MY NOISE ORIGIN STORY

A few months ago, I was put on the spot to explain my love of noise to some friends who were unfamiliar with the wonders of Merzbow. Unfortunately, I was quite stoned at the time and as a result failed miserably. But in the days and weeks that followed, it got me thinking about my path to discovering noise and why I enjoy it. I wasn’t able to properly articulate my fascination with ear destroying sounds while under the influence, but I’ll do my best here and now.

I’ve always loved music and I think my interest in noise began as a byproduct of that when I was a teenager in the early/mid nineties. Like many young metalheads I was an aspiring guitarist, but there were many days where I spent as much time hooking up a bunch of effects pedals and seeing what kinds of fucked up racket I could coax out of my Squire Stratocaster as I did learning Metallica riffs (likely much to my mother’s dismay). The less it sounded like a guitar and the more hideous the sounds coming out of my amplifier got, the more I liked it.

Of course, alternative rock was also blowing up during this period and I found myself immediately drawn to the noisier bands, such as Sonic Youth, Shellac and The Jesus Lizard. I didn’t know who Merzbow was yet, not to mention the fact that I was only fifteen when his genre-defining harsh noise classic Venereology was released in 1994 (and wouldn't have been ready for it yet even if I had heard it back then), but thanks to albums like Washing Machine, At Action Park and Liar the seeds had been planted, even if they wouldn’t fully bear fruit for quite some time.

Fast-forward a bit to the late nineties/early two thousands and my taste in metal began progressing towards the more extreme sounds of death metal, black metal and grindcore. This is when I came across Relapse Records and their incredible mail order catalog, which was roughly the size of a phone book. Relapse’s sub label Release Entertainment specialized in noise and dark ambient artists, and I remember reading the catalog copy that declared the aforementioned Venereology to be “the most extreme recording you’ll ever own!.” I still wasn’t ready to dive into noise, but the catalog descriptions and album art continued to rattle around in the back of my brain for years, providing further nourishment to the still-gestating seeds of obsession.

My real introduction to noise didn’t occur until 2004 with the release of Wolf Eyes’ Burned Mind. I can’t remember where I read a review of the album, but I was intrigued enough to track down a copy and was immediately blown away by what I heard; the rotten, filthy, fried and squelching sounds of “Stabbed in the Face” and “Rattlesnake Shake” were the sounds I had been unknowingly searching for in my room a decade prior when I was trying to make my guitar sound like a beehive that had been set on fire. By that time I was deep into my search for the most extreme and abrasive shit I could pollute my ears with and Burned Mind was a revelation. This was compounded by seeing Wolf Eyes live with Prurient in 2005, a total game changer that was unlike anything I’d witnessed prior in terms of live performance.

Then in 2006, the floodgates fully opened. I landed an internship with Metal Blade Records and was living and working just outside of Los Angeles. It was then that I made my first pilgrimage to Amoeba; I’m pretty sure I spent at least four hours combing through the rows of CDs that day. I stumbled upon their experimental music section and there it was, a copy of Venereology; the purple corpse on the cover grinning at me in all its grotesque glory as if daring me to pick it up, the words “EXTREME NOISE” running down the spine in giant block letters, drawing me in like a beacon. I took it back to the apartment I was sharing for the next several months, popped it into my laptop, put in my earbuds and for the next fifty-plus minutes allowed my ears to be violated by what to this day remains one of the most abrasive albums I’ve ever heard.

And I loved it.

Venereology was Merzbow's skull-shattering response to the burgeoning death metal and grindcore scenes of the 1990s, so it's no surprise that I, a metalhead discovering noise, gravitated towards it. As I listened to it for the first time, I was shocked by its unhinged violence and wondered if my brains were going to melt and come oozing out of my earholes. It was an endurance test, yet at the same time I was thoroughly mesmerized by it. I knew that this was the true entrance to the noise rabbit hole and once I started down it there would be no turning back.

Does this compulsion to bombard my brain with punishing sounds that I've developed over the past nineteen years make me some sort of masochist? Oxford’s defines a masochist as “a person who enjoys an activity that appears to be painful or tedious.” While listening to noise certainly can be painful, for me it’s more about a desire for chaos than it is about pain. My life has become increasingly defined by routine as I've grown older and while that's by no means a bad thing, I'll always crave a little chaos from time to time. To fully appreciate noise, you have to submit to its chaos, allow yourself to become fully immersed and let that chaos take you wherever it’s gonna take you. There’s something about giving yourself over to and losing yourself in the distortion and feedback that’s still utterly thrilling after nearly two decades of ear abuse.