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 the Bureau files 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.
The Bureau's reading. Panicsville is filed at Tier III as a central American noise project and the anchor of Nihilist Records.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene