The artist took the stage in an instant and tapped a seemingly random pedal in front of him with a sudden, unexpected force.
White noise. Shards of sound. Intense, painful howls. Careening screams bouncing off one another. Chaos in competition with itself.
A tangled mess of wires, pedals, and boxes laid spread out before him. Multi-colored plastic and rubber cords extended in every direction, somehow holding the monster together. You could almost see the sound pulsing through every cord, every “standby” light ready to burst with the noise bottled up within. It was a seemingly impossible maze that only the man himself could work his way through, and the end result was the violent sounds everyone in the audience had come to see.
The speakers themselves seemed to implode, their soft exteriors pierced by the very sounds they put forth, sucking themselves into a cavernous realm of staggering noise. All the while a remarkably human figure stood at the front of it all, his pale, lanky Asian frame shadowed by long black hair that fell to his waist.
At times, the man resolutely tended to his beast, delicately shaping the madness on levels only he could perceive, twisting knobs and reconnecting wires to develop more and more intense sounds. Elsewhere he was fueling it with his own crazed being, writhing about on the floor, belching horrific screams into a microphone that took his pained cries and twisted and amplified them into something truly terrible.
The initial shock of the performance wore off within minutes, giving way to a vivid numbness and sense of complete disbelief. The man thrashed about onstage with unworldly amounts of energy. Instruments that had littered the stage just minutes before were destroyed seemingly so he could hear the sound of their deaths. His pedal board was manhandled and transformed a million times over. The man abruptly fell to the ground in a spastic fit, leaving his microphone in pieces and his lone voice as his main instrument.
He left the stage with the same energy he took it with, nearly staggering off the front of the stage as he leapt to his feet and stormed toward the exit.
It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. My guess would have been hours, maybe days. In fact, the performance had only been five minutes long—ten minutes shorter than the soundcheck.
This is a typical gig by Masonna, the Japanese artist who is among the most heralded of the noise genre. Masonna tours very infrequently, as do most noise artists, and tends to stay in Japan when he does. His only U.S. tour took place in 1996, and as a result, his American following is almost entirely reliant on the Internet, where videos, LPs, and live bootlegs are frequently traded.
Masonna represents a violent, highly visual branch of noise that is as much performance art as it is music. Album recordings frequently feature power tools, magnetic tape manipulation, incredible amounts of distortion, and breaking glass. Gigs by such artists are rare, and often include mythic levels of destruction and chaos. Masonna himself frequently destroys any instruments he brings on stage with him, often injuring himself in the process. His gigs can range in length from hours to only a few seconds.
Similar artist Hanatarash has used power saws and wrecking balls on stage, commonly breaking planes of glass and hurtling steel barrels in his performances. In order to maintain complete control of his shows, Hanatarash would insist that audience members sign waiver forms, ensuring that he wouldn’t be held responsible, even for the death of someone at the venue. In the more extreme shows that required such forms, he has threatened to throw Molotov cocktails into the audience, or worse.
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The crowd stood in tense apprehension, huddled toward one side of a metallic warehouse, rigged up years ago with stage lights to create a makeshift music venue. The building had since molded itself into a performance area for some of the most revolutionary acts in Japan, hosting artists that were pushing the envelope in every way imaginable, playing music that was barely music in a style and form that hadn’t been seen since classic punk nihilism reared its ugly self-destructive head. Today it had invited perhaps the most notorious of them all: Hanatarash.
An hour before, a short, nervous-looking man had set up a drum kit, microphones, and several massive Marshall amps at the back of the venue. Shortly after, a group of extremely confused construction workers loaded heaps of scrap metal, spare appliances, and trash of all sizes into the middle of the floor, directed by the same skittish man from before.
The crowd gathering as the scheduled showtime grew closer, a regular who’s who of the hip Tokyo elite, was well aware of Hanatarash’s reputation, and their hesitancy to get anywhere near the stage itself was clear evidence of their knowledge. For an artist notorious for using glass as an instrument, this scene looked about right. These were people who knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. They didn’t show up for the controversy or to see what the hype was about: they knew there was a realistic—
A deafening roar of steel and concrete tore through the room. A second later, a bulldozer, a real, fully operable bulldozer, burst through the back of the building, driven by none other than Hanatarash himself.
The seasoned crowd scattered throughout the venue in a flash of primal fear. The frail sideman quickly ran into the room and took his place behind the drum set, playing a constant stream of fills to give the scene the strange air of an actual concert. Meanwhile, the bulldozer wreaked sheer havoc at will. Scrap metal, sinks, wires, girders, barrels, all picked up and tossed around the room haphazardly. The man at the controls, wearing a yellow t-shirt, blue jeans, and white knee pads, thrashed about with an alarming degree of recklessness. Pulling himself up over the control console, he lurched forward at the audience, his body hanging off the front of the machine, a face clenched in a menacing roar that was muted by the drums behind him.
He continued scattering objects around the room, dumping metal on the stage, and getting dangerously close to the drum set behind him. House lights illuminated the clouds of dust billowing through the room, and for a moment the madman was lost from sight. Suddenly the bulldozer came to a stop, and the thin metal frame surrounding the driver’s seat was ripped out of place and flung towards the stage. Audience members stood resolute, some crafting makeshift barriers of wood and metal to ward off any further projectiles.
He then jumps off the bulldozer, deciding instead to throw kitchen appliances at the audience by hand. The crowd ducks for cover after each throw, crouching down in the corners of the venue as the performance they came to view is turned violently against them.
The gig continues for several more minutes, until Hanatarash pulls an unknown item from his repertoire, something so terrifying that members of the audience and his own drummer rush toward him, tackling him to the ground and dragging him from the room. The most popular rumor is that he had lit a Molotov cocktail, but to this day no one is quite sure what caused the show to end. What is undoubtedly known is that the so-called “bulldozer gig” completely destroyed the venue, placing the band in debt for years, and making it nearly impossible for them to get another chance to perform.
(This is a true story. For decades, the bulldozer gig was thought to be fiction, until photographic evidence appeared on the Internet several years ago, suggesting that many of the tall tales surrounding Hanatarash’s legendary shows actually happened.)
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Other realms of noise music are much less graphic than this, utilizing laptop programs and analog equipment to create noise akin to white noise or television static, only layered on top of one other often a hundred times over. And then there’s noise rock, which takes conventional rock instrumentation and turns it on its head, sending waves of screeching noise through guitars, drums, and bass. And so on. You name it, somebody has put the word “noise” in front of it and gave everyone in their vicinity gruesome migraines in the process. One journalist wrote briefly about a noise artist who utilized a didgeridoo, for example, though the Internet sadly has nothing to back up this claim.
The motivation to create noise various wildly between these artists. Common bedroom artists seeking fame on the Internet cite motivations that include the desire to hurt the listener, the chance to make music that’s never been done before, and the urge simply to make noise with whatever they can get their hands on. Lou Reed arguably invented the genre way back in 1975 with the feedback piece Metal Machine Music, seeing his noise as a legitimate musical accomplishment, claiming repeatedly that he had placed references to Beethoven throughout his music, and even lobbying to have it released by RCA as a classical work. In comparison, Juntaro Yamanouchi, otherwise known as Japanese noise artist The Gerogerigegege, summed up his work in the following touching liner note: "F--k compose, F--k melody, Dedicated to no one, Thanks to no one, ART IS OVER.”
The Dadaists couldn’t have said it better.
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As mindless as it seems at times, the popularity of noise music is undeniable. Relatively speaking.
Noise artists, while never achieving real mainstream notice, have found enough underground success to carry on staggeringly prolific careers. Merzbow, a Japanese extreme noise artist, has recorded noise since 1979, releasing over 350 recordings to date—an average of over 11 albums a year for 31 years. And that’s just the albums we know he’s made. Merzbow also works in a number of other fields, including writing, painting, filmmaking, and dance, while working as an animal rights activist and environmentalist in his spare time, recording noise albums entirely from animal sounds in an effort to spread his message.
Merzbow’s career is par for the course when it comes to noise, if a bit on the prolific side. Noise as a genre tends to encompass a wide variety of different art forms. To argue that it’s not music is fair—it’s much more than that. The music itself, even in recorded form, is more of an audio-visual performance than traditional music performance. The vast majority of noise music is not meant to be analyzed or listened to intently. Noise is about atmosphere, the feelings (or lack thereof) that the sounds create within you, an aspect that is often misunderstood by critics.
But from an outsider’s perspective, there’s still one vital question: Why?
Why would you devote your life to making random noise?
Or better yet, why would you want to listen to it? For enjoyment? For pain? For catharsis?
What’s the point of it all?
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There’s an urban legend floating around the nether-realms of the Internet regarding a particularly graphic noise show that allegedly took place at some point in time. No name is attached to this description, and its existence is and should be doubted:
An “artist,” as he called himself, regularly performed a noise show with a litany of instruments onstage. Everything ranging from guitars and drumsets to computers and trash cans—anything that could possibly make noise when used, he put into his set.
The “artist” would move from instrument to instrument, object to object, playing it or destroying it at whim, creating a scene of pure noise and destruction. No purpose, no rhyme or reason, just for the sake of performance.
At the end of one particular set, the “artist” retrieved a fully functioning shotgun from offstage, loaded it with a live shell, and pointed it at a random audience member. Without warning, the curtains closed, and the show was over.
After the performance, the audience was furious, because they believed the show was never completed, never resolved by the death of an audience member that night.
This is the essence of noise.
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“Some people find pleasure in cutting themselves. Noise music doesn't really hurt your ears, but it overloads them, and after a while you feel a sort of intense euphoria.”
“Noise is like a cleansing for your ears. Everything else sounds so much better after listening to, say, Pulse Demon by Merzbow.”
“It excites you at first, then it starts to hurt, then it begins to calm and soothe you. Intensity-wise, no other genre matches noise.”
“Noise can provoke emotion in a way traditional music has a tough time doing. Mainly negative feelings, and mindsets. Despair and melancholy, suffering and rejection.”
“I started listening to noise after I started doing weird little experiments with noise on my sequencers and synths. I fell in love with it because it is just so cathartic and raw.”
“Sometimes I just get sick of the music we have today and all the layers of culture it has, trying to pick the influences, how they dress and what bands they're friends with. It all gets too tiresome. Some weeks I just listen to noise and classical.”
“There's just something alluring about the raw energy and the chaos of it all. A lot of it I see as a parody to ‘real’ music. But I love it for just that reason. It's also like the social malcontent of punk rock, the difference being there is no goal to make a change in noise. It's dysfunctional, but completely unapologetic.
At least that's how I justify it.”
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These are the verbatim words of noise fans from around the world, responding to my question of why they listen to the music they do. Their points of view are as varied as the music itself, but it all centers around a common theme: Noise has something to offer a listener that simply nothing else can.
Is it really music? Probably not. You can argue that it is, on a theoretical level. Italian composer Luciano Berio famously stated that "'Music' is what one hears with the intention of hearing music," an argument that works for the same reasons that it doesn’t. There was a time when blues, a genre of music that has arguably affected every genre of music in existence, was considered noise, a bastardization of sound that tainted the works of such “real musicians” as Mozart and Beethoven. There is the chance that Merzbow and Hanatarash will one day be just as accepted as Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. Yet if you open up the definition of music to incorporate noise, you inevitably have to open it up to incorporate wind, the tides, and life itself. At some point, music simply disintegrates into mere sound. Or, as John Cage demonstrated, the lack of sound.
What can be safely argued, however, is that no music can reasonably compare to noise. Ambient, perhaps, though the same music-or-sound argument applies, if dulled by the influence of Brian Eno. Even then, it’s the difference between relaxing atmosphere and grating metallic screeches, which is a pretty big one to reckon with.
It’s telling that the last listener in that group, who introduced himself only as “Jeff M.,” describes noise as “a parody to ‘real’ music.” In many ways that is undeniably true. Jeff uses the Gerogerigegege as an example, a group lead by Juntaro Yamanouchi, a Japanese homosexual crossdresser who infamously declared that “art is over.” His most famous release, titled Tokyo Anal Dynamite, is a live album recorded with what sounds like three sets of drummers, four guitarists, and one deranged man with a microphone. There are 75 tracks, all under a minute in length, including covers of “Boys Don’t Cry” by the Cure and several Ramones songs. The Gerogerigegege is known for putting out countless unorthodox releases, including “this is shaking music part 2,” a destroyed cassette copy of an earlier release, and “Art is over,” which is a single octopus tentacle placed in a cassette box.
Yamanouchi is a performance artist, plain and simple, yet he gets lumped into the “noise” categorization because he occasionally makes noisy records. It’s here that the divisions become even hazier. Where does “music” end and “performance” begin? What truly constitutes “noise”? When does an artist’s work take on such a lowly state it ceases to become art? And who gets to decide?
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Merzbow is known among certain hearing-impaired music circles as “the Rolling Stones of noise.” Yet you won’t find anyone giving him the same ceaseless veneration the Stones have been unnecessarily getting for the last thirty disappointing years. These same anonymous Internet dwellers call Merzbow “noise for indie kids,” a description that’s perhaps more apt. Pitchfork Media, the undeniable leader in hip, indie music journalism, gave Pulse Demon a laughably favorable review, despite the shared opinion among uppity noise fans that it the album was the sign of his decline as a real artist, as opposed to being the pillar of noise, as Pitchfork maintained. As a result, Pulse Demon simultaneously became the go-to noise album for listeners trying to broaden their horizons, and the most despised noise album ever made among those who had been there since the beginning. (Whenever they claim that was.)
Pulse Demon symbolizes the gap between mainstream media and underground music. Or rather, it’s the one rickety bridge over the divide. Pitchfork’s “8.7” grade of the album was the breaking point, the moment where those unfamiliar with the world of sane-ish Japanese musicians creating sonic hellscapes were handed a subpar introductory album chosen by writers who were no more qualified to do so than the editors of Rolling Stone. One side gasped, the other side laughed. The question of who, if anybody, benefits from such an event is a highly contested topic.
For true noise fans, they enjoy this gap. It’s the natural way. It’s a means of separating them from the plebeians who listen to music with such juvenile features as harmony and rhythm. They’re above and beyond it, reaching levels of music enjoyment all you Lady Gaga fans couldn’t even begin to comprehend. They will never be accepted, and they never want to be. But now all these “indie” kids are encroaching on their territory, scooping up the odd album for novelty purposes, or maybe to make their iPods look a little more cultured. Noise music on iPods??? What has the world come to!
For the people listening to a little Merzbow to “cleanse the pallet,” they don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just music. Sort of. Maybe it’s anti-music. Maybe it’s post-music. Hey, that’s got a nice ring to it. “Oh hey guys. Yeah, I just picked up the new post-music record from Merzbow. It’s pretty terrible. Maybe his worst stuff yet.” God, they’ll all be so jealous. They won’t even know what to do with themselves. I can’t wait to play this in my car and have people stare at me like I’m crazy. They just won’t get it. In any case, it’s something different to listen to. It’s cool, it’s loud, it’s chaotic, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.
There needs to be a middle ground here somewhere. If the Internet is any indication (and it has to be, since this music scarcely exists outside it), then the middle ground is nonexistent. It’s either “OMG NOISE” or “my favorite noise is way better than your indie crap.” You can’t just listen to it, you have to have a reason to back it up, or else risk getting attacked and ridiculed for it.
It would help if it was treated like actual art. Then again, there was a time when John Coltrane was more reviled than the devil himself. Free jazz was blasphemy, nothing but random squanks and squeaks thrown over a backup band playing too fast and too loud. Brian Priestley, a heralded British jazz pianist, had this to say about free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler back in 1969:
…However much some jazz writers may attempt to deny or ignore the fact, the only way in which appreciation of any kind of music can be cultivated or deepened is by the realization, whether conscious or unconscious, of the musical laws by which it is governed. I just wish someone would tell me what laws govern Ayler’s music.
Albert Ayler played a style of jazz “where timbre, not harmony and melody, is the music's backbone,” according to jazz writer Val Wilmer. In other words, it was the quality of the note, not its pitch or loudness, which distinguished Ayler’s music. In 1969, this was an extraordinary idea. Even while jazz was in a seemingly constant state of flux, the notion that melody and harmony could be set to the side for an entirely different third technique was unthinkable. Yet Ayler proceeded to record over twenty albums of this music before his untimely death in 1970, releasing ten albums in 1964 alone—a rate that Merzbow himself would be proud of.
And he most likely is.
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What first attracted you to noise?
M: I was influenced by aggressive Blues Rock guitar sounds like Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Robert Fripp and fuzz organ sounds such as Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine. But the most structured Noise influence would have to be Free Jazz such as Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and Frank Wright.
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What would Albert Ayler say if he could experience the world of noise today? What would he say upon discovering an entire genre of music based on timbre, the atonal qualities of sound, bypassing traditional instruments almost entirely in the process? Who knows. Ayler was beginning to stray from his noisy roots toward the end of his career, recording several horrific R&B albums before returning briefly to his earlier sound. Then he committed suicide. Needless to say, he was nowhere near as dedicated to the craft of noise as Merzbow, who has recorded nine new albums this year alone, in addition to releasing two box sets of his music, and the 53-year old noise giant does not seem to be changing his style or committing suicide in the near future. In a genre that prides itself on being the sound of flux itself, Merzbow prides himself on churning it out on a nice, steady basis.
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Merzbow stands at the front of the stage, bent intently over a table covered in electronics of every possible shape and form. A mixing board with dozens of tiny white knobs shoots out black cables in every direction, leading to more primitive boxes with their own knobs and cords, as well as a silver Apple laptop proudly brandishing a sticker reading “Meat is Murder.” A few random objects sit at his side, the straps bringing to mind those of a guitar, yet the overall shape seeming more at home with some kind of oblong keyboard. While walls of noise engulf the stage and the packed crowd in front of him, Merzbow stands resolute, his deeply-lined face unflinching, his long graying hair falling soundly in front of him, framing his laptop as he toys with the programming used to layer these sheets of screeching static.
At once content with the noise he’s built up, he reaches to his side and pulls out one of these mystery instruments, a guitar-shaped device the size of a ukulele, only without strings, buttons, or any normal means of creating sound. He strums it violently like a guitar, activating unseen devices within that create a deep scratching noise, beyond the tone and caliber that any electric guitar could conjure up. He continuous his unholy war against the people in front of him, pausing from his onslaught only to fine-tune his output for reasons only he will understand.
All the while he stands at place, not moving, not reacting to the sounds gushing from his instruments, the only physical association with the music being the sole movements needed to create it. There is no urgency, no hatred, no emotion at all. He is seemingly at peace within the chaos.
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“If music was sex, Merzbow would be pornography.”
- Masami Akita (aka Merzbow)
- 12/15/2010
I will never forget the image of Taylor Swift at last year’s Grammys, her arms struggling under the weight of her four gleaming trophies, one of which was the Album of the Year award.
Volume is a lost art in the music world.
(Note: I already wrote about this album, but this is an entirely different piece, and I think it's a lot better than what I wrote a few years ago. Well worth a read.)