Musique Machine / Multi-Genre Music Magazine

Seeing this band live, it's like they change the lighting in a room without any kind of special effects. It's less a performance and more an exhibition of raw, soulful splendor, unmiterated by any gimmickry, appeasement, or fake bad boy attitudes. A wall of sound and song will delineate into an instrumental industrial ballad; organ, guitar, lap steel, electric drill, and sheet metal will interlace, sparks will fly, and just when you might think there may not have been a plan, a ghostly sort of crooning that could fit into a David Lynch movie might emerge from out of the fog, and you will find that you've just seen a triumphant epic sewn together in front of your very eyes, yet no secrets have been revealed. An experience like this had drawn me further to this group, and spurred me to find out more. On a brisk but sunny Sunday afternoon in November (09), at lead singer travis's marvelous home on the south side of Chicago, I was fortunate enough to be blessed by their hospitality and gather some information during a wholesome feast much like the one described in this Roctober article, on one of the days that they regularly meet for rehearsal.

Formed in 1980, ONO, which stands for Onomatopoeia, is influenced by Eastern music, The Stooges, Velvet Underground, Bobby Womack, and a gospel singer named Sallie Martin, who reputedly incorporated power drills and saws into her music. Its core members are P. Michael Grego and travis, a collaborative kinship tied by chance from the very beginning, a random meeting at a gas station meant to be a pit stop for a trip to New Mexico with the intention of giving up all earthly belongings. While their backgrounds are widely varied, the two seem to meet at a drastically skewed departure from the axis of R & B, and a reluctance to play an instrument the way that it is "supposed to be played". travis used to play piano in church as a child with blocks or pieces of wood tied to his fingers, P. Michael would memorize music while being taught, so that he didn't have to follow along or read the music as he was playing, and he played in a percussive way. The intent was apparently always to dismantle the music, to capture the essence of what the right music did to people, and to discard the insincerity of many bands. But this isn't to paint them in any kind of stuffy or academic light in the manner that one might to that of an avante garde composer.

Previous to ONO, and predating punk, P-Michael grew up in a south side Chicago neighborhood rich with soul music history, played in bands that did funk tunes interspersed with prog, and sometimes played at strip clubs. After leaving the navy in 1969, travis spent a lot of time in NY gay bars, which seemed to be the only fun loving and spirited places that would host nights oriented to what would later be called "punk". *He also had a strong, non-musical friendship with Peter Laughner (Pere Ubu, Dead Boys), which he went into colorful detail about in an addendum below*. ONO has never had a regular drummer, so more recent member Rebecca Pavlatos often plays percussion sounds with her keyboard along with, or instead of their drum machine, and Jesse Thomas will sometimes play a big metal garbage pail if he's not busy making sparks come out of his guitar. So their sound is still strongly rooted in the influence of playing pianos and other things like percussion instruments, but the focus behind the music seems to be more about expression and catharsis than many an experimental artist or straight rock band.

Around 1980, ONO were playing in factories, art spaces, classrooms, and on a few sequential engagements, the burned out ruins of smoldering buildings, with few peripheral artists to accompany their strange fits of chaotic, spirited incantation. travis would often wear something like a wedding gown or priest's vestments and a jester's mask, along with a jock strap, and swing around chains with hubcaps attached to them. Their performances were known to have several 100 watt amplifiers stacked into a pyramid, white lace altars, candles, broken sheets of glass, and altar boys. The extensive and alarmingly detailed bio covering 30 years or so, reads like this: 17NOV84... ...Louanne Ponder enters stage from lower level with ceremonial size US flag, joining three other flags decorating the stage floor. Ponder as Honor Guard wears black vinyl hip-length boots, athletic supporter, oversized brassiere (2ft-3ft "breasts," all white) and pale Ponder body covered in chalky paste of paint and white powder. Then, the final Procession: Ric and P.Michael with shiny new garbage cans, heavy metals into "Taps" played on brass. There's a video of travis with ONO in 1984, singing the national anthem in a tutu behind a backwards American flag as walls of dark, screwed up guitar and wirey lap steel twang go writhing about.

While they had plenty of friends in the music scene, received no small amount of press, and did share stages with Snakefinger, Boy Dirt Car, Naked Raygun, Lydia Lunch, and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, their music was not often taken gracefully. They didn't always play with bands that would bring out a receptive crowd for something like an ONO performance, and with the photos in the press, people would often times assume that they played reggae or something, so one might've heard them start shows by saying "IF YOU CAME HERE FOR MUSIC, LEAVE NOW!". However, they were also good friends with a young Al Jourgenson (of Ministry, in Special Affect and Immune System, around that time), who produced their first album, introduced them to their future accordion/saxophone player, his girlfriend at the time, Shannon Rose, and was instrumental in getting them a record deal with Thermidor, mainly a punk label. On this label, they shared company with SPK, Flipper, Minutemen, and Gerechtigkeits Liga for their only two official releases to date: Machines That Kill People (1983) and Ennui (1986).