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.