Critics

[jon abbey]

. When Touching Extremes started, many years ago, Jon was man enough to clearly tell me (via email) that he didn't like the website and wouldn't send promos. I was perfectly at ease with his decision, we kept having sporadic and very civil contacts when I purchased Erstwhile CDs, which I also reviewed occasionally - positively of course, ha! No grudges, no hard feelings, no hysteric behavior. That's the way it should be.

heh, I actually don't remember this initial contact but it doesn't surprise me, I've always been pretty hesitant about sending promos to most writers, as my experience has always been that so few of them have anything of interest to say about this music, and even fewer at length.

musicians whom I respect, on the other hand, I've always been quite generous about giving promos to, usually unsolicited. the instance I'm still very proud of is giving Taku Sugimoto a copy of dach, which turned out to be the first Radu disc he'd heard.

this thread has inspired me to come up with an idea to help remedy the situation, let's see if I can pull it off. stay tuned...

[rainey]

Ah, at last someone's thought about my retirement fund!

No one mentioned the money going to you, Dan. I believe the money is destined for "smart people".

(I refuse to use a smiley face, here, but please read as *JOKE*)

It's the tone of Grisha's post that I didn't like, not the essence... "I can't stand that guy's writing" and "Does he have any insight" is not an objective appreciation of one's work, especially when that work is not carefully scrutinized. You can't call it a "criticism", it's just the will of coming out with something "strong" without really substantiating it.

Sounds very similar to the problem we're grappling with in this thread. "Nothing new here - some crackling and high-pitched whines followed by large blocks of silence with the occasional jarring interruption." Although the problem there is not really a lack of objectivity, but an over-abundance of it. It's still hollowly dismissive.

(I'm remembering a real, subjective example from a review I got in a newspaper in Pittsburgh, the bulk of which was "Mostly annoying" - Who would come to my defense? Where should I have posted my account of how a lot of people actually liked it? Where was that reporter during the show, and why didn't he have the "balls" to introduce himself to me?)

Not that you or anyone else deserves that kind of thoughtless, public drudging, but perhaps the subsequent public defense is a little overstated.

And I disagree that sending an email takes any "balls" whatsoever.

[Dan Warburton]

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[Massimo Ricci]

but perhaps the subsequent public defense is a little overstated

In what, Bhob? Only because I told Grisha that he's in a "tiny minority"? Or because I defined these threads harshly? I'm asking because, sincerely, I am not seeing traces of overstatement in my reply and I'm worried about the development of an evil alter ego

Anyway - words are indeed hollow, especially in music reviews, and this is something that I myself often admit in the very writeups. But weren't for those words, maybe someone would still believe that Dead Can Dance are avantgarde music. Jon's point about writers having few interesting things to say about EAI and the likes may be partially correct, yet that doesn't exclude that many writers are more knowledgeable and experienced than their words show, quite often more than latecoming insiders who were listening to Cure until five years ago and then, all of a sudden, believe they're god because they manage to work with someone important.

On the contrary, many "names" shouldn't be forgiven for writing bullshit that rapidly becomes mere global ignorance. One thing is liking or not liking a writer's style, another is reading on Wire that Frank Rothkamm's music is based on musique concrete when the whole album reviewed was made with an analog synthesizer. And this is just an example.

In any case I believe that, once again, Richard is right when he says that "insightfulness" is proportional to the length of the review and the number of listening sessions (in my case, it's usually three per CD - with and without headphones, the latter in a silent environment. I mean SERIOUS listening: no people around, no television, no pissing while hearing echoes of the music from the living room). But if I had to write 800 words or more for any record I intend to review, I'd do very few of them. What would be the point in receiving hundreds of records that need to be known by a potentially interested audience and not reviewing them, even in 200-300 words? At least people know that the stuff exists, and could be of some interest. The large part of them fools even likes the style, haha!

[William Hutson]

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/4620

does that sound like it could be describing franz hautzinger? certainly not. a pretty useful review, i think. which is to say that i didn't already know that this was a solo trumpet disc-- now i'm more excited to grab a copy. funny that this showed up today.

[bryan]

There's a lot of potential for insightful critique and approachable (for the non-initiate) discussion of eai by using the internet for more than just a souped up pony express. It would be great, as rainey touched on, to use more than words when discussing this music. That way folks could get down to brass tacks and not have to spend a third of the time trying to describe a particular permutation of noisiness.

An ideal would be this: a way to load up a track online for streaming so that in a discussion, like in a thread on IHM, anyone posting could cue up a specific point on the music to talk about. I don't know how it would work technically, but the bandwidth could be kept low by just using one copy of the track that would load up in virtual memory when one accessed the thread, and the cue points would be immediately responsive (no load time: the track is already in memory). And of course, a way to make the track "stream-only".

In this way maybe the ability to wrap words around taomud would increase, and both the area of music under discussion and the discussion itself would be totally accessible for more than just the chosen tribe of 150 (where did that number come from? i thought the estimate was 1,000 or something.. heh).

[Dan Warburton]

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[schiksalgemeinschaft]

can't we start a count here? or does jon's 400 suffice?

that 400 probably also includes musicians.

fuck. are 'we' really spearheading?

[bryan]

the chosen tribe of 150 (where did that number come from?

Nick Cain, in The Wire. See the other thread.

oops!.. thanks.

[will]

can't we start a count here? or does jon's 400 suffice?

that 400 probably also includes musicians.

fuck. are 'we' really spearheading?

Uhhh, I think this stuff is all head, no shaft.

[jkudler]

this was going to be its own thread, but it makes much more sense here, and i won't be calling out bill as badly. but. really really enjoyed this essay i just read, found via googling, occasioned by a recent listen to the rita's "thousands of dead gods" (yes, i am embarrassed to have typed that. i really liked the rita's live performance a lot; the disc left me mostly bored. perhaps that is the point).

http://deathbombarc.com/cassettegods/transJuly07.htm

"Of course, being noise, WN is terribly resistant to theory and those who actually want to talk seriously about it are deemed “fags” by the internet community. But this is another curious aspect of the style. The existence of WN should prompt discussion. It is an artistic movement that sprang out of a dissatisfaction with the status quo. Obviously, its adherents find most HN to be too chatty, too gestural, or (to use the noise-dude vernacular) too “wanky.” It has a manifesto, even if it exists only in the combined single-line posts of a hundred isolated nerds on internet discussion boards. It is a conceptual art, disguised under noise machismo to deter the accusation of pretension."

this piece does a lot of what we were looking for earlier in the thread: it provided a good and insightful introduction to a genre i know little about, it had thoughtful discussion of the theoretical/conceptual side without reaching too far afield or up its own ass, and it was readable and funny. great work, bill! this is exactly the kind of criticism we need more of.

-jesse

[hatta]

jesus christ though that page is unreadable.

[jkudler]

yeah, i know. well, it's formatted for some annoying frames, but i can't link directly that way.

go here (and then watch your browser re-size; yeesh!):
http://deathbombarc.com/cassettegods/

then to "Transitory Magnetism," then to "july 2007." or. . . i will copy and paste here:

" Transitory Magnetism
Bill Hutson


Wall Noise occupies a difficult space in the greater universe of Harsh Noise music. It resembles an artistic movement, rather than a mere subgenre, in its devotees’ adherence to a rigid ideology. Its discussion has its own rhetoric, with terms like “militant,” “unchanging,” “nihilistic” as if a list of adjectives can stand in for an actual manifesto. According to many, walls have existed for some time in the work of earlier noise artists, but were never viewed as dogma until given their name in the mid-2000’s. With the coining of the term, Wall Noise triggered furious debate, a generation of sycophantic hangers-on, naysayers declaring the nakedness of its emperor, and jaded bastards pronouncing its death with every new cassette. By virtue of the fact that this style has a name, strict rules for its production, and artists who claim to work solely within the genre, WN has surrounded itself with an air of doomy religiosity.

For the uninitiated, WN’s statement of purpose could be described in the following way: single chunks of thick noise with no dynamics or movement. Walls are generally slowly shifting textures of extremely saturated distortion often characterized by heavy bass frequencies and a crunchy edge in the high-end. The individual pieces of music are usually long, as if on a scale grander than that of other types of noise (though it could be argued that length is irrelevant since these pieces needn’t contain any development). WN is unaccepting of any audio but the harshest. It is “pure” noise. It strives for unrelenting brutality and walls are described as being “airless” or “suffocating” or “punishing.”

If one takes into account certain contemporary trends in experimental music, as well as the ubiquity of electronics in music, WN seems inevitable. Modern composition, sound art and improvisational musics, to place themselves in opposition with the musical mainstream, have been exploring space, silence, inactivity and (in general) boringness since the 1960’s. These concerns have become even more apparent in the last decade with the rise of EAI (electro-acoustic improvisation) and other reductionist movements. WN shares with these genres an emphasis on restraint. To an acoustic musician, restraint means quietude: if a pianist is inactive, his instrument makes no sound. If a noise artist chooses to do so, he can be inactive while his electronics continue to produce sound. With electricity, stillness does not translate to silence. WN is the result of this phenomenon— electronics untouched just keep going. The challenge then becomes the degree of inactivity. How little can an artist do over time and still be considered the author of the resulting sound? During performance, there is an expectation that a musician is supposed to do something, and often the maintenance of extreme restraint can make both the audience an the performer very uncomfortable.

The performance, and the recording of WN by an artist requires a kind of shutting-down, a slowing of processes. In a sense, WN is the opposite of dynamic Harsh Noise. The production of HN usually involves zealous gesture, the suggestion of physical violence, as if the musician is performing an assault upon his audience, his listeners, his equipment, etc. HN is a reaction to an indefinable rage, the source of which is either unclear, or specific to the individual artists. WN is the flipside, acquiescence in the face of those same stimuli. In WN, the artist is as much the victim of the assault as the audience is. The rage is still present, but the WN artist’s reaction is to give into masochism rather than to turn it around and into sadism.

In the absence of all grand gesture, the focus of the artist and of the audience must be on tiny detail. This aspect provides a fascinating contradiction within WN. With respect to movement over time, WN is extremely minimal, but the sound of any one moment of a WN composition is maximal. It is overwhelming. These are not small, quiet sounds as they are in the case of EAI, or lowercase music. While those genres attempt to provide an alternative to, or a brief respite from, the overabundance of media stimuli in post-postmodernity, WN accepts it and drowns it out. (To briefly hint toward a cultural reading) WN becomes the logical future of globalization and a wealth of information where every event is pounded flat by saturation into a constant, unchanging din. The minimal/maximal contradiction is the result of a kind of pac-man effect, where the extremes of the spectrum loop around on each other and meet—where too much information becomes numbing static noise.

Of course, being noise, WN is terribly resistant to theory and those who actually want to talk seriously about it are deemed “fags” by the internet community. But this is another curious aspect of the style. The existence of WN should prompt discussion. It is an artistic movement that sprang out of a dissatisfaction with the status quo. Obviously, its adherents find most HN to be too chatty, too gestural, or (to use the noise-dude vernacular) too “wanky.” It has a manifesto, even if it exists only in the combined single-line posts of a hundred isolated nerds on internet discussion boards. It is a conceptual art, disguised under noise machismo to deter the accusation of pretension.
Stepping back from the discussion of WN in general, I intend to hang this column on the release of a six-cassette box on Hate State called None Shadow. Before I do that, however, I have to say a few things about the reality of WN and the state of the scene.

As WN became popular in the underground, the simplicity of the concept, along with the relative ease of producing a “good” wall, allowed for the almost instantaneous appearance of wall devotees, inactive (or at least, unheard) before the style had solidified. The older artists who developed the sound, like The Rita (who, in fact, coined the term and is unquestionably responsible for movement’s existence) and The Cherry Point, became the popes and cardinals to an upswell of just-bought-a-Boss-Metal-Zone worshippers. Now, the success of individual artists is judged by their WN authenticity—in this case, their faithful devotion to the aesthetic. Whose walls are the “purest,” the most “unchanging?” If a knob is turned too quickly and the shift in sound is too dramatic, then the wall is impure. To accept the metaphor, walls should have no windows or doors— this is some Cask of Amontillado shit.

When an artist who is not known solely for producing walls releases a WN tape, he is considered a dilettante. He is not utterly devoted to WN and therefore his walls cannot be serious. This attitude, however, is somewhat necessary. If any Harsh Noise artist can produce an acceptable wall, then exclusivity must be the criteria for quality. But in this way, wall artists have backed themselves into a corner. An ambient record by Taskmaster or Vomir would retroactively throw into question the validity of all previous releases. WN is an avant garde within which experimentation has become effectively impossible. (To be fair, a number of artists use other pseudonyms for their non-WN, “impure” projects: The Rita records more dynamic noise with weird movie clips under the name BT.HN. The Sewer Election/Treriksröset duo exclusively produces walls, but the individual projects do not.)

This column will be continued next month with an actual discussion of None Shadow (which was my point in writing this… I just filled up all my space with the introduction). Please come back and read the conclusion. "

[Dan Warburton]

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[carlos]

there's a 23 page thread about "walls" on iheartnoise:

http://chondriticsound.com/forum/viewto ... f=1&t=3420

the first few pages are helpful, if anybody is interested

there was an older thread- possibly on the old iheartnoise, when the "walls" thing/idea first appeared but i can't find it- it seems like it was around early 2006, when Oscillating Innards, Pedestrian Deposit and The Rita were touring together

[jcg]

This is a very interesting piece, and does indeed deserve its own thread. Aaron Dilloway mentioned WN en passant in his interview just posted http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magaz ... loway.html

Yes indeed: excellent writing from Bill Hutson here! Especially since, as far as I know, there's very few people willing to cover this area of music at length with enough baggage and/or decent writing abilities. No offense to anyone intended so please correct me if I'm wrong. Most noise forums I've occasionally visited seem to be full of people mostly hostile to or perhaps uninterested in discussing their matter of interest with depth and detail. A stand that maybe is valid but that I deplore myself. And websites or publications directed to wider audiences typically don't do much more than defining noise and its various sub-genres as non-music or anti-music. Which is utterly ridiculous.

And Dan is right: those last few posts should probably be moved to a separate thread.

Bill (anyone), which Rita stuff should I check out? Would like to hear yours too.

There's an interview of Sam McKinlay (the man behind The Rita) that should get you started : http://www.musiquemachine.com/articles/ ... .php?id=93
The mentioned PACrec releases (Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence and Thousands of Dead Gods) are, I think, pretty representative, easy to find and cheap. Not sure it's quite up your alley though.

[jcg]

there's a 23 page thread about "walls" on iheartnoise:

http://chondriticsound.com/forum/viewto ... f=1&t=3420

the first few pages are helpful, if anybody is interested

Thanks for the pointer. But again it's just forum level discussion (which I like don't get me wrong!) with a lot of short comments and name dropping. I'm still waiting for an in-depth analysis of noise with historical, esthetical and social perspectives that is also a pleasant read. Wall noise could be a nice chapter in this book. Please don't let Paul Hegarty be the only recognized writer about this!

[Dan Warburton]

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[apfEID]

Both of The Rita's PacRec cds are excellent. Especially sublime, for the harsh noise enthusiast at least, is the moment roughly 10 minutes into the first track on Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence when the wall is split by the sounds of screaming sampled from Italian giallo film. A similar contrast arrives in the second track where amplified sheet metal abuse is clearly heard fighting in the mix for attention.

Total Slitting of Throats is the least changing record I've ever listened to. It's utterly exhausting at high volume. Definitely opened my eyes to what is or is not "valid" in noise... wall noise helped me shed my insistence on rapid change and cut up as an approach, even though it continues to define much of what I do. Though Phil and Sam have been making noise as long as I have or longer, one of the things I like about the current generation of noise artists is that they seem to not be hung up on "is this music?" the way some of us who started making noise in the mid-90's were. Personally, I wrestled with that question for far too long and I know others in the 90's were asking the same question.

Oddly enough, wall noise's rise to prominence aligns quite well with my discovery of Erstwhile, so thinking about those The Rita releases brings to mind certain Ersts and vice versa.

[Dan Warburton]

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