world power, and life must still go on.

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