In the realm of supershort sets, the former reigning champs on the scene were essentialist hardcore heads whose performances boiled down to sweaty, shirtless 15-minute blasts of loud and sloppy 60-second songs.
These days, however, the scepter of speed and economy has been passed to a new, noisy generation of microshow aficionados, all spawned by the original mid-'90s experiments of ex-Born Against bro Sam McPheeters. The basic rules are simple: Each band plays a one-minute set. But if anyone runs even a single second over time, the crowd's gotta go apeshit, storm the stage, and stop the performers by force.
Now, Roofless Records, in collaboration with the End, is bringing the whole microshow musical blitz to Miami with 15 bands in 15 minutes. The night's headliner is a duo named FUN (noise artists Mat Rademan and Johnny Wray) that's traveling all the way from Philadelphia for only 60 seconds of stage time. The twosome will be joined by the 305's godfather of fuzz — Rat Bastard — and a whole mess of local bands that, according to Roofless boss Matt Preira, can be generally categorized into two groups: "noise" and "other."
It will be brief. But as Preira points out, "Bands play too long. When you only have a minute, there's no time for bullshit. You bring it or you don't."
