Скачать или смотреть People Who Do Noise: Noah Mickens

This was one of the special features from the DVD version of "People Who Do Noise," a documentary about the Portland noise scene directed by Adam Cornelius. It's me getting interviewed about the history of noise as a musical form, and also just a little bit of footage from the late period of my band Nequaquam Vacuum.
The full documentary can be viewed here:    • People Who Do Noise (2008) Full Concert Mo...  

I've always wished that I did a better job here of explaining the history of noise. In my defense, I was at work (the Rotture, where I was the in-house booker at that time), and dipped downstairs to record this interview unexpectedly. Adam asked me, "Is noise the new punk?" Here's what I was trying to explain:

"Noise" as a sound within music dates back to the creation of the valved instrument, which could be used to create dissonant tones by partially depressing the valves. Classical composers like Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, Cowell, et al. made use of the dissonance of valved instruments in their compositions of the early 20th Century; and concurrently musicians associated with Dadaism (Russolo, Tinguely were noisy music in even less conventional ways. From these experiments came another series of musical movements in the 1940s (eg. Musique Concrete, Futurism, Musik Elektronisch, etc.) with their own star composers often operating in a very noisy mode and with unconventional and experimental instruments (Stockhausen, Xenakis, Cage, Varese, et al.)

Soon, concepts of dissonance and atonality entered jazz out at the edges of bebop soloing, leading to the ever-abstracting genres of Free Jazz and Fusion with people making super-noisy music on saxophones and other instruments (Coltrane, Ayler, Coleman). A concurrent thread was the Fluxus movement - La Monte Young, Z'EV, John Cage again, Gyorgy Ligeti, Pauline Ontiveros, Yoko Ono, and many others. In the world of rock and roll, noise began to show its face in the heavy feedback experiments of Jimi Hendrix, The Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed's solo provocation "Metal Machine Music." Merzbow is the hero of "pure noise" or "harsh noise" guys, and he came around in 1979 as the head of a wave of Japanese noise bands like Hanatarash and Zeni Geva; while acts like Whitehouse and Final Solution in Europe, and The Haters and Smegma in the USA, explored related territory of electronic feedback and mechanical noise. By the 90s, it was all much too widespread and complex to summarize, and this documentary was made eight years into the following decade, at the height of the popularity of Noise music.

I offered this as a counter-narrative to Mr. Cornelius' suggestion that "noise is the new punk" - a frankly absurd statement that I had been hearing right around that time. This was the brief advent of noise hipsterdom, when a weird guy could pick up girls by setting up a feedback loop with a microphone and a delay pedal, and I was hoping to get the history on record for the edification of a new generation of noise heads who didn't understand how long people had been doing this sort of thing. Instead, I gave them this rambling and only partly-coherent explanation, said "Throbbing Gristle" about a dozen times, and it wound up in the special features. Perhaps I'll find another opportunity one day.