Why Noise?

It is difficult to create in the present era because we are currently experiencing a time of destruction before, what will hopefully be, an eventual rebirth. A time when all fruit will be succulent and all creations divinely beautiful. But for now, in this period of collapse – our lot is that of deconstruction. Too much has already been made – become cliché – agonized over – repeated, imitated, copied – had its life essence sucked out by countless years of critique and analysis – and most detrimental of all – overexposure. The dazzling masterworks of yesteryear are mere parody-fodder – a fig-leafed punch line – Viewed outside of gallery in billboard, television, bus stop advertisements or animated children’s show, these works have been neutered – rendered impotent from now until humanity’s end. There can be no re-burgeoning of mystique. That pendulum swings in only one direction. So along with the tides of oceans, with melting ice caps, and empires built on dominator hierarchies and greedy misappropriation, all of our ideas about society itself, art too – all of our dearest works – must first be dismantled, brick by moldy brick, all the rotten splintered lumber collapsing under the weight of our expectations… It all must be removed before we can even consider the construction of new foundations – new windows from which to gaze awestruck at budding cultural vistas of a ripe, fecund future… So it is our ignominious position in history to be the wreckers, civilization’s demolition crew, the pestilence and provocateurs to see the task through to its conclusion. And be joyful about it! It is not punishment, it is an honor! To be the dung beetle making a life from the great enormous elephant’s waste! To pave the way for fresh, lively women and men who will stun the masses – drive them to epiphanic realizations of infinite wonder… How lucky we are, to be the forbearers to such impending genius! The backs upon which they may stand to peek above the wall of delusion and dogma – to pull aside the dark veil, catching the first glimpses of new frontiers, the likes of which our dead heroes could never have dreamed. With a new vocabulary discovered, new experiences catalogued, new emotions coined, the young may again be able to create. Let me know when it happens, because I’ll be there with eager ears and eyes to bask in the radiant genius of what’s to come.  Like the first orgasm after a decade of celibacy. To be there in Spirit, if not in flesh! So for today, let’s begin our task with a grin creasing our eyes and a tattered song in our throats! Cut, splice, suture and compile – then burn, fracture, split and render impenetrable our most basic, finite enigmas. By way of this corrosion, we not only reflect the decay of the hour in all regions of this globe at once, we also provide expediency – we speed the process for the good of all kind, blissfully reflecting our future destiny! Cull, young warriors, cull!  

Noise music, paradoxically, is a primitive force. Maybe the most basic and primitive music yet discovered. Paradoxical because we use technological electronic developments to produce these new, and yet strikingly familiar, sounds. But they are at once sounds of the future, sounds of urban decay, spaceships not yet built, yet imagined decades ago on the wings of Sputnik and the Apollo missions, the crumbling mortar of high-rise tenements, gridlock on freeways, screaming semis, throbbing, clicking machinery, assembly-line factory robotics, cogs and gears slipping, gone awry,  short circuits, modems of the 1990s connecting to faceless voices and voiceless faces, receivers picking up the electromagnetic radiation permeating our bodies instead of the tempered frequencies of radio stations, and yet, at the same time they are none of these things.  

The sounds of noise music are quiet, humming rocks, stems emerging from splitting seed and ruptured earth, flowers unfolding in waves of erotic joy, amplified so to be witnessed by our gross moribund lot, thunderous erupting volcanoes, fresh young life screaming, tearing itself free of shell and womb, foundation-cracking earthquakes sending fear-crazed humans scrambling into the ruptured streets like ants whose colonies have been trampled by oblivious feet of laughing children, snow collapsing in unthinkable avalanches of exponential chaos.  

Noise music is an anarchic force in the way that nature is an anarchic force. Unbridled and free of contrived form. Formless in all its hidden symmetry and apparent chaos. Of course, there is no chaos in nature. And so there is no chaos in noise. All entities in these cosmos are formed according to hidden fields operating and affected by no mind. Emptiness… Shunyata, the Void, the Quantum Field… And so every composition will adhere to these inherent patterns, providing too much human thought doesn’t get in the way and skew the results into something linear, solid and artificial. (Look down from the window of an airplane sometime, and notice that roads make themselves immediately apparent because they are the only truly straight phenomena visible from horizon to horizon. Nature is fluid and malleable, not one straight bone in the whole lot, yet we obsess over creating a certain “perfection” in the realm of these sharp edges.) Without contrived formulas, form occurs spontaneously. Seemingly of its own accord. Synchronicity likely functions on this principle. All works, music or film, painted canvas or printed word, can be laboriously plotted, planned, made to conform to geometric ideals appealing only to a fragment of human consciousness. Those are dead works. Empty of soul. Pitiful wax simulacrums melting in their own pretentious radiation. On the other side resides art created by nature. In league with the forces of nature. By the nature residing in our basest centers. Our primitive brain released of its cultural bounds and able to once more convene with the creative wisdom of our ancestors.  

To put it differently, I feel synchronicity functions, is easily, commonly experienced, because just as every physical object has its own resonant frequency, so does, I believe, every man-made, inspired work of art. A rhythm, an inherent order lurking under the façade of chaos and free will, as devoid of these things as the Fibonacci spirals in flower petals, the self-similarity of an entire rainforest encapsulated in a single tree. Not all objects share the same resonant frequency, but very disparate objects, a fork and a swatch of skin stretched over a hollow log, for example, may… And when those two disparate objects or works of art are set to coexist in the same vicinity, the two will vibrate, sing, resonate becoming bolder and richer than either of the objects or art could have if left alone, wallowing in their frightfully drab independence. It is a gift inherent in all form – This I believe. That all things may find their resonant mate – This I know – no matter how misshapen or ill-symmetried….  

Noise is the sound of both destruction and creation… all the universe is in constant construction and decay, so why should music reflect only one side of the coin at the exclusion of the other?  

It is the freest of jazz, the punkest of punk, the least egoistical of all blown horns. In some ways, it can be anything to anyone, just as a blank canvas hung on museum wall can be viewed as either ingenious statement or pretentious ingenuous bullshit depending on the observer’s personal mythology.  

When patterns form, they form as motifs or rhythm. Rhythms are heartbeats, throbbing and amniotic, motifs are Fibonacci spirals in pinecones, repeating figures in DNA, atomic space repeating itself above as it is below…

Rather than deft fingers scaling Escher-like stairways of modes and arpeggios, noise is pure sound, meditational sound, sound that completely engulfs the listener and pulls them, kicking and screaming, or in complete holy abandon, out of their bodies and into the void, the spaces between the sounds themselves, into sound’s ever-present silence… Sacred sound, devotional sound… devotional not to a deity or composer, or even to Man the Creator, rather devotional to existence, life, the moment pulsating and thumping, smooth or crusted over and rotting… All emancipated and beautiful!  

Perhaps there is in it a fetishizing of forms. And perhaps there is a danger inherent in this… anarchism and atheism can both, in the wrong hands, become equally as dogmatic, vapid, and binding as organized religion. But perhaps we can only extinguish our fascination and embroilment with forms through that very embroilment. Riding the sounds straight through its own semi-tangible appearance, on the tail of its disappearance back into the void into which we too can become extinguished, or held in wait for the clang to pull us free. Suffering as we are in this lowly form, perhaps these sounds of ambivalent discord are just what we need to shake our binding loose.  

Or perhaps, on the other hand, it is simply a doing away with pretense. If one listens, or better yet, if one listens with a dissecting ear, to any classic, be it Beatles or Beethoven, you can with time see the gears and levers behind the artificial skin. What I mean to say is, when we’ve heard a song enough times, it takes on a life of its own, and with it, a distinct color palette, an irreversible, un-unseeable image as rich and instantly knowable and unmistakably identifiable as any hanging on gallery wall. But if you listen with a new inquisitive ear, you may hear each individual instrument’s part, and with it, each snare hit, each violin bow, every slightly out of tune guitar pluck, and the assemblage in all its greatness begins to fall apart. Much in the way a masterwork of visual art will devolve into a chaotic tangle of paint splatters if viewed with one’s nose right up to the canvas. We need to step back in order to be tricked into believing any piece of art is something real, is good, substantial, representative, a unique living entity standing clothed and formal alone and respectable. And this is where noise does away with these pretenses. It never claims to be a finished piece of art. It is always in the process of becoming. It is brushstrokes witnessed as brushstrokes for the sake of being pretty, interesting brushstrokes. Maybe no more or less. It is the animatronic figure with no outer skin to fool the eyes into believing it is human or bird. It simply is what it is. And is that not enough? To dispel of the erroneous belief that anything is good, great, finished, the best it can be? Earth-shattering… Life-affirming… It’s all trite and conditioned on one level or another. Nothing ever lives up to the hype, so why hype at all? For a bigger paycheck? To become popular in the eyes of other mortals? To what end? For what eternal gain? Bah! Nothing but cold calloused trickery. I would sooner stand on my head naked in the middle of Times Square with ants eating syrup off my genitals. Hoopla designed to transform mortals into gods, and with the gods their imperfections deified, their infernal powers multiplied a thousandfold. Exponential suffering…  

Noise is this generation’s blues, the sound of the Delta relocated to wherever the disenfranchised exist. Wherever the poor of money, of spirit, of optimism, of patriotism, of faith, of tolerance to corporate-media-controlled fascist bullshit now reside. We may sing with voice or with howling sirens or melting synthesizers just as our predecessors sang out their old slave-beaten woes with their own coarse howling throats or else a knife blade dragged against the strings of a handmade instrument roughly impersonating a guitar. We make music with toys, with available tools just as the beautiful men and women of the Depression-era South nailed strings to porch studs and enthusiastically played I-IV-V progressions with a broken beer bottle and a soul full of misery looking to be sublimated through the raspy whine of glass and steel. We now amplify these glasses and errant broken strings. We detune and lose harmonic structure, but it’s all to the same end. Noise musicians abandon as the modern classical composers of the ‘30s through the ‘60s abandoned. They wondered what good would come from discarding old dogma, and in doing so discovered a whole new language. A new palate with which to paint.  And perhaps we’re too abandoning the prospect of future. And in that abandonment, we’re sending a resounding Yes. A Yes to our eventual demise; not the demise of the musician, but to the species. We are on a collision course with the Sun. Planets can be torn to shreds and reborn in the pull of Red Giant stars, and so our whole world, everything we know and rely on for sustenance can be in a blink, taken from us and vaporized. And we have no control. We are powerless in this world, though many is the self-help guru, priest, or magician who attempts to persuade us otherwise. But there are those of us who embrace the unknown, the universe’s mysterious power and frightening ability to change, disrupt, destroy and rebirth. And this loss of control is brought into our art. Bent keyboards spew out endless strings of possessed free-jazz notes, discarded children’s books now chirp like hordes of cicadas and crickets burrowing deep into the skull, combinations of toggle switches thrown at random contrive whole new rhythmic cadences and harsh grating percussive hits no one would have considered intentionally programming.  

But where the noise musician breaks from the Schoenberg or Breton is that the noise musician no longer needs an orchestra or concert pianist to realize his creative vision. He doesn’t need to defend his aberrations, or his methodologies. He needn’t seek the approval of the art establishment to validate his creation. The least experienced neophyte on his first day may create, and be accepted. That is not to say that your skill as a noise musician won’t grow, or that your compositions of improvisations won’t get more fluid, confident, controlled (in whatever way we may quantify such a thing), and indeed virtuosic. But just like the blues singers of the past, a young boy could play with string and bottle and create passable music, mimicking the motions of his elders, and singing out the pentatonic strains grown natural and sacred in his ears. Harmonious as his own DNA. In this way the sounds of modern, electronic discord are forever emblazoned in the ears of today’s youth. We don’t need to play Mozart for in utero fetuses. They are already hearing car engines growling all around them, radio static, flipped television station cutups, jackhammers on street corners, massive cranes rumbling, ditches being dug with behemoth-jawed bulldozers. The overlapping voices of family and friends in a language as yet unintelligible creating complex 360 degree surround-sound panoramas of warbling textures, be they menacing or soothing… The blubs and groans of our mother swallowing food and drink, of her stomach, inches away, digesting her food before its nutrients are passed on to feed our feeble form. The murky fizz and splatter of defecation, the hissing sizzle of pissing in a toilet just below our twitching toes. The warm washy thumping of her heartbeat transferred through the amniotic bath…  

This rejection and abandonment should not be confused with insincerity. On the contrary, looking on the faces of those performing, one can see there is no less passion or ecstasy apparent than any other musician performing from the depth of their beings. Compare it to the smiling conviction of the Gnawa performing in an incense-clouded cave. The countenance of the noise musician likewise belies their thought process… to the awe when experimentation proves successful, and a new sound is born with delight – at least to the performer – or their deep scowl when a connection no longer functions, and they’re tracing the lines to find a detached patch cord.  

It’s appropriate that we play music with debauched children’s toys, since we are, at heart, still mystified children, able to hear sounds as if for the first time, and sit chanting lalalalala for two hours straight, just for the joy of hearing our own voices ring out, against the walls, echoing wildly and then return anew, fresh and sounding wholly brilliant and wild as the tundra!  

As for those who claim that twiddling buttons to create chance electronic processes is not music, I make the comparison to nature photographers. No one complains because the photographer didn’t pose the two monkeys grooming each other, or the bird feeding her chicks. Instead, they praise her for being in the right place at the right time and for snapping such an endearing, clear record of the event. The same goes for the noise musician who, given the equivalent, places two electronic monkeys in a room, and then sets the camera rolling to capture whatever may arise, knowing it will likely be something interesting. They will then place an appropriate frame around it in the context of either the performance venue or an album cover. And there is their contribution to the momentary arts.  

It works like this: We each visualize the totality in our own small, fractalized vision, and by bringing to a musical stage, whatever that stage may be, not even musical, but artistic, visual, written, sounded, whatever, we are for that moment displaying our view to the others, not so they can idolize us for the uniqueness of our vision, or hold us on a pedestal for being adept at concretizing that vision into an easily consumable capsule for the masses, but just in appreciation at our own humanness, and their own humanness, and our own inherent uniquenesses and idiosyncrasies that make it interesting to, even for just those few moments of presentation-time, alert us of our connectedness, before it’s the next person’s moment to show his own crayon sketch to the world for our edification and appreciation. So applaud, laugh, sing, be merry! But save the derision. Because derision is a mask covering one’s insecurities and self-loathing. The fact that we have not yet been able to find that one single piece, one single note, even one single sound worthy of validating our existence. Where does this alchemical combination of tones, hiss, electronic pops and skips remain secluded that we may never discover their charms to spread wide, to proclaim that this is our purpose? Why we were born, to show our vision of the immense totality in a few moments of sonic discourse to waiting ears! Who knows? But without proclaiming acceptance of the process, of the ability to find such a work, what else is the point of continuing? Why not pack up the rucksack tonight and head out to the netherworlds immediately, leaving behind only a steaming carcass making too few sounds in its moist stillness to satisfy the earthly concerns of those left behind?