Each year on the first Sunday of May, the Festival powers demand that the Bywater holds forth with an additional afternoon of merrymaking and music is staged each year. Beginning at noon, this year's edition of NOizeFest boasts a deep lineup of local acts pushing music to its outer limits. Acts include Ratty Scurvics, The Bongoloids, The Death Posture and Genrefuck. Once upon a 2004, however, there was no NOizefest. Then Deacon John's son Keith Moore came along. On the eve of this year's action, NOizefest facilitator Michael Patrick Welch relays how the whole thing got started:

I first met Keith Moore at Ray Bong’s birthday party: without knowing the guest of honor, Keith set up a T-shirt booth, blew an airhorn over our band’s music and commandeered my microphone several times to announce his upcoming “Ambient Wars part two! A sonic catfight between Beatgrrl and Miss Mass Destruction!” Keith assigned me to write about his upcoming 20-act Noizefest, then called every single day after to confirm his interview date and discuss his ever-evolving plans. A little intense. But I appreciated Keith’s weird drive. So out on my porch one night, I let him fill my entire cassette tape with his monotone ‘noise manifesto,’ his musings on ambient techno vs. “Jazz Fest’s blues whores and crappy jam bands,” his future plans for his Deathouse Industrial Enterprises (D.I.E.), and his list of scheduled Noizefest performers: Rob Cambre (N.O.’s noise guitar hero), Manchild(techno-rock), Ray Bong (toy instruments and nitrous oxide), Denise Bonis (dark, atmospheric soul-singer and violinist), PotPie (sinewave studies) Siamese Cocks (more sinewave studies), Mikronaut (dub reggae and Robotussin influenced four-track manipulations), Kid Calculator (laptop collages), One-Man-Machine (deconstructed spirituals and Sun Ra covers), Sickniks (guitar and digital noise), Chuck Reily (singer, computer artist), DJ’s Miss Mass Destruction, Proppa Bear, The Hussy, Brice Nice,Beatgrrl and Quintron, MC Shellshock (female MC with real-time laptop vocal trickery), plus one-man-bands King Louie and Ratty Scurvics. Noizefest’s $10 cover charge would benefit Charity Hospital, an institution that had recently saved Keith’s life from simultaneous cases of pneumonia and meningitis -- this town and its many musicians seriously needed Charity.

But not until Keith had fed me all this information at least twice more did I realize that Noizefest itself, which still hadn’t confirmed a venue, wasn’t for two more months.

In the meantime, my dedicated pursuit of yellow journalism led me to take a job painting Uptown apartments for Keith’s Deathouse Industrial Enterprises. Instead of whistling while we worked, we listened to evil techno music featuring Keith’s echo-drenched voice -- “I will give you AIDS!” -- booming from a trashed and graffiti sprayed jambox in the corner. Beside it lay a separate, short-wave radio emitting static, and a loudly whispering wave-machine: wshhhhhhhhhhh. He told me I needed to come to see one of his shows. Over and over and over, he told me.

 At his next public appearance under his stagename, Deacon Johnson, jamboxes blaring static littered the Dragon’s Den’s precarious stairway. Every corner of the dark main stage was crammed with broken electronics, pill bottles, blacklights, candles, 9/11 photos and anti-corporate, anti-humanity slogans. Keith taped sheets of foil and giant photos across the floor, and dusted it all with shards of broken mirror. The 40 or so humans in attendance walked around crunching glass while Keith bellowed into the microphone, “People want to know where Deathhouse is? It’s at each and every one of your addresses! Because you are all going to die!” As Keith continued dragging more and more junk up into the Den, it became clear that he was at least intensely committed to the grand New Orleans tradition of working way too hard toward a high production value, for art glimpsed only briefly.

“I showed up around noon that day to help Keith load in,” eternally mellow Dragon’s Den booking agent Tark Putman told me one balmy night, out on the Den’s iron balcony above Café Siam, long before the storm closed both places. Tark pointed to the sidewalk below: “First Keith unloaded all these computer monitors and stuff from his van, onto the sidewalk outside the club. By the time the show started at 10:30, we were still bringing stuff up into the Den, and I forgot about the junk out on the sidewalk. Then halfway through the night, one of the chefs comes up screaming at me in Thai, because downstairs these two big jock meatheads were outside with fucking sledgehammers,golfing computer parts at his hotrod. Somehow, unloading Keith’s car, I hadn’t seen the sledgehammers…” Tark recalled yelling at Keith: “‘I hate getting uptight about anything. I definitely appreciate what Keith is doing, and if it was my joint we’d light off dynamite inside, whatever. But I took all the junk from out front, scooped up all the glass, threw it all in a garbage can and told Keith, ‘This is garbage! Leave it here!’ And the next thing I know the pile has been moved upstairs onto the Den’s stage. With the sledgehammers.”

For months between my initial interview with Keith and Noizefest itself, Keith was angry. I heard the word “Noizefest” barked hundreds of times a day as we painted apartments by the levee on St. Charles. But $10-an-hour was a good wage for New Orleans… Upon picking me up at 6:30 a.m., Keith would announce to me Noizefest’s latest impediment, seethe about how everybody was letting him down, how he was a day late getting us paid for painting, how the screenprinter had “fucking lied” about Noizefest T-shirts, and how MC Tracheotomy -- who’d promised Keith use of a Desire Street venue -- had left for a European tour, making contact nearly impossible. Each morning Keith’s anger swelled until, creeping down Royal, he would scream and slam his cellphone against his van’s dashboard, turning it into dead techno junk, to later be worn around his neck.

But though unpleasant, Keith had gotten Quintron to agree to play (Q told me that Keith called him absolutely every single day too). And New Orleans’ press squad had unanimously picked up the Noizefest story; success was assured -- until MC Tracheotomy finally returned from Europe, cancelled Keith’s event altogether, then continued using the name ‘Noizefest’ to promote his own concert at the same venue, on the same night.

Keith had few people to turn to. When he threatened to cancel Noizefest, I shouted, “No! No way! I already wrote the damn article! So did Gambit and The Picayune! There are so many other buildings in this city, so many other places. Jesus, I would let you have it in our backyard before I’d let you cancel.”

“I can have it in your backyard?”

“Well, I was being hypo…I’ll have to uh…”

“Don’t jerk me around here. Can or can’t I? I need your word.”

“Mizzy’s parents are coming to town that weekend and…”

“I need your fucking word!”

I’d already made the mistake. And thus, Noizefest’s long painful birth would culminate out by the goat pen.  

Keith smashed yet another cellphone when I told him he’d need to rent a port-o-potty. Night before the show, we left Chauncey with neighbors so the freaks wouldn’t feed him LSD, and boarded up our house as if in preparation for a zombie attack. First thing Noizefest morning, Keith hauled over several humongous sheets of mirror, which for obvious reasons I demanded he immediately remove from our patio. Keith grumbled argument.

“It’s my house. Do it,” I said, stomping away. I returned to find all the DJ equipment on my patio sitting atop the mirror, which had cracked already into many tectonic pieces. “I do not want Chauncey walking around in bits of broken mirror for the rest of his fucking lifeKeith!” I slammed a trashcan down in the yard. “Don’t make me regret letting you do this! Clean the fucking glass up! Now!”

I took no responsibility for anything else at Noizefest. Despite my deep-rooted instinct, I met requests to help load-in equipment with friendly refusal. Actually, when Quintron, who’d agreed only to DJ, arrived with his Drum Buddy, Ernie K-Doe organ, Leslie speakers, the whole shebang, I did help him load-in – any bohemian in town might have hosted this mess if they’d known Quintron would play on their porch. Otherwise, I didn’t even see it as my job to deter Ratty Scurvics, who’d shown up black-out drunk at 11 a.m. determined to make-out with Mizzy’s mother (luckily, she managed on her own to avoid that fate). Both of Mizzy’s parents -- if not more open-minded than at least more quietly tolerant than my own -- dealt gracefully with Noizefest, as well as with her daughter’s boyfriend, who would donate his home and life to such a cause. The rents left to go sip wine one street over at Bacchanal by the time Ray Bong spun off on his bad acid trip.

For a “psychedelic guru,” Ray really cannot handle LSD. This does not at all deter him from dropping, despite how acid overtakes him, disintegrates his already frail connection to reason so that he ends up treating his friends like shit. After dosing at Noizefest, Ray jammed with (or rather over) every single artist, with or without their permission. I had already lovingly warned all the acts, “If you play in my yard you are required to let Ray Bong jam along, ha ha.” But at one point, as Ray was bouncing, eyes closed, strangling truly ugly sounds from the Coron, just fucking grooving over King Louie one-man-band, Louie ordered via the microphone, “Hey dude. Please stop.”

Ray stood stunned for some moments, then scrambled over to me and, quietly at first, began losing his shit: “Fuck that motherfucker!” he whispered loud enough to be heard over King Louie’s own ugly music. Ray slapped his thighs, furious: “He’s not even makingnoise! He’s playing fucking songs! He’s going against the whole fucking tenant of Noizefest, man!”

Though the day’s “music” had been consistently rich and interesting and fun, by the ninth hour I was sick of the whole freaky thing, and slipped upstairs to my bedroom. I lay listening through the house’s bargeboard to a nicely muted, subdued, surprisingly relaxing remix version of Noizefest -- until Ray called me on his cell from the backyard: “Everyone’s out to get Ray Bong, man!” he claimed. Over King Louie’s final song, I heard Ray’s teeth grinding.  “They’re trying to hold Ray Bong down!” When I explained to him that several musicians simply had compositions they’d planned to play alone, he erupted, “You’re against me to! Everything we’ve been through together man and… Fuck you, man! You think you’re gonna be so famous! Well fuck you!” 

Around 10:30, M.C. Lil Gregory Esq. accidentally tripped over the main power supply and officially ended the day. Our last minute venue debacle had limited the official crowd total to about twenty attendees and 40 performers. And because the festival ended up free to the public, no one benefited financially, not me or Keith or even Charity Hospital. Noizefest was still valuable though, as a summit where dozens of original artist/weirdoes, most of whom hadn’t known of each other, got to meet and plot and play and collaborate. Noizefest was also like a private audition for my music column: years worth of scene research, dumped squealing, clanking and feeding-back, right on my porch – my porch which is still, incidentally, strew with Keith’s broken mirror.