Blips Magazine
New Music Seminar Issue: Miracle Room / Knitting Factory
This tragically low profile three piece band is among the finest purveyors of underground/ experimental sounds in town. They're free of much of the "art" baggage and frigid virtuosity of many Knitting Factory regulars while they definitely don't come across as a typical rock unit. The emphasis is on percussion and processed sounds. The drum set is a sprawling assemblage of sheet metal, oil drums, oxygen tanks and most standard percussion. Unlike many in the sphere of clang bang art damage music (Missing Foundation, Z'ev, Neubaten, etc.), Miracle Room practices a lean, understated industrialism and can really mix it up with their vast palette of surfaces and delay-based effects. For one piece, all three of them played hypnotic afro beats on waterjugs. In another they all played a long pipe simultaneously as a wind instrument, a drum and a miked, electronically treated megaphone (ahhh, the wonder of sound). They also have a jam where two of them, using a rod or small pipe as a slide, play doors (yeah, doors) rigged with guitar strings. It was a bit of a forced "experimental" gesture but it rocked in a novel, visual way. This band has a foot in the New Age/Fripp pond but the rest of their limbs in the rock tide.