Noon:30 seems to have surprised a lot of people. Singer/bassist Blue S. Moon’s voice can shout unmercifully or bend passionately, but never loses its power. When Moon emotes, “Don’t leave me baby/I have no mother.” on “Orphane,” from their debut EP, it send chills down the spine. Furthermore, the guitar riffs of Aissa Arroyo-Hill sound like they’d fit in on a Siouxsie & The Banshees track or anything off of a Can’t Stop It! mix — she can shred noisily or pluck dissonant notes that are alternately dark and energetic. Add in the strong rhythms set down by drummer Vivianne Njoku, and there’s one of the District’s most exciting and intriguing power trios: not afraid to stand in the legacy of their post-punk forefathers but more than willing to challenge your assumptions of what a power trio can sound like.
We sat down with Noon:30 (even though Njoku had gotten into a bicycling accident hours earlier) to talk their affiliation with Girls Rock! DC, their commitment to volunteering, the misconceptions people have about their band and what their hopes are for the D.C. music scene.
Find them online: http://www.myspace.com/noon30band
See them next: July 8th at Hole in the Sky and July 21st at U Street Music Hall
How did you three meet each other?
Vivianne: Well, Aissa was renting out a room in her apartment in Mt. Pleasant, and I was applying to move in and I said kind of as a qualifier, “I play the drums,” even though at the time I was still kind of learning.
How long ago was that?
Aissa: This was two years ago. Two and a half years ago.
Vivianne: So I said, “I play the drums,” and she said, “Oh! I started this band!” Not Noon:30. And they needed a female drummer. And that’s kind of how that got started. We played in another band. There were five of us. And then, that didn’t work out and I left. It wasn’t even a year that that band was together. I left. Aissa was still with them and meanwhile, I met Blue through a mutual friend. And she was a vocalist looking for musicians, basically. So, we coerced Aissa to jam out with us and from the first jam session, we birthed collectively the song “Orphane,” and we knew it was meant to be.
