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Originally Posted by alyasa
Elements of noise will be interesting interspesed with rock or any kind music, it would be interesting to hear Pelican, for example, flirt with noise, but as a genre unto itself, noise is a very exclusive one.
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The seeming exclusivity is a turnoff to many, I think. Many noise people think of themselves as "noise artists" and present their noise as some kinda "high art."
If you don't like it, you just don't get it, they may say. I suppose that if this is what a new listener gets exposed to this attitude early on, it's gotta be an instant curiosity or love affair, or else the listener's relationship with noise is immediately finished.
Some noisefolk play the "high art" angle not outta some great importance or intellectual superiority which they perceive themselves to have...some play the art angle outta necessity or convenience, such as the folks here in Sacramento who are part of the annual Nor Cal Noisefest. They get a grant from the city's arts commission to help finance the event. That's awfully smart if you ask me. I'd like to get some money like that to book all these bands I get contacted by, but I wouldn't know how to justify "blues-damaged garage-scuzz" as high art. Thus, I'm relegated to blow at least 10% of my own money on booking shows anywhere I can get 'em going. For music or art that's overall so poorly supported in terms of patronage, it's great to get some public funds to help out.
But a lotta other "noise artists" do seem pretty ridiculous to me. I can appreciate the idea that a project might be akin to a "sound installation," but I see plenty of so-called noise artists every year who are doing nothing to separate themselves from noise-musicians that are spontaneous table-top combusters of low-tech junk, found objects, and pedals....these more pedestrian-level DIY noisejammers are 100% representative of the true punk rock ethos. Always visceral and cathartic like even the high-brow stuff, these no-brow/low-brow noisers are occasionally even very funny, and almost always more engaging and sometimes very audience-interactive. They have a palpable humanistic element which otherwise rare or almost devoid in noise music.
The quality of the noise between the high-brow and the no-brow/low-brow can range from awesome to totally sucky just the same, which further drives home how ridiculous it is that the high-brow noise artists take themselves and their "art" so damn seriously. Nothing is simply for the fun of it.
Now, with that said, I think it's certainly true that noise recordings sound best the higher the fidelity of the recording and record manufacturing process. Inasmuch as clarity of notes is not a chief concern or even a concern at all, noise is a genre where all the other characteristics of sound beyond tonality (timbral richness, pitch, etc.) are so important...perhaps even singularly so. If it can be a great experience live, then it must be captured on record to be a great noise record. Go back to so many noise records of 20-30 years ago...or even all the way back to
Metal Machine Music. You will hear many records with a dull bleat or buzz and nothing more. How much of the front-and-center experience are you missing on a record like the
Bruitistes 2xLP? The Vivenza side of that comp sounds like 100x oversampled steel wool on metal, but with the mids and highs and the lower half of the lows cut out of it. Same can be said for about a dozen different Violent Onsen Geisha LPs. What made the best Merzbow records of the same era great was the brightness and sharpness of the sound, which in the 90s was one-upped.
It had been quite a challenge for the no/low-brow noisefolks to make a great-sounding record in the past, but now it can be a matter of learning how to use some software, so we're starting to hear a lotta great noise recordings that very nearly live up to the great live performances.....stuff like Yellow Swans, Kites, Tralphaz, Kevin Shields, Moth Drakula, Deathgleaner...this stuff is amazing. And while noise will never catch on that much (has Wolf Eyes even sold 10,000 copies of anything?) that it will have any great amount of hype beyond the very edge of the edgiest mainstream media, it certainly has become more known and more popular, and that's led to a lotta crack noise artists who try and fail and mostly just clutter up MySpace, and that leads to threadstarters like the one that originated this thread.
Don't write off noise....just reset your filter, and learn where to find the good stuff so as to avoid too much crap.