How did you end up making/listening to noise?

This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound.

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How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by NoiseWiki »

In the late 80's I went to school in Winston Salem NC and was turned on to industrial music for the first time. Prior to that the weirdest group I knew was the Butthole Surfers. I bought a cheap electric guitar and restrung it with bailing wire and used a broken stereo preamp and an electric toothbrush to make my first noise recordings although at the time I called them industrial as I wasn't familiar with the term noise yet. In the mid 90's a coworker of mine in Chicago told me about this act called Merzbow that was playing at a bar and thought I'd be into it because it was extreme. It was indeed extreme.. it was one of the loudest most painful sonic experiences of my life .. I didn't have earplugs so it was actually hard to stand.. I almost left. What I found frustrating was that I could see him turning knobs and shit but it was just a blast of noise with no discernible variation. It was basically HNW. Then in the early 2000's I started fucking around with circuit bending and eventually ended up on Troniks for better or worse.
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by WhiteWarlock »

LSD & underground cassette tape trading lists/records at the wrong speed or spun by hand backwards/forwards thru pedals...
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by melko »

Sometime in the mid 90s, during my tenure as Norsk Arisk Black Metal artist, I plugged my Yamaha PSS-51 into a distortion pedal and liked what I heard very much :mrgreen:
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by WhiteWarlock »


in between radio stations...
Television static & 1khz colour bars late at night...
Total Obscure 70s grind house movies soundtracks at the Drive In...
Gille Melle NightGallery intro...
Early 80s phone call...
Listening to sounds of space by calling 1- 900 voyager probe # on TV(That's Incredible Commercial) when it reached Jupiter...
hmmm was seriously beaten for that stunt when the bill came... half an hour+...
sounded like modular synth:P
The Sounds of Space.
Fulci City of the Living Dead VHS rental...
Strange unexpected influence of (1st wave)Celtic Frost Dance Macabre on Morbid Tales(original press German Noise Label 1984)
early Surfers on way too much acid watching colours flowing out of the speakers...
& then anything Bizarre and preferably European or Japanese...
Old School Industrial...
Noise...
Experimental...
strange bizarre weird total underground sounds...
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by JLIAT »

The OP was "Why we make Noise" - its changed to IMO a much simpler question. And answers.

But to return to Rubbish's thing about the Beatles etc. Mark Fisher talks about this quite a bit in his books, but there are videos on you tube. One of his ideas is that 'everything has become retro'. Which means there is no now, or future, his term 'the slow erasure of the future'...

Historically it happened before Modernism, when folks thought The Greeks had all the answers.

To give one answer (which I don't support) there is the idea of the finite and the infinite. And that a finite being cant figure out the infinite, but the Artist can express it.
"Cage's 4'33" = 273 seconds xe2x88x92273.15xc2xb0 C = absolute zero."
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by BPJ »

I was in a shitty band when I was a kid, and only the drummer was any good. I only had one effect for my guitar, a DS1, and it broke so it just squealed when not playing, and made retarded, pitched fart sounds when you did. I thought it was wicked hardcore and showed the other guys this thing I totally invented on purpose, and the vocalist loaned me his Dads copy of Metal Machine Music. I dicked around for a while, tried to make jungle on a bunch of tape decks because I didn't know you could make music with computers, and eventually lost the pedal in a box full of assorted shit. Years later I find it again, get a couple more pedals, and stumble upon noise music after looking up "Loud noisy music" on the internet. Adrian was the first noise guy I ever talked to, I just really liked how fun it was to make loud stupid sounds even though I pretended at the time that I was all artistic and shit.
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by NoiseWiki »

JLIAT wrote: Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:09 pm The OP was "Why we make Noise" - its changed to IMO a much simpler question. And answers.
It didn't change.. I started a separate thread on the topic of how did you personally end up making/listening to noise

Here's the thread RUBBISH started.. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=131
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by NoiseWiki »

BPJ wrote: Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:19 pm Adrian was the first noise guy I ever talked to
I was?
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by BPJ »

Yeah, I found some of your stuff on a blog or SLSK or some other place, I forget, so I looked you up, found your website, which gave me your MySpace, so I made one to talk to you about noise. You were really cool to me, showed me some circuit bent stuff (Your CD player was the first circuit bent thing I ever saw, I broke so many because of you), and taught me about feedback loops, which gave me the revelation that my DS1 had somehow bridged a connection.
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Re: How did you end up making/listening to noise?

Post by NoiseWiki »

BPJ wrote: Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:36 pm Yeah, I found some of your stuff on a blog or SLSK or some other place, I forget, so I looked you up, found your website, which gave me your MySpace, so I made one to talk to you about noise. You were really cool to me, showed me some circuit bent stuff (Your CD player was the first circuit bent thing I ever saw, I broke so many because of you), and taught me about feedback loops, which gave me the revelation that my DS1 had somehow bridged a connection.
Ah that's awesome.. myspace seems like a bazillion years ago.. I still have a number of those cd players.. the Xplayer still works but usually flakes out after a couple of minutes of playback
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