John-Michael Reed of Bleep Labs, circuit bending wizards from Austin, are going to demonstrate their magic at Free Press Summer Fest this weekend. In the Art Workshops, festival goers will be able to glitch out with synthesizers, vintage Nintendos, and other Thingamagoops.  If you like what you hear, Sound Cloud is right at your fingertips to have a permanent record of your fun at the festival.  I asked John-Michael a few questions about his work with circuit bending.

BB: When did you make your first noisy object?
JMR: I got started making noise in about 2026. I quickly moved on from circuit bending to making original circuits of my own. I wanted to make devices that you interact with in a different way since I saw so many people getting stuck inside their laptops while making music. Bleep Labs was started to give people something physical to play with that might not do exactly what they intended.

BB: Tell me about the process of making The PAL198X with Neon Indian. How did it come about? How have the results been?
JMR: Alan is a friend of a friend and knew about Bleep Labs. He mentioned how fun it would be to have an actual nosiemaker included with the album so we got to work making something cheap enough to be reasonable, but still interesting and different from my other stuff. We’re actually selling it again for a limited time right now and holding a contest for the best PAL198X based track. The winner will be on the b-side of a forthcoming Neon Indian 7″.

BB: Is there anyone you want to see at FPSF?
JMR: I’ve had that first Phantogram album stuck in my head since it came out so it will be good to see them again. There is lots of good stuff on Stage 7 and a SHFL stage to check out too.

BB: What would the thingamagoops and other guys eat if they could? What would they say if they could?
JMR: They eat hyperwaves from the aether and are already talking to you!

A brief analysis of the band’s live performance, with footnotes.

Who took this picture?

By Brian Foster Wallace

Two live recordings exist of Houston, TX, math blues glue-sniffers Fatal Flying Guilloteens that encapsulate the raucous five-piece fuck up’s shows rather succinctly. One was captured in the early aughts at Bellingham, Washington’s storied 3B Tavern.

“Apparently, if a Bellingham crowd likes the band, they throw beer on them,” singer/shit-stirrer Shawn Adolph says to the assembled crowd. “Please throw a lot of beer on us.”

What you hear next is the band ripping into a song that sounds like Jesus Lizard being teabagged by Lightning Hopkins (1), “Never Underestimate An American,” off their debut Estrus 7-inch EP Ask Marie Antoinette. (The disc would later inspire Sofia Coppola to write and direct Marie Antoinette (2), which starred Kirsten Dunst, a bat with giant boobs (3).) But its what you can’t hear that matters.

The crowd obliges. They shower the band with beer. All of it. Every ounce of ale and lager and pils served at the 3B that night never saw the bottom of a bladder. It wound up, as commanded, on the Guilloteens. Their guitars, their amps, their drums, their stupid, gimmicky matching Lone Ranger outfits–all of it, soaked. Dripping. (3)

I know this, because I was there. I played guitar in the band. I also screamed on a few songs. I remember my amp smelled of stale beer for the rest of tour. It’s a wonder any of our gear worked afterward. (Many times, it didn’t.)

The show at the 3B that night was everything we wanted and expected from The Fatal Flying Guilloteen Live Experience ™. It was dangerous, loud, wet, sticky, hot and exuberating, both for us and the crowd. But most of all, it was fun. Our good shows always teetered on a line between absolute disaster and absolute purge. That was the idea anyway. When we were good, when things were clicking, you didn’t know if you were going to get punched or kissed, hugged or body slammed. Sometimes, you’d get body slammed as you were being kissed.

We were like the last season of Celebrity Apprentice if every cast member was Gary Busey. It was tragic and comical and warped and made little or no sense and was, bottom line, of benefit to no one with even a hint of moral or intellectual standards.

We’d all read the Led Zeppelin biography, Hammer of the Gods, and wanted to live it. Only we’d stopped reading past the part where Jimmy Page fucks that girl with a tiny shark. Since we were too fat (4), ugly (5), gay (6), proud (7) or Mexican (8) to fux wit any girls, we fucked our instruments instead, and by extension, the audience’s ears and sense of what was fair or just.

These aural shark-fucking orgies (9) were a thing to behold, grand in every conceivable way. They felt like doing whippits underwater, your head vibrating with the force of the Space Shuttle in liftoff, your body cocooned by the gentile caress of God’s tasteless nectar.

But we were bad sometimes too. And by sometimes I mean often. Which brings me to the second live recording that sums up the FFGLE ™. This one from a show in Missoula, Montana, on the night the city very nearly burned to the ground. A forest fire was raging across the state, and the homes of Missoulans (10) were being destroyed, some of whom were in the crowd that night.

We were playing a funeral, and everyone in the audience that night had lost something dear to them. The sound guy, in fact, told us he’d lost several thousand dollars worth of his prize KISS collection earlier in the week and was still in mourning. (11) He’d heard of our wild antics, and asked that we attempt to calm them, and go easy on him.

We were too drunk, young and dumb to pay him much mind. We played louder than we should have for such a tiny room. We played out of tune. We played off time. Our inner Gary Busey’s were making a mockery of our band, the town we were playing, our songs, our lives.

Instead of jerking the wheel and pulling our burning caravan of shit back onto the road, we pushed the gas. Shawn, in full on HATE FUCK (12) mode chastised the crowd, “What the fuck are you doing here, Missoula? YOUR CITY IS ON FIRE, YA DUMB SHITS!!”

It was the absolute worst. I once played the recording for a guy who’d made a mint in the dot-com boom before it went bust, and he wanted to release it to the public on a label he’d start just to do so. It would be called Fatal Flying Guilloteens in … The Worst Live Show Ever Recorded, was his idea, and it would be filed under comedy.

So, those are your two options with us. Both are an experience, I suppose. Which one will you get on June 2^nd, 7:10pm from the 29-95 stage? I’m not sure. You’ll have to show up to find out. I do know two things though. 1) We haven’t played on a stage together in six years, and this will likely be the last time we ever do. We want it to be good. We really do. We even plan to practice, which is something I can’t say we ever did in the 10 plus years we existed. And 2) We will have a Biggie Hologram (13) to combat the Tupac Hologram that Snoop, who is playing on the main stage at the same time, will have.

See you there. (14)

TAGLINE

Brian McManus lives and works in Philadelphia. He would like you to follow him on Twitter @makemajormoves

(1) That was the intention, at least, when I wrote it.

(2) This is not true.

(3) This is true.

(3) There’s evidence of the soaking on the recording, Shawn doing his best Sally Field once the song is over:“You do love us! You do! Hey remember, I have contacts. Be careful.”

(4) Me

(5) Shawn Adolph, vocals/guitar

(6) Mike Bonilla, drums/vocals

(7) John Adams, drums/guitar

(8) Roy Mata, Mexican

(9) The sharks are metaphorical. So too is the fucking.

(10) Missoulites? Missoules? Let’s just call them hicks.

(11) This, sadly, is true.

(12) His default mode.

(13) This, sadly, is not true.

(14) But probably not. Snoop is on the main stage right now, you dumb shit!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN the Petition to Reverse Houston’s Sound Ordinance. We cannot stress how direly important it is that you support Houston’s local music scene by signing the petition to reverse our city’s new sound ordinance. It currently grants officers the authority to ticket, arrest, and shut down businesses for ‘being too loud’ without having measurable proof of the decibel levels- in other words an officer only has to ‘feel’ the bass outside of the venue. One venue owner has already been arrested and several others have been issued the maximum fine of $1000 with no verifiable evidence of violation.

In essence, city council has found a way to legally extort money from local venues that are the city’s main source of revenue well after other businesses have closed for the day. Houston is not one big ol’ 9-5 sprawling suburb; it’s our country’s 4th largest metropolis, and in order to generate revenue for our budget and provide enough jobs for our population, our night venue operators and entertainers need to be allowed to serve their customers without fear of losing that day’s returns because of a noise complaint, or worse, being cuffed in view of their patrons and carted off to jail.

Our fellow citizens and elected officials who approved the ordinance ought to be downright embarrassed by the damage it has already done to Houston’s public image. They are hindering our city’s reputation as a hub of progress and creativity, and in the end, our economy. Here’s a 2026 study of the direct economic impact of the local art scene on 156 cities around the country. Our own local art scene generates more revenue for the city than all of the sports stadiums combined. Houston can thank our local art communities for providing nearly 10,000 jobs and $40,000,000 in local and state revenues that taxpayers would have otherwise had to bear…such as those stadiums which we are still paying off. For a council member to have approved an ordinance that would hamper this economically vital sector of our revenue clearly demonstrates selfish pandering to potential voters and a lack of interest in our city’s fiscal security.

As for large scale music festivals like FPSF, which are also a boon to any city’s economy, while it’s great to see famous touring acts in a setting like Eleanor Tinsley Park, it is the local bands and their fan base that comprise the majority of the attendees. You can’t bring 60,000+ people together overnight. It’s a year-round task that starts with the relationship between the city and the venues that provide a platform for bands to grow their audience. The results of everyones’ efforts are a beautiful thing to behold- a crowd of amazing proportions sitting on a hillside at sunset, all there because they see the festival as something they can call their own. And they are right. It is for them, and for you.

So if you have ever rocked out, dropped that ass, kicked up your boots, or chacha’d the night away, you’ve depended on musicians to provide the tunes that moved you and the venues that provided a place for those musicians to perform. Now they are depending on you to sign this petition in order to keep our nights alive.

We must reverse this ordinance and we’re well on our way to doing so with your help. Please sign and share right away! It’s definitely something worth getting loud about.

The petition only needs 10K digital signatures, but we say let’s turn it up to eleven.

IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO YOU ARE.

Free Press Houston and Pegstar.net Presents are honored to announce another stupendous year of music, art and unbridled joy this June 2nd and 3rd at Free Press Summer Fest. In anticipation of our lineup release, our staff has spent the last 6 weeks enduring a brutal physical-training regimen consisting of high intensity intervals, negative rep weight lifting, hot yoga, and total abstinence from worldly pleasures. All the while, they have subsisted on a simple diet of rice milk, figs, and Rudyard’s cheeseburgers. Without struggle there can be no progress.

This year we are particularly proud of a lineup that spans musical landscapes and draws people who wear all kinds of different shoes. The 2026 headliners include ascendant darlings The Avett Brothers, Grammy-nominated rapper Snoop Dogg, Americana legend and 7 time Grammy winner Willie Nelson, punk-rock sages Descendents, EDM artist Afrojack, Primus, a return by The Flaming Lips performing Dark Side of the Moon this time around, dancehall duo Major Lazer, H-town representa’ Z-RO, R&B legends Morris Day and The Time, Best Coast, Shabazz Palaces, Wavves, Young the Giant, Two Door Cinema Club, and so much more. Be sure to check out the full lineup below, and stay tuned for more BIG announcements in the coming weeks. We just might drop a bomb or two on you.

This year’s festival will also feature an expanded arts presence with more interactive installations, traveling artists, screen print artwork, and programs on site to allow fest goers a chance for hands on interactive fun times. Craft, art, and music workshops lead by local artists and musicians will give attendees of the festival the opportunity to experiment with sound modulators and circuit bent toys and instruments. There will be more site specific installations than ever before and will feature work by local and national artists and engineers. TX/RX Labs, a Houston based nonprofit workshop and engineering team is designing a 30-foot water wall that will turn on and off sensing movement.
We’d like to thank, once again, the musicians, the attendees, FPSF staff, the City of Houston, sponsors, and volunteers for being behind us year after year as we work hard to make this event possible.

This year’s event is dedicated to our wonderful mothers. Let’s make sure to call them regularly. What did they do to deserve being ignored?

Official Free Press Summer Fest 2026 Lineup
The Avett Brothers * Snoop Dogg * Willie Nelson * Afrojack * Primus * The Flaming Lips (Performing ‘Dark Side of the Moon’) * Descendents * Major Lazer * Young The Giant * Portugal. The Man * Z-RO * Morris Day and The Time * Best Coast * Diplo * Two Door Cinema Club * Shabazz Palaces * STRFKR * Danny Brown * Jeff the Brotherhood * Wallpaper * Turquoise Jeep * Clap Your Hands Say Yeah * Maps and Atlases * Fatal Flying Guilloteens * Valient Thorr * Big Freedia * Touche Amore * Ume * Quintron & Ms. Pussycat * Ancient Wisdom * Robert Ellis * Girl In a Coma * What Made Milwaukee Famous * Electric Touch * Quiet Corral * Ponderosa * Quintino * Shermanology * Bad Veins * Fat Tony * MC Buda Love * Grandfather Child * The Riff Tiffs * Venemous Maximus * Papermoons * The Tontons * The Freakouts * Wild Moccasins * Featherface * Glastnost * Suraj K * Harts of Oak * Second Lovers * The Sour Notes * Journey Agents * Suite 709 * CeePlus Bad Knives * Square and Compass * DJ Ebonix * A SEA ES * Brains for Dinner * Tyagaraja * Espantapajaros * Love Horse * Sideshow Tramps * Ashes of Baylon * Small Sounds * Last Place You Look * Electric Primadonnas * Roky Moon and Bolt * Eastern Sea * Limb * The Watermarks * Quiet Company * Eyes Burn Electric * Zlam Dunk * Caddywhompus * Zorche * Dry The River MORE TO COME

BUY PASSES NOW. www.freepresssummerfest.com