Noise Music

Noise music takes signal — feedback loops, distortion pedals, contact microphones, broken electronics, voice through amplifiers — and uses it as the entire compositional material. There's no melody, no rhythm in any conventional sense, and often no clear distinction between 'event' and 'background'. Pieces vary wildly in length: some last seconds, some last hours. Volume is part of the form; many works are designed to be felt physically rather than parsed for content. The body of the listener becomes part of the instrument, in the sense that fatigue, disorientation, and pain are anticipated responses rather than failures of the work.

Japanese noise — 'Japanoise' — is the most internationally recognized strain, and Merzbow (Masami Akita), active since 1979 in Tokyo, is the central figure. His discography runs into the hundreds of releases, including 'Pulse Demon' (1996) and the 50-disc 'Merzbox' (2000). Hijokaidan, Incapacitating, Hanatarash (Yamantaka Eye), and Masonna are other key Japanese acts of the 1980s and 1990s. Parallel developments in the United States included Whitehouse (UK), Throbbing Gristle, and the American power-electronics scene of the 1980s. The genre's institutional history runs through small cassette and CD-R labels — Bloodlust!, RRRecords, Hospital Productions — rather than through conventional record industry channels.

Expect the first few minutes to feel disorienting; that response is the work doing what it's designed to do, not a sign you're missing something. After your ears adjust, attend to micro-variation: a noise piece that sounds 'static' on first hearing is usually shifting constantly in spectrum and intensity. Volume changes are structural. Some works (Merzbow especially) have moments of relative quiet that function as articulation points. Headphones are physically rougher but reveal more detail than speakers at safe volumes.

Merzbow's 'Pulse Demon' (1996) is the canonical single album and a reasonable entry. For a wider view, the 'Merzbox' compilation (2000) traces his earlier work. Hijokaidan's 'King of Noise' (1985) is the alternative Japanese reference, and the early Throbbing Gristle albums show the British genealogy of the form.

Merzbow has released hundreds of albums — by some counts more than 400 — and many of them were made in long, focused sessions where the entire piece is improvised in real time; the production output is part of the work, in the sense that the practice of constant release functions as its own statement against the album-as-discrete-object format.