SO! Amplifies: Nameless Sound
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/k0be4-s6s31
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You’re welcome!
Nameless Sound is a Houston institution, currently celebrating 25 years of bringing free experiences of experimental music making to the local community. The organization, founded by trombone player/composer/improviser David Dove, started out as a small workshop in improvisation for teenagers at the MECA (Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts), an arts community center in Houston’s 6th Ward. Dove realized through musical practice with his students that the opportunity for creativity was often missing in traditional musical education and that improvisation was, for him, the most immediate and inclusive way to collaboratively engage young people in creative music making. Despite widely varying musical expertise, the students were able to able to meaningfully collaborate with one another. Beginners were captivated and engaged, while students with more musical education were challenged and ready to experiment. Shortly after this realization, Dove became part of the Advisory Board of Diverse Works, an arts organization in Houston’s museum district, he began organizing concerts with leading experimental musicians, inviting them to lead sessions of his kids’ workshop at MECA.
It was Houston’s own Pauline Oliveros who encouraged Dove to formalize this residency model–experimental musicians come to town, give a public performance followed by a community workshop for young people–that would become the blueprint for Nameless Sound’s work today. The organization actually began as a branch of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in 2001 (and would come to be called the Deep Listening Institute Houston when Oliveros’s organization took on that name). That year they brought 9 artists to Houston and started a ongoing campaign of improvisation workshops in public schools (known then as The Houston Tour).
In 2005 Jo Ann Williams, art therapist and founder of ArtBridge Houston, invited DLI Houston to start giving workshops for children in some Houston homeless shelters. This was an important turning point for DLI Houston. It widened the age group that the organization worked with. It began a practice of facilitating workshops for people who previously had no experience playing music at all. Perhaps most importantly, Nameless Sound began to witness the potential for social-emotional learning in the improvisational process, and they began to understand how a secure framework for creative music making could also provide a safe-space for emotional vulnerability.
In 2006, with the blessing of Oliveros, DLI Houston broke off from its parent organization and became Nameless Sound, a fully independent 501(c)3 non-profit. Over the past 20 years, Nameless Sound has continued to evolve. Its concert series has become known for a diverse range of international artists who represent the most important and influential names in the music, as well as the emerging cutting-edge.
The series features commissions and world-premieres, as well as special projects that entail collaborations between visiting artists and local musicians. Site-specific events in some of Houston’s most interesting art environments often bring in visiting audiences from outside of the city. Visiting artists have included Susie Ibarra, Damon Smith, Keiji Haino, Louis Moholo, Maja Ratkje, Cooper-Moore, Matana Roberts, and Hamid Drake. Occasional interventions bring ears to seemingly unlikely public listening spaces. And one of our ongoing projects outside of Houston brings audiences to The Hill of James Magee, an art installation on private land in the West Texas Chihuahuan Desert.
One of Nameless Sound’s most popular interventions is They, Who Sound, which started out as a series of casual sessions at local Houston bars. After some challenges and changes in location, Nameless Sound officially took on They, Who Sound in 2018 as a weekly series of concerts in partnership with Lawndale Art Center. For Lawndale, the series represented something of a return to roots, as in the 1980’s, Lawndale’s original location was the site for some of the most memorable experimental music and underground rock events in Houston. Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago all performed there, as did Black Flag, The Minutemen and the Replacements.
For Nameless Sound, They Who Sound was an opportunity to provide a stage and shed light on Houston’s diverse, vibrant, and unique experimental music scene. It has endured as a meeting place for Houston listeners and experimental musicians, and as a lab for new developments. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, Nameless Sound contined to innovate and serve the community, creating They, Who Sound Special Delivery. For a small fee, anyone can schedule a They, Who Sound musician to come to their home and perform a 10 minute piece of experimental music from a safe distance.
They, Who Sound continues in concert with the Lawndale Art Center every Monday from 7:30 to 9:30pm (Doors open at 7pm). Coming up September 28th, 2026 Nameless Sound will host Emily Beisel/Lisa Cameron & Laura Dykes/Kodey Saldaña/Thomas Swindell. For videos of past performances and to subscribe to receive future updates, you can check out Nameless Sound’s Youtube Page or follow on Vimeo.
Nameless Sound remains committed to a vision of personal and community evolution supported by the practices of creative music. Creative music improvisation provides a unique opportunity to cultivate group awareness, self-awareness and healthy vulnerability, with potential outcomes of knowledge exchange, creative work, play and healing. The skills developed through musical improvisation emphasize listening, creativity, spontaneity, dialogue and self-expression. There are free ongoing workshops through September 2026 and more to be announced.
Other upcoming events for Nameless Sound to close out 2026:
- October 10, 3 – 5 pm, Dimensions Variable at Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University. Laura Dykes and Aryn Ward on/with Nanibah Chacon’s Where Two Rivers Meet. As part of The Moody Center’s Dimensions Variable series, in conjunction with the exhibition Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas
- November 12, 7–8 p.m, Vitalized Vitalized at Menil. : The Nameless Sound Ensemble creates and performs scores based on works by Terry Winters. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry, This program takes place in the main building, located at 1533 Sul Ross Street. As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.
Nameless Sound is currently in Fall Fundraising mode, with an anonymous donor matching every gift up to 8,000 dollars through FRIDAY, September 25, 2026 Here’s to 25 more years of Nameless Sound with ongoing support from local and global sound communities!
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The Absurdity and Authoritarianism of Now: My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade Resonates Queerly, Anew
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/g8byn-fea85
My Chemical Romance fans are speculating about new music after the band wiped their X account clean and wrapped up the Latin America leg of their tour this month. Whether another album is on the way or not, MCR’s magnum opus – The Black Parade – continues to endure two decades later. The sound now resonates through MCR’s commentary on fascism, critiquing the nation while holding the crowd accountable for our participation or passivity.
As the band tours The Black Parade for its 20th anniversary, the members have rejected nostalgia in favor of a new storyline, playing alter-ego characters who have been conditioned to perform for a dictator. The plot, slightly shifting night to night, encourages fans to follow along.
In the first run of the tour, each concert paused midway for an “election.” Four hooded figures walked out to the center stage. Nearby, an army official watched. Singer Gerard Way asked the audience to vote: Support these candidates or reject them? Each person in the crowd had a sign. One side: YEA. The other side: NAY.
“Now we need to hear you,” Way says. The audience roars, jeering and cheering.
No matter the spectators’ will, the result is the same: execution.
The warped election – and the sound of The Black Parade – reflects the absurdism of authoritarianism. Here is a democracy that ends in death, regardless of how you vote. Viewers log into livestreams to watch the fanfare repeat.
MCR’s commentary echoes the ramping authoritarianism and upheaval in the United States:
- The Supreme Court cleared the way for immigration agents to use race as a reason to stop and check someone’s citizenship documents. Daily ICE arrests reached a decade high last year. 2025 also marked the deadliest year for people in ICE custody in two decades.
- Protests have swept the nation, with outrage further increasing after federal agents killed two Minneapolis demonstrators this January.
- Cuts and changes to Medicaid and SNAP are on their way. The longest government shutdown also ended without extending subsidies for health care.
- The Epstein files were released, showing ties between powerful leaders and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
- The Department of Governmental Efficiency, named after an outdated Internet meme (DOGE), has resulted in the elimination of at least 290,000 jobs.
- The U.S. withdrew from the Paris Agreement and World Health Organization. The country also pulled out of 66 international organizations.
- Trump continues to enact steep tariffs after a Supreme Court ruling against his policy.
- Layoffs soared past 1.1 million job cuts in 2025, the highest since 2020’s COVID-19 shutdown.
This list represents a fraction of stories and executive orders in 2025; a “flood the zone” strategy overwhelmed the news cycle. Despite censorship efforts – such as the federal defunding of NPR and PBS – much of this information is available to us at the click of a button. State-sanctioned propaganda even encourages the spectacle. Just take a look at footage of ICE raids on the WhiteHouse’s TikTok account, set to songs and images of pop stars:
Yet fatigue and fearmongering keep many complacent; looming economic crises also draw our attention and time. I do not mean to diminish people’s efforts of resistance. But I am interested in the way technology has expanded our potential to witness violence, without ever requiring us to act – as well as the power of entertainment to distract.
So I turn back to MCR’s spectacle, which twists and mirrors this descent into fascism. Up against the tour’s faux-executions, the boos and the cheers of the crowd collapse into a cacophony. I locate the sound of our times within these screams, where dissent seems to go unheard and melds into the chorus of support.
The Black Parade is full of these bombastic wails, but the most intense of them are in “Mama,” a song that balloons into an extended eight-minute performance in the Long Live the Black Parade Tour. Within “Mama,” I try to make some sense of these screams, finding queer resonance with the present moment.
With my analysis, I ask: How might we hold fascist figures to account without squirming out of our own role in the daily exchange of authoritarianism? I argue My Chemical Romance’s 2025-2026 performance of “Mama” highlights structures of violence but also criticizes our participation within them.
In “Mama,” the indulgence of sin is contagious. It’s loud. It’s repeated: “Mama, we all go to hell.” This refrain, set to a polka beat, creates an abject intimacy around our shared fate. Queer listeners have interpreted this song as an angry anthem against the rejection we face from our families and dogmatic religion. For those of us who have heard, “You’re going to hell,” the response, “We all go to hell,” serves as a relief. Verses like “You should’ve raised a baby girl, I should’ve been a better son” have been reclaimed by transgender fans.
Other fans have taken issue with these interpretations, arguing queer attachments distract from the “true” meaning of the song. Indeed, “Mama” tells the story of a soldier writing from the trenches of war, while his mother judges him from afar. But I argue that by placing a queer reading in tandem with the canonical narrative, generative meanings emerge. Queer theory provides tools to understand the role of the mother here. Mama is the title of the song. Mama is pervasive. Mama is mean. Mama is on his mind. But she is also almost entirely absent, avoiding accountability for her son’s violence and instead blaming him: “She said, ‘You ain’t no son of mine.’”
The soldier finds that the trenches are not just his domain, but also his mama’s: “Mama, we’re all full of lies…And right now, they’re building a coffin your size.” His plea to his mother helps us wonder: What about the culture that birthed this violence? In this metaphor, critiquing the mother extends to critiquing the nation.
At the climax of the song, these sentiments come through screams: 30 seconds of an extended, “AHHHHHH” and a crying out of, “Mama, Mama, Mama.” In these wails, I find a soldier begging to share responsibility with his motherland, even as he contends with his own role in the violence. The cries puncture the polka, demonstrating “Mama” is not a celebration, after all.
Mama only sings one line back, through the voice of theater icon Liza Minnelli: “And if you would call me a sweetheart/I’d maybe then sing you a song.” Minnelli’s voice connects the song’s sound to her role in Cabaret, a musical which mixes together queer aesthetics and indulgent decadence with a foreboding rise of fascism. This allusion to Cabaret, as well as the tour performance, serve as a reminder: pleasure and entertainment does not always equal resistance.
In the extended version of “Mama” on tour, these lines are sung by an opera singer, whose voice, too, serves the dictator. Preceding her performance, the song briefly opens up a space for resistance. A new section of the song, debuted on the tour, includes the lyrics:
A dagger, a dagger
Please fetch me a dagger
A tool for our treasonous needs…
With tears in our eyes we collapse on the crosses
And said death be the son of us all
This war is the son of us all.
Even as Gerard Way’s character plots treason against the dictator, these new lyrics make clear: this “death” and “war” is “the son of us all.” Though we might want to pin fascism on one figure, many Americans have participated in the creation of this “death/war.” There are fatal consequences for our collective actions – or our passivity.
Ultimately, the dramatics of this song, delivered like a sinister weapon, critique violence, while ironically trapping us in its pleasures. If prayer is crying out to our father who art in heaven, “Mama” is yelling back at our mother to bring her to where she belongs: the hell in which we both exist. Given the stakes of our political moment, I argue we need to scream louder, with purpose and strategy, against our motherland.
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Featured Image: “My Chemical Romance Live at T-Mobile Park 6/11/25,” Image by Flickr User Laura Smith CC BY-ND 4.0
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Max Lubbers (he/she) is a first-year PhD student in the American Studies and Ethnicity department at the University of Southern California. His research centers on transgender affects and sounds. Max earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Northwestern University, with a senior thesis on butch affect. She previously worked as a journalist, with pieces in Chicago’s NPR station, Colorado Public Radio, and Windy City Times.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
The Sounds of Equality: Reciting Resilience, Singing Revolutions–Mukesh Kulriya
Vocal Anguish, Disinformation, and the Politics of Eurovision 2016–Maria Sonevytsky
“To Unprotect and Subserve:” King Britt Samples the Sonic Archive of Police Violence —Alex Werth
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