article

Noise music is music that uses sounds regarded as unpleasant or painful under normal circumstances. "Noise" music is regarded by some as a contradiction in terms, because "noise" is generally defined as unwanted and undesigned or unintentional sound and music as the opposite (see Definition of music). However, "noise" in a more general sense refers to any extremely loud or discordant sound, and that these sounds are often the basis of noise music. Secondly, as famous noise musician Masami Akita said, "If by noise you mean uncomfortable sound, then pop music is noise to me." Noise music is not necessarily "noise" to the listeners, although it is certainly "noisy" in the more general sense of the term. Practitioners themselves do not generally refer to it as "Noise Music"; they just call it "Noise", tacking the term "music" on the end is an explanatory device only necessary among outsiders.

Characteristics and influences

Noise music is loosely related to industrial music, sharing its DIY ethos, independence and ethic of using "non-musical" sources. Often described as "punishing and abrasive" by those with a flair for the dramatic, Noise music can be very loud and dissonant, ranging from the free-form extreme electronic music of Merzbow and Prurient to the more sculptured sounds of C.C.C.C. and Black Leather Jesus, to the cold haiku sound-scapes of Boyd Rice and Club Moral.

History

Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo, a Futurist painter of the very early 20th century, was perhaps the first Noise artist. His 1913 manifesto L'Arte de Rumori (The Art of Noises) stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned Noise Music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to modern Noise Music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of this genre, and many artists are now familiar with his manifesto.

Other early composers

Russolo was a little-known fringe character, however; mainstream composer Arnold Schoenberg's proclaimed "Emancipation of the Dissonance" (the idea that music could just as well be based upon dissonance as consonance) in the early 20th century was probably the origin of noise music. By the 1920s, composers (in particular Edgard Varèse and George Antheil) began to use early mechanical musical instruments--such as the player piano and the siren--to create music that referenced the noise of the modern world. In the 1930s, under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco, Lou Harrison and John Cage began composing music for "junk" percussion ensembles — scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more. Cage started his Imaginary Landscape series in 1939, which combined elements like recorded sound, percussion, and (in the case of Imaginary Landscape #4) twelve radios. After the second world war, other composers (including G.M. Koenig, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen) started to experiment with early synthesizers, tape machines and radio equipment to produce electronic music, often with very noisy sounds and incomprehensible structures. Much of this music has proven influential on the creators of noise music.

With the advent of the radio, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrete to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially. His ideas about non-referential sounds take their most extreme form in noise music, which often blurs or obscures the actions which produced the sounds while also suggesting the physicality of sound itself.

In all the cases of these forerunners, the sudden affordability of home recording technology in the 1970s with the simultaneous influence of punk rock established a new aesthetic of non-musicians creating music. When anyone could produce noise, and anyone could record and distribute it, then noise music provided a way for any person (artist or non-artist) to experiment with sound as a painter might with visual material. Noise began in earnest when classical avant-garde ideas became democratised, separated from the academic thought that started it, and experimented with by laymen with nothing at stake other than making music for its own end. Most contemporary noise (and the best of it) is therefore produced by obscure, isolated individuals and groups (much like Russolo himself), with a minimal amount of equipment and who are generally contemptuous of the famous, including many of the big name noise artists covered in this article.

Boyd Rice

American archivist and writer Boyd Rice has been a seminal influence on Noise music. Starting in 1975, Rice began experimenting with the possibilities of pure sound. In his live performances, he attached an electric fan to an electric guitar and also used an electric shoe polisher as an instrument. He created extremely loud, cascading walls of noise and played pieces of recorded conversations, news reports, and music just beneath the threshold of comprehensibility. Rice has created works that combine brutal soundscapes with various poetics. He has also structured noise elements into harmonious, rhythmic pieces that defy easy categorization.

Japan

Originally influenced by the sounds of European bands like Whitehouse, Japanese noise artists pushed this approach to an extreme of loudness and density, which in turn became a major influence on western noise bands. Sometimes known as "Japanoise" (not just as a pun in English, but even in Japanese: ジャパノイズ ), it is usually associated with "harsh" characteristics including walls of white noise, non-linear pulses, beats, sampled loops, dialogue, and sirens, just like the work of their European and US counterparts. Since the late 1980's this Japanese style has been probably the most prolific and noticeable part of the Noise Music scene, being relentlessly hyped in zines everywhere. Likewise the popularity and prolific output of musicians such as the aforementioned Noise Music figurehead/posterboy Merzbow, C.C.C.C. and other names like KK Null, Masonna, The Gerogerigegege and Hanatarash (founded by Boredoms frontman, Yamatsuka Eye) have made Japan something of a Mecca for many noise fans. In terms of sales, Noise music is not particularly more popular in Japan than in Europe or America. However, there is perhaps a higher level of recognition from crossover with mainstream genres and events, such as fashion shows or dance performances with music by noise artists, and a comparatively large number of live noise performances are held in Tokyo.

Albums and non-noise influences

Lou Reed's double-LP album Metal Machine Music released in 1975 is an early, well-known example of noise music.

It is very likely that Reed was aware of the electronic drone music produced in the mid-60s by his Velvet Underground cohort John Cale with artists such as Tony Conrad and LaMonte Young (see the CD release of Inside the Dream Syndicate Volume 1: Day of Niagra).

A lesser known release, though perhaps more influential on this sub-genre, is Boyd Rice's 1978 LP, Pagan Muzak.

In 1988, RRRecords released a series of Anti-Records in which ordinary vinyl LPs and, in some cases, flexidiscs were physically transformed into noise records.

Mixing of forms

In Canada the Nihilist Spasm Band has been performing acoustic-based noise music for decades. The aptly named noise rock fuses rock to noise, usually with recognisable "rock" instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonalism, improvisation and white noise. One of the best-known bands of this genre is Boredoms. This style is more like a "traditional" band compared to abstract or electronic noise and sometimes bears a similarity to grindcore. The name noisecore is also used to refer to noise-influenced hardcore techno or rock.

Fans of the genre sometimes distinguish between "harsh noise", the more well-known super-dense and abrasive sounds of Merzbow, Masonna and similar artists, and other loose sub-genres like "rhythmic noise", "power electronics", "free noise" and so on. Confusingly, some industrial techno sub-genres have very similar names, i.e. power noise. Power noise is comparatively conventionally musical, and is not to be confused with power electronics, the synthesizer based subgenre of abstract and experimental noise performed by Whitehouse.

One possible influence of noise music has been to change the way of thinking about what is "musical" or "unmusical" noise, and recently many different genres, such as techno and hip-hop, include some kinds of sounds that could be viewed as "noise".

Noise music: a form of masochism?

Noise music is similar to any other form of music in that, as with other genres, it can evoke a emotional response from its listener. For some individuals, noise music's somewhat pain-inducing ability is used as a device of masochism. Some people have been quoted as saying when they are depressed or upset, they are more prone to listen to certain noise artists. In this respect, the music can evoke a cathartic response from its listener. Noise music's often grating characteristics may be used by its listeners to punish themselves, in much the same way as when people induce other forms of pain in search of pleasure. Other people just find very loud, complex sound exhilarating and not at all painful.

Noise music: fetish & obsession.

In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by primitive art, most contemporary noisicians are excited by the archaic technologies of wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge, and vinyl records. When given the choice of having their work released as either a vinyl record or digital CD, most still choose vinyl. Most noisicians would rather develop their own personal technology then conform to the commercial mass-media norm. Many not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment. Rejected sounds together with rejected technology married in attitude. Without having anything in common, noisicians all record, document and achieve the very sounds nobody else wants to hear.

When distortion becomes a fetish for sound, noise is the result. With Merzbow, sound is transformed into noise by distortion. It is his means of showing how a person becomes transformed into someone or something else by fetishism.

With very little else in common, the issue of fetish, obsession, or mania is the one thing that all contemporary noiscians seem to share. After a century of audio experimentations by art movements, academia, and the fringes of pop culture, the current Noise scene has taken avant-garde sound and given it unprecedented passion.

David Jackman said his first noise performance, albeit unintentional, was when he was 14 years old. He and his father demolished an old piano using an ax and hammer. Jackman called it "a huge racket".

An outburst of emotion is the effect given by the performances of the group C.C.C.C., headed by former Japanese porn-star Mayuko Hino. One senses a socio-political fetishism with the work of Con-Dom, formed by Mike Dando to explore the many sides of personal faith. In a sensuous merging of body and machine, the French sound-composer Manon Anne Gillis gives birth to her noise. Intimately demonstrated by a 1995 performance, in which she kept pulling out, from under her dress, strands of audio tape accompanied by the sound of recorded material being yanked over the playback heads of a tape-deck.

Many in the Noise scene are fixated on either one sound, or one type of sound. A.M.K. uses, as his only sound source, the montage. His montages are flexi-discs that he cuts up and recombines and then plays on regular turntables. Even his CD releases sound just like broken records. A.M.K. started to cut up readymade flexi-discs in 1986. Eleven years later he would start to record and release his own limited-edition flexi-discs for the sole purpose of montaging them.

Zipper Spy is an avid collector of zippers. She also loves the sound zippers make. Amplified zippers may not be the only sound source she plays with, but zippers are nearly always the dominant ingredient in her compositions. When asked why she loves zippers so much, she simply replied; "I hear zippers in everything."

Others in the Noise scene base their sound on the type of audio equipment they build for themselves. Both Chop Shop and Speculum Fight are the most compelling in this approach.

Chop Shop was formed by Scot Konzelmann. Konzelmann builds speakers. Since '87 he's been developing his speaker constructions to focus the listener into linking physical sounds through visible sources. Konzelmann thinks of it as a kind of ventriloquism. His speaker constructions are assemblages made from found and scavenged materials. His basic building-blocks are pipes, cylinders, and machine parts of every kind from junkyards and construction sites. A vibrating cone would, for example, fill a small metal compartment with a tone that would cause the outer-casing to emit sound. No two speaker constructions effect a sound source the same way. The same sound source in fact would never sound the same from speaker to speaker.

Speculum Fight, otherwise known as Damion Romero, deals with tones and frequencies that are very seductive to the listener. To achieve these soundscapes, Romero builds a variety of custom-made devices. These include microphones that look like small wooden boxes, and antique audio test-equipment re-wired as feedback generators. In one of his 1996 performances in Los Angeles, Romero would quietly sit in a chair. Between two very large speakers, he would be gently shaking what looked like a small flat wooden box with wires coming out. The resulting sound was both staggering and monumental. The contrast between how the sound was made and the characteristics of the sound itself was considerable. Considerable, yet typical for the likes of Speculum Fight.

The noise-poet blackhumour, who has been active since the mid-80's, uses only recordings of human voice. Some noise critics have described blackhumour's work as a hybrid of noise and literature. However, blackhumour has stated on many occasions that he sees his noise as an extension of literature. Godzilla, not literature, is the inspiration for Daniel Menche's recent interest in human voice. Since 1988 Menche has carefully crafted noise from sound sources like his heart, lungs, chest, and fist. Better known for running his amplified fingers through some very loud salt, it doesn't seem to matter what Menche does, it always winds up sounding just like the monster-movie sound effects he loves so much. On stage everything becomes extravaganted as every physical movement of his body is amplified into a sound that conveys an viciousness and aggression that is both sharp and brutal. For Menche the extreme physics of noise equals the extreme physics of the soul.

Kimihide Kusafuka, better known as K2, originally came onto the scene in 1984, just to disappear from Noise a few years later. He returned in 1993 after having just graduated as a pathologist. K2 has a Ph. D. from the Tokyo Medical & Dental University. He works at a city hospital, researching the morphogenesis of salivary gland tumors and cartilage formations. He's also conducted his studies at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. K2 sees no difference between the act of making noise and the act of science. K2 says he practices a kind of alchemy through his noise. He aims to metamorphosize himself with both the insight he gets from his scientific experiments, and the emotional strength he gains from performing and listening to noise. "Noise..", as K2 puts it, "can not be refused by either ears and heads!"

Most performances by Noise artists are extremely loud; to the point of being near-deafening. The frequencies used by many are both shrieking and overpowering. The Noise audience can be every bit as fanatical as the Noise performer. Numb from mass-media over-stimulation, the person who comes to a Noise show does so in order to shock the body into hearing something not usually heard.

GX Jupitter-Larsen had always enjoyed listening to the scratches etched across the grooves of a record much more than the recorded material stamped onto it. In fact, his first real creative success with noise was with the self-titled vinyl record "The Haters", which he released in 1983. It's a silent record that comes with instructions that informs the holder that he must first complete the record by scratching it before he can listen to it on his stereo. It was entropy in action, and everything I did thereafter would be a celebration of entropy. For Jupitter-Larsen, there couldn't be anything funnier or more life-affirming than rot and decay.

The Haters have performed by tearing up hundreds of books, by smashing numerous large sheets of glass, and by setting trucks on fire.

In 1993 in San Francisco, Jupitter-Larsen used a giant ion-gun to charge an entire audience to 5000 volts. Audience members chased one another around the club giving each other shocks. Centre stage, seven members of The Haters sat watching blank static on a TV while slowly cutting up cardboard. The same TV static was also being projected, covering three of the four walls of the club. The hiss of the static was amplified loudly enough to rattle the whole space. Hung from above, during this 20 minute untitled performance was a 6.5 square metre ion-gun. This device propelled clouds of ions into the 160 member audience. Once charged, electricity started arcing from person to person. It was a spectacle of audio static, video static, and static electricity.

Since that show, The Haters have been getting less destructive, and a lot louder and noisier. During 1994 The Haters on stage would slowly push live mics into power grinders. During '96 The Haters used amplified staple-guns to shatter stacks of records.

Sound samples

See also

External links

Industrial music | Japanese music | Noise music

Noise (Musik) | Noise | Musique bruitiste | Noise | Noise | ノイズミュージック | Noise | Noise | Noise

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Noise music".

Home Page • arts • business • computers • games • health • hospitals • home • kids & teens • news • physicians • recreation• reference • regional • science • shopping • society • sports • world