Noise-rock super group lands at Eli’s Mile High Club

OAKLAND — Led by Australian noise-rock legend Stu Spasm, the Art Gray Noizz Quintet brings its caustic and corrosive songs to Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland Saturday night.

Guitarist Spasm (known to some by his birth name, Stuart Gray) had already played in such notable Australian punk groups as Exhibit A, Salamander Jim and Scientists offshoot the Beasts of Bourbon when he founded Sydney-based band Lubricated Goat in 1986. Taking cues from the Stooges and Nick Cave’s pioneering crew the Birthday Party, Spasm and his collaborators would make an even more unhinged improvisational racket on Lubricated Goat’s debut album Plays the Devi’s Music the following year.

The band would feature a fluid line-up of players with future Mudhoney bassist Guy Maddison included among the musicians who recorded the band’s follow-up effort Paddock of Love the following year. The band created a national controversy by appearing onstage in the nude to perform the album’s lead single “In the Raw” on the Australian Broadcast Corporation show Blah Blah Blah. Despite that notorious performance (or perhaps because of it), the group would eventually get signed to like-minded U.S. noise-punk imprint Amphetamine Reptile, who reissued the band’s earlier albums and recent EP Schadenfreude ahead of Lubricated Goat’s first American tour in 1989.

The band released its third album Psychedelicatessen for the label in 1990, but Lubricated Goat would go on hiatus after Spasm was stabbed in Berlin during their first European tour. The musician would release a number of singles on various labels under the moniker during the early ’90s, but also founded the group Crunt with then wife Kat Bjelland (of the band Babes in Toyland) and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins. The trio would record a single album, but by the time it was released in 1994, both the group and Spasm’s marriage to Bjelland had started disintegrate. Both would be over within the year.

Lubricated Goat would go silent until Spasm and a new version of the band released The Great Old Ones, a 2003 collection of re-recorded material from throughout the group’s history, and resumed live performances. Spasm’s latest all-star project the Art Gray Noizz Quintet formed in 2015 to celebrate the premiere of the Amphetamine Reptile documentary The Color of Noise. Featuring latter-era Lubricated Goat member Rich Hutchins (also former drummer of Live Skull, Of Cabbages and Kings and Ruin) along with ex-Woman bassist Ryan Skeleton Boy, Twin Guns guitarist Andrea Sicco and a variety of auxiliary members playing horns and metal percussion.

Since coming together, the outfit has supported kindred spirits like Mudhoney and the reunited Scientists as well as collaborating onstage with NYC no-wave heroine Lydia Lunch. Earlier this year, the Quintet released its self-titled studio debut on Bang Records. The band’s latest West Coast tour comes to Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland Saturday night and will also feature a pair of local noise terrorists: established space-punk freaks FNU Clone, Inc. and Future Kill, the latest project of Salt Lake City experimentalists Mikey Blackhurst and Kristin Maloney (ex-Blood Bagz) now based in the East Bay. 

The Art Gray Noizz Quintet
Saturday, Aug. 20, 8 p.m. $13
Eli’s Mile High Club