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It must have been sometime last year, summer, perhaps July or August, that I was looking through the stack of unlistened-to cassettes that tower above my studio monitors and tape decks, wracking my brain for something clever to write a column about, when I noticed that I had, through purchases, gifts and trades, collected eleven tapes by, or featuring, the noise artist Kakerlak in a matter of mere weeks. I had recently begun writing a column about Wall Noise, hung on a (still unfinished) review of the None Shadow box-set, released by Hate State, which included a cassette by Kakerlak, but I otherwise knew very little about the project. Through friends returning home from tours of the East Coast, I had heard the name and some vaguely positive reports on his recordings and live shows. Apart from that, based on the themes and artwork displayed on his cassettes, I had gathered that the man behind the project possessed a deep fascination with cockroaches. And that was about it.

I liked (and still like) the idea of writing an article that consists of a series of short reviews of multiple releases by an artist, with an overall discursive framework that deals not only with comparisons between the releases but seeks to build an argument about the project's goals and cultural relevance. I had admired Richard Pinnell's "One Month With Jeph Jerman" project where he reviewed one CD by Jerman per day for one month. Each entry was one installment within a structure that, eventually, lead the author and his readers towards some understanding of the varied work of an artist whose career is, to the common consumer, otherwise daunting. Other, more available, references for this type of writing are the "Primer" articles that appear every other month in The Wire, where an artist's entire oeuvre is examined by a selection of the magazine's writers, placing each recording in the artist's history and, hopefully, a wider history of whatever time and culture they were a part of. What is required of this type of work, however, is an artist whose work is varied enough to warrant such a treatment.

I thought to try this type of a piece with the recent cassette output of Kakerlak. I had in front of me, beside the already mentioned None Shadow, split cassettes with Riverbed Mausoleum, Privy Seals and Squamata, a collaboration with Macronympha, solo tapes on Monorail Trespassing, Abisko, Trash Ritual and Nurse Etiquette, and three by-mail collaborations with Sewer Election called Dog Holocaust, volumes I, II and III. This may sound as if I was some kind of fanatic, but really, I ended up with most of these by chance. It occurred to me that I knew what to expect from Kakerlak as I had heard The Blood Of The Forrest Turns The Streams Dark Red, the three-way split CD-r with Terg and Taskmaster on the Militant Walls label. That is to say, I expected exactly that: militant walls. And that was what I got.

After listening to three or four of Kakerlak's tapes, I grew fed up with the notes I was taking on each, finding that the brief descriptions I had jotted down did little to distinguish one tape from the next. Every one had to be described in relation to every other, "slightly higher frequencies than the last, but not a s high as the first," "smoother in texture than the A-side," etc, but they could really all be summed up with the same metaphors and lists of adjectives. My belief in this column faltered. The Wire's "Primer" articles work because the artists they choose have large discographies of material that are extremely varied and usually cover several decades; people like Sun Ra, The Mekons and The Wu-Tang Clan. Nolan Throop only began the Kakerlak project in 2005. I was dealing with a different type of review than I had imagined.

What was worse was that to treat Kakerlak in this way would be a terrible disservice. I would appear to be suggesting that his tapes fail to show any progression from one to the next, and that he is, somehow, at fault for this. Though I felt that many of his tapes were similar, I still enjoyed them immensely. I wouldn't be writing about Noise if I did not enjoy this type of material when it is done well, and Kakerlak is a good example of Harsh Noise done simply and effectively. So, had I failed as a writer because I could not synthesize the prose required to differentiate these excellent cassettes from one another, or develop some throughline to describe Kakerlak's evolution as an artist? Perhaps. But perhaps that type of thinking is unsatisfactory when writing about an artist so new and prolific who works within such strict genre parameters.

The issue I had run into is one particular to this underground scene. It is a characteristic of Noise that we who follow and participate in the culture value. It becomes an problem only when we try to map the strategies of other arts criticism onto Noise. What I had discovered about Kakerlak is, in a sense, a symptom of the scene that is true is nearly every Noise artist; it is something I would like to call Catalogue Redundancy. When a rock band, one who writes songs, releases a recording (an album, a single, whatever) it becomes, in most cases, the definitive recorded version of those songs. That band is not going to release two albums, back to back, with different recordings of the exact same songs on them. No band would do that, unless it were some conceptual turn. Therefore, when they release those songs, they will probably do so in an edition slightly larger than the demand of their following at the time, hoping to accommodate future fans as they are earned. If a release sells out, a band is likely to reissue those same out-of-print recordings rather than go back to the studio to rerecord those songs, because to do the latter, in the rock world, would be some kind of desecration. Noise and other experimental musics are, luckily, quite different. Because the nature of Noise is not based on the song-form, but on a progression of non-melodic, non-rhythmic textures and gestures, two different recordings with similar structures may not be recognizably alike the way they would be if both had the same chords, riff or lyrics. Some Noise artists disrupt this tendency; Pedestrian Deposit, and some of those his music has influenced, use an almost classical-music-like sensibility in composition that make two identical tracks obviously so, as well as any Power Electronics performer who has simply added noisy textures to what is, essentially, traditional songwriting. But for the most part, Noise musicians can produce pieces that all fall within a very narrow aesthetic area without their fans becoming disinterested in their lack of artistic development, or calling them frauds for making two tapes that sound the same.

Much of this, I would say, has to do with the strategy of producing releases in the Noise community. Most music comes out on cassette, or small runs of CD-r's or vinyl. An absolutely standard edition of homemade cassettes can be anywhere from fifty to one hundred copies. In the case of most artists, these will eventually sell out. Most of them do so, by music industry standards, very quickly. When they do sell out, rather than rerelease the same material, Noise artists usually record something new and release that. And more often than not, the new recording is not a significant departure from their last cassette. When this music is produced in such small editions, it would be unwise to hold artists to the same standards that song oriented musicians are: that each release be another step forward in the artist's canon. Catalogue Redundancy is necessary so that everyone who wants to follow an artist's evolution can do so. If each Kakerlak tape lead to the next in a radical progression of maturation, then most people would miss huge chunks of his development. Nobody who owns one or two of the Kakerlak tapes that I own should be expected to own all of the others. Fewer than one hundred copies exist of most of those. What Noise artists are allowed then are periods of artistic production. Most of the Kakerlak tapes I listened to belong in one creative period in Nolan Throop's music. They all sound kinda the same because they're supposed to, so that everybody who so desires has multiple chances at glimpsing this stage of his work. In the case of the bigger names, like Wolf Eyes, the major evolutionary steps are documented with pro-pressed CDs in huge editions that will, for all intents and purposes, stay in print forever. One of those stands in for ten or fifteen smaller cassette releases that all sound alike.

I am reminded of two quotes, both of which I will paraphrase (and surely misquote) because I cannot be bothered to look them up. About different albums by the legendary Improv band AMM, one reviewer wrote that they are as similar and dissimilar as trees. On the other hand, about Evan Parker's solo soprano saxophone albums, another reviewer wrote something like: "Parker's albums are like Cartier wristwatches. Sure, the brand new one is beautiful, but my old one still works perfectly."

Catalogue Redundancy is an unavoidable aspect of this music, as long as it's production follows the same structure it has since the beginning of Noise. It is a way of allowing the more casual fans, those who do not fetishize completism, to follow an artist whose cassettes disappear quickly. If you miss one cassette by your favorite Noise artist, you can pretty much count on the next one to fill you in on what you missed. Only the real big spenders and people who write reviews for crappy webzines have the privilege of discovering that all of an artist's tapes sound the same.