I love music that pushes the envelope on what can be considered music. Two metal pipes banging against each other in my headphones might just be a prototype of the instruments of the future. The worst part is I am only half joking. If someone can make it sound good, or scratch that if someone can make it sound, who’s to say it isn’t music? Music is just noise, so any noise or combination of noises could be music. That line of thinking is what gets you the noise music genre. This genre features things like music made using hair dryers, cut up and split together cassette tapes, factory ambience, half-unplugged amps doing an infinite feedback loop with themselves and more that almost fails to be describable.
When I set out to write an article about noise music, I knew I was biting off a lot to chew. Any genre that evolves alongside the evolution of technology is going to evolve at a break-neck pace and splinter off into about a million different extremely specific subgenres. What I was not prepared for was seeing that there seems to be a split identity when it comes to people’s perceptions of this style of music. Some people seem to think that only super pretentious theory geeks and philosophy fanboys would ever bother with noise music, and that no one actually listens to it or finds it enjoyable. Other people maintain that there are specific kinds of enjoyment that can be derived from the walls of noise, and that only people distant from the music’s scene would be philosophical about any of it because of not understanding what it is that true fans hear in it.
I think the truth is, as is so often the case, somewhere in between. In the same way that many people can get caught up in the philosophies of something like abstract art and describe it as a rejection of form and sense and go into diatribes about dadaism, it is similarly easy to get caught up in the philosophy behind noise music. Just as much as people might make abstract art because they like how it looks and the kinds of thoughts and feelings it evokes in them, people might make noise music because they like the noise.
Texture is fun. For those who enjoy it, noise music represents the qualities of music that people enjoy at their harshest and most extreme. People often go into making music without the teaching of philosophers in mind. As shocking as it would be to the philosophers to have their good opinion thrown out, many people start out making music because they wanted to. People tend to be more broadly influenced by music and scenes they have enjoyed themselves than by articles people write about music.
Music is often made with an attitude or a direction in mind rather than anything else. This is where it gets interesting, because an attitude is really just a philosophy with cooler phrasing. Wanting certain people to enjoy your music while making sure outsiders are turned off from it is a classic reason to make things abrasive and loud. If you want to deliberately shock people, or make them angry, or make them leave because their ears hurt, then scenes like art pop are not going to appeal to you in the same way something like power electronics will.
One of the other aspects of this that was interesting to me is that noise music actually does have its start with orchestras and philosophy. One of the earliest people to discuss the concept of noise music were the futurists, a movement that was dedicated to technology and industrialization. One of its key players was a man named Luigi Tussolo. He envisioned and wrote a manifesto about an orchestra made up entirely of noises and noise-creating machines that were not considered to be musical. His idea was mostly hinged on the concept that the everyday sounds of the rapidly industrializing world were creating a sound ecosystem that shouldn’t be ignored. Many people worked off of this idea, that sounds and music were not meaningfully distinct from each other.
I think this is a really interesting and engaging question. It feels impossible to draw the line between the two. This is the kind of thought that defined most of early noise music experimentation.
The futurism movement wasn’t all philosophical niceties though. Many futurists focused their attention on speed and violence, especially the violence that is inherent to rapid industrialization. That attitude would not remain unique to this art movement. Noise music would go hand in hand with post World War II anxieties and the disillusionment of young people in the seventies and eighties. The same conditions that helped birth some of punk;s first bands also heavily impacted noise music. It was then that harsh noise with a macho “how much can you take?” mentality began to take the forefront. This kind of macho-ness went from how far you could push yourself in terms of physically listening to music that was built to be loud enough to damage your ears to dark and shocking lyrics and gory album covers.
This history that spans levels of respectability from orchestras of the future to the unfiltered mental scars of the generation born immediately following the second World War puts into perspective for me the conflicting accounts I was reading about what to expect from this genre. Now in modern day, the internet has allowed more people than ever before to be exposed to this niche of music. This has led to wider audiences experimenting with this music and falling in love with it. It would be remiss to neglect to mention that one of the forefront modern scenes for noise music is in Japan, where people are pushing the envelope on what modern noise even is supposed to sound like.
Despite its long and confusing reputation, I think that there is plenty of artistic worth to be found in these works that so many people consider to be just noise. Making people consider the world around them in a new light is extremely valuable. Acknowledging the sounds surrounding you that so many people take for granted is such an important breakthrough that can be brought to your attention through this kind of music. Whether or not you think that noise music is stuck up and posh or scary and aggressive, there is something to be learned from this degree of experimentation.