Anyone interested in involving themselves and being a part of the N.O.I.S.E.
We like when local publications write about us :) Below is an article from the Las Vegas City Life:
Art culture coup
On an otherwise lackluster First Friday, Aruba corrals the creativity ... all weekend
So the plan was to hit downtown's First Friday arts festival this past weekend and find out where it is these days that Vegas' artsiest contingent goes afterward to drink, decompress, kick it like there's no tomorrow, et cetera. Trouble is, almost no one showed up. To First Friday, that is. And since you can't make something from nothing, I assumed "N.O.I.S.E.," Aruba Hotel and Spa's monthly First Friday after-party, would be just as big a bust. Not so. This would end up being a case of the dessert vastly outshining the main course -- if you can even consider these two events part of the same dinner.
Almost no one I talked to at Aruba that night -- neither artist nor audience -- actually went to First Friday this time around and, judging from the nocturnal scene in the venue's old-Vegas Thunderbird Lounge and separate, cavernous Club Aruba showroom, no one felt they needed to. Good art and music community is where you find it, and they had it all right there.
"I've wanted to do this since I was born," says Travis Morrison around midnight. "For the right people who appreciate it."
As a regular at this event, he's talking about his painting and pencil work, some already finished and on display near the lounge's west entrance, but some being done right now, in real-time, as we're talking over the drum-n-bass-inflected house stylings of DJ Big VRG. Vegas-born-and-raised Morrison says the big-eyed, Sims-like urban subjects of his work aren't really inspired by the music we're hearing ("I kind of just zone out ... this is too eccentric for me,") but the visual and the auditory attacks still seem to complement each other for these 100 or so "right people" in a room that's still getting more crowded.
Fifteen feet away, Jason Warnok puts final touches on a square canvas depicting a giant, floating screw, painted against a royal blue background dotted here and there with tremulous little diamond-shaped starbursts -- as if Van Gogh had designed our "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign.
"There's only so much [a club] can do with just a TV and a sound system," he says. "This is more personal entertainment, and the trick is to make some potent subject matter in four hours. People might notice what I'm doing over here, then talk to each other for a while, go off to the bathroom, come back and say, 'Whoa, you did all this since last time I looked?' ... It's instant gratification for the audience."
"N.O.I.S.E" (Network of Immersive Sensory Entertainers) is the co-creation of Jeffrey Trower (yes, he's Brit-rocker Robin Trower's cousin) and four other people who share what he calls an "art for art's sake" ideal. In terms of who gets to be a part of this scene, Trower says it's simple.
"If you want to put your energy in here, we want you to put your energy in here. Unless someone, you know, jacks us, they're welcome back. That's how it works."
Besides Warnok and Morrison, two other artists are doing their thing here, and that's just in the lounge. On the building's east side, that giant Club Aruba showroom turns out to be the main attraction to most who've shown up. The place wasn't totally packed for the FunkyJahPunkys' jammy, physically frenetic set and it still isn't, but that's fine; if there were more than the few hundred already in here, there'd be precious little room for the raging and democratic drum circle that's just formed in the middle of the floor, led by Brian "Paco" Alvarez. ("He's crazy," grins senior bartender David Matthews affectionately -- which is saying something coming from Matthews, but I'll get to him in a minute.)
While a dozen or so guys whale on congas and djembes, attendees join in, gather on the circle's fringe or mill around the room's perimeter, taking in tables full of sculpture, custom jewelry, at least one painted mannequin torso and a bunch of other created objects for show and sale. Not an unfamiliar setup in itself, but one very oddly matched to the environment; in this dim club light and reverberating musical thunder, I feel I've stumbled into some small-town craft festival of the damned.
On top of that, there's a vaguely anarchistic, who's-in-charge-here aura about the whole thing, but that's typical of the Aruba on just about any night. Nowhere in Vegas will you find the truly eclectic, poly-subcultural scene that exists here, despite the something-for-everyone image touted by a hundred other clubs. This place functions like a community center in that regard, with Saturday's mood being just as different from Friday's as a Girl Scout bake sale is from an N.A. meeting.