Andy Ortmann's Chicago noise project, the band that started Nihilist Records and the live face of the American art-damage tradition.
Panicsville is the American noise group I keep at Tier III, founded in Chicago in 1992 by Andy Ortmann with David Forquer and Ryan Kohler. It came first and the label came after: Ortmann started Nihilist Records to put this band out, and Panicsville has remained his ongoing project ever since, run with a revolving cast around a constant core of Ortmann and Jeremy Fisher.
On stage the band made its name through confrontation. Early shows pelted the audience with dry ice, meat, blood and insects; later sets settled into shrieking, high-pitched electronics performed in black latex, a violent-but-playful assault that treats the crowd as part of the work. It is the live arm of the absurdist, gross-out sensibility that runs through the whole Nihilist catalogue.
The records are more than a document of the shows. The catalogue runs deep across cassettes, 7-inches, LPs and odd formats, and includes conceptual gestures like the 1996 LP Four Notes in Search of a Tune, a playable cut-and-paste record assembled from smashed and reglued vinyl in an edition of a hundred. Collaborators have included Cock E.S.P. and M.V. Carbon of Metalux, and the band toured Europe alongside Metalux in 2002. Andy Ortmann's long collaboration with Evil Moisture produced a record on his Nihilist label, partly recorded live in Paris.
My reading. Panicsville is at Tier III as a central American noise project and the anchor of Nihilist Records.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene