Last month Mobtown and The Windup Space produced a week-long festival that highlighted (mostly) Baltimore instrumental bands. The festival was called NOVO (ie. No Vocals).

Russell (Windup’s owner and a generally swell guy who also makes a mean Jim and Coke) curated the shows (with a little help from us) and I recorded and mixed every night with Alex, with the plan to release the tracks on Aural States as an extension of the festival.

Some of the bands included Nathan Bell (Human Bell, Lungfish) featuring Ami Dang, Microkingdom, Jason Urick (WZT Hearts), Expanding Man, Yeveto, Insect Factory, Notendo, We Used To Be Family, JDay, Dustin Wong (Ponytail), The Water and members of the Out Of Your Head collective.

We had an awesome turnout and we’re already in the planning stages for 2011. Props to David at TeamAdelle for all the hard work on the visuals and design and Tedd Henn from HennPict for the wonderful photography. Here are some audio samples of my favorite performances. You can stream and download the entire festival over at Aural States.

Jason Urick is the kind of ubiquitous figure in Baltimore underground music that you’re bound to have tripped over at one point or another if you’ve spent any time in the scene, whether he was organizing the Once.Twice Festival, running the DIY venue Floristree, working at the record store the Sound Garden, or playing in the noise band Wzt Hearts. But it’s only now, a year after that group’s breakup, that Urick has issued his first solo album on Thrill Jockey.

The laptop experimentation of Urick’s solo debut Husbands, recorded at Floristree, is in many ways a logical progression from his previous band, and like Wzt Hearts’ Heat Chief, it’s comprised of four long tracks. But without percussion or an improvisation-driven band dynamic, the overall sound is far more sedate, almost ambient. In fact, the theme of the album, if any, seems to be taking one or two brief sounds and stretching and manipulating them into countless variations over a lengthy span of time. The opener “Strides” warps and distorts a harmonica played by Emma Walters into an ethereal soundscape, while “Let There Be Love” renders a Bee Gees sample unrecognizable with similar results.

[See post to listen to audio]

In fact, the last of the four tracks on Husbands, “The Eternal Return,” is the only one that comes anywhere near producing the ear-grinding noise of Wzt Hearts, or much of anything that couldn’t be mistaken for a somewhat offbeat meditation soundtrack. The garbled voices, percussive click clacks and roaring distorted tones don’t sound anything like what the sounds must have been when they were first captured by Urick’s microphone, but he twists them into something intriguing and new. And at only 6 minutes, “Eternal” is actually the most concise and accessible track on the album while at the same time its most abrasive.