Farewell, Dissonant Plane
This Sunday, September 26, a free performance by Robert Millis of Climax Golden Twins will mark Dissonant Plane‘s final day of business. Seattle’s obscurest music store, which opened in early 2009, is closing its doors due to a dropoff in sales, leaving to Capitol Hill’s Wall of Sound once again the uncontested mantle of Seattle’s most outsiderish record shop.
Photo via DissonantPlane.com
Most Seattleites will not notice the loss. When Dave Segal reported that the store was closing on The Stranger’s Line Out, half of the commenters didn’t even know where Dissonant Plane was. (It’s in an odd location, tucked away on the upstairs mezzanine behind Resolution Audio in Ballard.) But for a small, devoted coterie of metalheads, drone fiends, and other music-loving weirdos, DP has become something of an institution. Run by Eric Lanzillotta, an experimental musician and longtime record distributor, and his emerging rock star son Tannoth, Dissonant Plane is more than just a place where sound-obsessed masochists go to fork over large portions of their paychecks in exchange for a helping of expertly administered aural abuse. It is the hub of an adventurous, albeit tiny empire where a variety of freaks regularly made the scene. Eric and Tannoth sponsored an ambitious calendar of events, including instore performances by a dizzying range of performers, from classical Hindustani vocalist Srivani Jade to maximalist shredder Kawabata Makoto of Japanese psych-rock giants Acid Mothers Temple. One of the first events hosted by Dissonant Plane, in fact, was a listening party of the various audio pieces included in the SMS portfolios, a 1968 time capsule of conceptual art, presented in conjunction with an exhibition of the portfolios I curated for Davidson Galleries.
Mood Organ performance for Visiting a Burning Museum CD release at Dissonant Plane.
For those of us who relished stumbling on the ecstatic finds therein, Dissonant Plane will be sorely missed. But fortunately the dynamic cultural forces exerted by its cofounders will continue to resonate within the community. Eric is going to be spending more time releasing worthy artifacts on his sub-underground label Ri Bi Xibalba and working with his performance ensemble Eye Music, while Tannoth will, in his words, “get a real job,” while moving forward with his black metal project Forest of Grey.
It’s the end of an era, but I look forward to seeing what the future brings for both of these local luminaries.
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