Music History – Noise Music – From Merzbow to Throbbing Gristle, Pushing the Limits of Sound Art

Noise music is perhaps the definitive “anti-music.” The genre features a number of artists whose work is best described as a form of “sound art.” Noise breaks through the boundaries and constraints imposed within traditional music genres and due to its total disregard for standard concepts of musical theory, it is often considered entirely unlistenable to those Service Industries Definition unfamiliar with the genre. Forming an exact definition of noise can be difficult, although it has often been described as being made up of “unwanted” sounds or sounds that are inappropriate for a particular situation. By this definition, the perception of what is noise has changed over time and also varies from culture to culture as well as from person to person.
Despite the fact that nowadays it is frequently associated with modern industrial artists or Japanese noise artists (so-called “Japanoise” bands) such as Merzbow, the development of modern noise music can be traced back to the beginning on the 20th century. A member of the futurist movement, Luigi Russolo, is often cited as one of the first noise Small Scale Industries Pdf artists. Russolo envisioned noise as the music of the future, which he outlined in “The Art of Noises,” first released in 1913. To demonstrate his ideas on how this future music would sound, Russolo built a number of noisemaking machines to form a “noise orchestra.” Russolo’s performances were generally not well-received by audiences of the time.
Modern noise emerged more than a half a century later, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s and owes much of its development to industrial noise groups such as Current 93, Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Laibach, Nurse with Wound and Einst?�rzende Neubauten. These bands mixed conventional instruments such as guitars with other sound sources such as metal percussion and self-made noisemaking devices.
Since there are no stylistic guidelines to define noise music, there are also no requirements placed on the equipment used to create it. Noise can be made using traditional instruments, which can be seen to a large extent in the related genres of Free Jazz and Noise Rock, or by using non-instruments and “found sounds” (recordings of non-instrumental sounds and noises). In the early days of noise, artists often experimented with splicing together recordings made on tape machines. Today, this process has largely been replaced by modern hardware and software samplers.
Many noise artists are known for creating their own self-made instruments and noise machines, either in the form of hardware synthesizers or effects boxes or using modern software tools such as Max/MSP. Masami Akita, the man behind the prolific Japanese Noise project Merzbow, also builds his own guitars used on his recordings and during live performances. More conventional gear often used by noise artists includes the Roland SH-101 hardware synthesizer and the digital audio workstation Ableton Live.