Burning Star Core

If directing a film is more about collaboration than authorship, consider Burning Star Core a musical movie directed by C. Spencer Yeh. He’s always at the center of the sound, but his rotating cast of characters makes BSC a group effort. That comes across strongest on the band’s latest release, Papercuts Theater, a collage of 66 different live recordings made during a seven-year stretch. Piling up sounds made by members of Hair Police, Lamsbread and more, Yeh deftly edits and pastes it all together, forming song-like shapes out of raw sonic clay, like a painter tracing lines around his impulsively splattered colors.

Yeh formed Burning Star Core in 1993 in his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. Classically trained as a violinist, he quickly developed a fiery style somewhere between the backwoods sawing of Henry Flynt and the minimalist mantras of Tony Conrad. He added an array of other sound sources, too—samples, effects pedals, and, most memorably, the abstract rumblings of his own voice. Equally comfortable playing gritty noise, uproarious improv, or gallery-friendly chamber music, he has performed and recorded with everyone from free jazz saxophonist Paul Flaherty and rock guitarist Thurston Moore to similarly boundary-crossing drummer Chris Corsano. He even guested on the second album by fellow Ohio lo-fi ringleaders Times New Viking.

But it’s Yeh’s work in Burning Star Core that has made the most lasting impression. The past few years have been particularly strong: Blood Lightning and Challenger in 2007 and Operator Dead…Post Abandoned in 2008 all expanded his palette, exploring textures that seem both boundless and bottomless. Somehow, throughout all the hurtling noises and dense drones, Yeh manages to make his group’s music sound both frantically busy—as unavoidably confrontational as the best noise—and subtly detailed. Whether you’re looking to accelerate your pulse or decelerate it, moments in every BSC record will do either—and often both. —Marc Masters