E-Mail This Article to a Friend Alien encounters The precocious noise punk of Slick Pig BY MIKE MILIARD

"Wanna see my permit?" asks Nathie in a congested helium squeak as he strides purposefully down a verdant Newton street. "It’s pretty funny."

Nathie — the only name he wants to be known by — has just turned 16. Gangly in an outsized Pink Floyd T-shirt, with a swaying riot of tangled hair and cultivated fuzz on his lip and chin, he digs into the ripped back pocket of his dirty blue jeans and fishes out a crumpled learner’s permit. After all, for a kid whose sole mode of transportation has heretofore been a BMX tricked out with a pink flamingo and a boombox, a license to drive is a big deal. The permit betrays Nathie’s surname, but he asks me not to mention it. "I’ve kept my last name kind of secret. A lot of famous people do that. I mean, I’m not really famous, I’m just saying . . . "

Nathie isn’t famous. Not yet. But from his first Nirvana tapes (age six) to his stint in a Meat Puppets "ripoff band" (age eight) to the booking of his first club show (age 10), he’s done quite a bit to distinguish himself from your average school-age guitar noodler. Working primarily under the moniker Slick Pig, he’s a one-man band — he describes his chosen form of expression as "spacy/metal/rock/grunge/trippy/other" — wreaking havoc on an assemblage of instruments and found objects ("wine cups, guitar, bass, vocals, metal bars, drums, and tons of others") to mine experimental metal ore in his parents’ basement. The two full-lengths and one demo he’s churned out since age 13 couple a riveting sonic adventurousness with an astute feel for dynamics; and their progression evinces an exponential artistic growth. Yet the kid who made them is way too young to get by the doorman at the very same clubs he plays in. Nathie hasn’t just parlayed his recordings into nights sharing stages with mavens of avant-metal and experimental noise — Faith No More’s Mike Patton and the Japanese band Melt Banana, to name just two. He’s gone so far as to form his own record label and produce his own videos, and he just launched an on-line ’zine.

And he shows no signs of slowing down. He has enough material ready to release his third album, and instead of waiting around for club bookings, he regularly engages in unannounced street-side performance-art happenings. When not attending Sudbury Valley School in Framingham — he describes it as "this weird alternative school where you don’t actually have to do anything" — or skulking around suburban cul-de-sacs at 2 a.m., Nathie is making noise. "I’m pretty much a music addict, I guess. That’s all I do, when it comes down to it."

The æsthetic of Nathie’s music finds an analogue in the dusky, dusty clutter of his bedroom studio, in the basement of his parents’ tidy yellow house. Lit wanly by a single blue light bulb, filled wall to wall and floor to ceiling like a dark and dusty junk shop, it’s a helter-skelter tumult of microphones, drums, guitars, a sitar, an old electric organ that’s missing a few keys, a mixing console, a crappy TV, salvaged receivers, a turntable, and tangled thickets of wires and cables and cords of every description. A pair of busted headphones hangs on the wall. Plasticine body parts lies strewn across a bureau. In a shadowy corner, an unmade bed lies, as if an afterthought.

Slouching at his computer, Nathie pulls up the file for a video he’s just finished for "#Maybe3983748256)!" the first track from his newest self-released work, &7City&7&&&Water7. "Most words in English can sound either really cool or ridiculously stupid," he says by way of explaining the title of the album and song. "So I put tons of numbers in to confuse people." The video itself is an accomplished piece of work. It owes an obvious debt to those Tool videos filled with grimy claymation of anguished automatons lumbering through dystopias of liquid light and heavy shadows. But the song is built on a foundation of clamorous percussion that evokes Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex blaring from a transistor radio at the bottom of a well. Starting slow and wordless, it builds toward a harrowing eruption of distortion swells punctuated by shrill stuck-pig squeals.

The rest of the new Slick Pig album finds Nathie wringing ever more expressive sounds, alternately atmospheric and assaultive, out of everything from traditional instruments to miscellaneous junk; it’s all topped off with heavily treated vocal tics. "painorain888888888888888888888" is a catatonic wash of melancholy piano and theremin. "End of Trains" rides a ghost wind through some slimy subterranean haunt where albino alligators copulate with ferocious grunts. The title track evokes tribal drums from deep jungle recesses summoning swarms of robotic bees. The hairspray-huffing "sludgepop-[]![][]![][][]!" bursts synapses in its rendering of the Clockwork Orange score as narcotized new wave.

The new material represents a leap forward from the chunky art metal on the first Slick Pig full-length, 2002’s Bottled Distortion. But even that album revealed a sense of purpose and a level of complexity far above what you’d expect from most established experi-metal bands, let alone a solitary 14-year-old. The shape-shifting mesmerism of "Shade Blue" spins a tortuous riff with spectral, effects-shrouded vocals dissipating into ear-splitting shrieks and squeals. "Rise Above," a churning snit of growls and rants, sounds like all three Melvins suffering simultaneous epileptic seizures. "The Corax" melds a staccato fuzz bass with assorted blips and bleeps and a barely pubescent high-pitched voice that channels Danny ("red ruuum!") from The Shining.

It’s clear that Nathie is no ordinary kid. At a time when most six-year-olds were being treated to the likes of Raffi, he was cutting his punk-rock teeth with Nirvana and Melvins tunes. "I used to have to sneak White Zombie tapes around and label ’em differently because they had parental-advisory stickers." When he joined the Mini Puppets, at age eight, it didn’t bother him that "none of us really knew how to play anything. I bought, like, a drum and a bunch of pots and started banging on ’em." The callow caterwaulers even managed to log studio time. "When I was 10 or 11, we went to Bristol recording studios. It was really horrible. We did, like, 12 songs in five hours. But the mixing job was really bad. So right after recording the thing, we decided to break up."

That wasn’t even the biggest disappointment of Slick Pig’s nascent career. Having played live once already at the Natick Arts Center, 10-year-old Nathie managed to book a Mini Puppets gig at the Linwood Grill. His folks, however, would have none of it. "My parents got really pissed off. They called this big meeting. They were like, ‘You can’t play clubs! You’re 10!’ So I had to cancel. I was all embarrassed."

His parents finally relented when Nathie reached 14. And one of his first club gigs, an opening slot at the Middle East for Dan "The Automator" Nakamura & Mike Patton’s Lovage that also happened to be the Bottled Distortion release party, "really got my name out there. Before that, people were like, ‘Oh, some kid. Whatever.’ But it got their attention. I got the best reviews that I’ve even seen for my CD. They were like, ‘This is completely ridiculous, because this is as good as something that anyone would do, but this kid’s, like, really young.’ "

Of course, Nathie’s age makes these excoriating psych-metal opuses that much more impressive. But his notoriety has as much to do with his tireless creativity, his savvy self-promotion, and his anything-goes attitude. He not only sold his CDs locally at Newbury Comics, he also got Amazon.com to carry them. His sales rank? #448,706. Not bad for a teenager whose albums are released by his own Fake Water label. Indeed, the industrious Nathie has also begun to distribute CDs by like-minded friends. And they all now have an opportunity to express their musical opinions on-line at his www.nastydrink.com.

Nathie’s unconventional approach recently led him to embark on a mini-tour of 16 different Tampa bus stations in one day (four minutes at each). Closer to home, he’s been bringing his sonic terrorism to MBTA stations, playing at selected T-stops with a group called SA=1=RS. He’s sometimes one half of a duo called I’m Going to Sea, which he describes as "less crazy, more trippy weird rock oriented." And he just finished an album of ambient drones called Music To Sleep To, which is exactly what it says it is.

A beefed-up live incarnation of Slick Pig — still his main musical outlet — took the act out into clubland last month for a gig upstairs at the Middle East. Sporting a large black X on his left hand and a beat-up guitar draped across his scrawny frame, Nathie stood flanked by six friends, including a second-guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a flutist. The vocals were heavily treated with electronic effects.

The gig got off to a slow start but quickly gained momentum until the clattering commotion, at first underpinned by a semblance of structure, began a descent into ear-splitting entropy. As the band sat or crouched around him, Nathie took center stage with one of his invented instruments, something he calls "Robot Fuckhead." It’s a large metal rack rigged with tuned guitar strings, strung up with a gaggle of aluminum cans, and topped with a giant boiling pot cum echo chamber — it was almost as big as Nathie himself, and it emitted boneshaking sounds. At first, he played it as one would any instrument. But as the cacophony around him mounted, he tackled the invented instrument, wrestled it to the ground, humped it, knocked it into the flutist’s head, and finally dragged it out into the audience.

Returning to the stage, Nathie flailed maniacally, screamed and moaned with his mouth around the microphone, pulled down an amplifier and, hugging it, used it to scrape against a guitar. He dove into a guitar case as if it were a coffin; for a moment, all one could see was a small sneakered foot protruding from a stage choked with a junkyard jungle of equipment. People stood with their jaws dropping.

Off stage, Nathie claims that he was born on another planet — Quenasvalliea. When I ask about that, he says, "I don’t have much memory of it. Only small little patterns of déjà vu–type stuff. It’s more of a different reality/dimension that co-exists with Earth." This may just be an allegory for Nathie’s compulsion to follow his own vision on his own time. "It’s more of just a feeling," he continues. "When you don’t associate yourself with everything that’s around you, you can get off the same time frame, and expand and improve at a different speed, and have fewer limits. . . . If you see yourself as an alien, you can use it in a good or bad way."

Slick Pig perform this Sunday, September 14, at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square; call (617) 492-BEAR.