october 10
"Japanese Noise" is a real, not-made-up label for a kind of avant garde Japanese music that started maybe in the 70S.
Sorry, this is going to be ANOTHER fairly dry article with no sexy pictures or juvenile humor. Um, check back tomorrow for that.
There are two main approaches to noise : high brow and low brow.
The high brow noise guys see themselves as the latest in a long line of non-melodic, avant-garde music. . starting with Music Concrete in the 20's, Futurism in the 40's, and the weird shrieky sounds of Xenis Xenikakis or Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 60's. the goal, (like the goal of Modern Art in general) isn't to be aesthetically pleasing. Things like 'notes' or 'melodies' or 'rhythm' are for sell-outs! The goal is to be 'challenging' and take the listener to another world where he or she can contemplate the subtle sonic textures hidden inside the noise.
The low brow nosie guys see themselves as the latest in a long line of angry metalheads. . . Their attitude was, metal was noiser than rock: Distorted and angry . Death metal was noisier than metal-non melodic, dissonant. Grind bands like A.C. pretty much demolished the few remaining musical rules- becoming a blur without tempo or notes. Pretty much the only way to take things further out than A.C. was to just abandon rock instruments altogether and just produce pure white noise. Rather than thinking of noise as intellectual or contemplative, they are convinced that it's super duper extreme/ intense / messed up, and put totally disgusting pictures of mutilated corpses on their album covers.
The irony is, both approaches sound about the same!!
Tonight was a 'highbrow night'. . .which makes sense, since tonight's hellish din was brought to you by. . . THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY!!!????
We arrived in time to catch the end of LOZI's set. My man was doing a solo on a sewing machine.
Then MERZBOW played. He's generally called the inventor of this style of music. But tonight he was doing 'modern style' noise: laptops were his instruments. He sat there, in the middle of this insane cacophony, like a middle aged executive, calmly typing into his computers. I still can't decide if that is ironic enough to be cool. I mean, it sure beats trying to 'rock out' at his laptop. That would be as bad as the new wave guy with the 'guitar-strap synthesyzer' all trying to act like he's rocking. But still, it's not that amazing to watch this guy push buttons in an 'avant garde' way.
the promoters tried to liven things up with HUGE VIDEO PROJECTIONS of. . . ducks, wallabies, and what I swear was a fajita. But I would have gone further. Maybe a fan on stage, blowing his hair, bon jovi style.
Then ANAGMA played. He was SO GOOD. Rather than radio-static type noise, he started with one or two sine waves, and built them into really complex harmonics, which then got more and more complex until it lost all tonality, but sort of became this pulsing shimmering noise. And then gradually resolved back into these pure ethereal sine tones, over the course of half an hour. All this was accompanied by sweeping, elegant black and white, mathematical-looking animations that perfectly matched the music.
Afterwards, we're walking out and notice the sound booth: THERE'S
LIKE 4 64 CHANNEL MIXERS THERE. Not to mention 50,000 dollars worth
of audio gear. All this to mix the music coming out of ONE
LAPTOP. 
I'm totally pissing myself laughing. What's even funnier is, it's NOISE MUSIC. Like, 'oh, we need at least a 64 channel mixer, OTHERWISE IT WILL SOUND BAD.' 'yeah, IT'LL SOUND ALL WEIRD if it's not mixed right.'
Fucking a. you'd at least think with that much equipment they'd be able to liven up the evening by adding some Orchestra Hits to the mix. . . .
Also, the bar had an interactive art show: a hidden camera would detect the motion of the people at the bar, and then represent everyone's movement as a SERIES OF GREEN LASER BEAM VODKA BOTTLES for no reason.
Also, there was a cool art project called DEATHCLOCK.
they'd take your picture and ask your age, and
use some kind of statistical program to determine when you would averagely
die. then your face goes on the computer screen, with a little clock. the
clock counts down to your death. as long as it was on a computer though,
i think they should have just had a really slow scroll bar, but instead
of 'loading...' it would say 'dying. . . .'
plus, some more pictures from the U.N. art show:
promoting world peace through upskirt shots and red blotchy things. .. .
TOMORROW: BOOTS FOR SURE!!!
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