EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 11 - Harsh Noise Wall
Genre of the Day - Harsh Noise Wall
Album of the Day - >(decrescendo) Final Chapter デクレッシェンド 最終章 by The Gerogerigegege (2022)
September 11, 2024
Today’s genre suggests the inevitability of encountering the darker emotional realities that cyclically confront us. Harsh noise wall has occasionally popped up as a prospective genre of the day throughout this project (as in, it comes up first when I select a random genre), but I’ve skipped on to the next for fear of simply being overwhelmed. In the words of Maya Angelou: “I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.” But the sooner we tackle certain sources of darkness, we can appreciate levity more. So, today, I decided that it was time to face the music—that is, if your scope of the word music is as generous as RateYourMusic’s—and let the harsh noise wall overtake me.
That might be a painfully emo way to start this column, but I feel the intensity is justified given the sheer extremity of today’s genre’s interpretation of sound. Black MIDI is perhaps as far as we’ve seen the envelope pushed, though it plays more with the visual boundaries of digital audio workstation capabilities than simply sound. The question of what defines music once again returns to a central position in trying to wrap our heads around harsh noise wall. Is music defined by the movement of sound? Is it defined by the presence of harmony and/or melody? Is the mere presence of sound music? A loose definition drawn from musicology is that music is simply organized sound. Harsh noise wall does organize sound, though its conception of a sonic journey is akin to sending the next Apollo expedition straight to the sun.
One wonders if end-stage capitalism has brought about the desire for industrial musicians to illustrate doom through harsh noise. Would, say, the Victorians have ever considered making this music, even if given the capability? It goes against modernist notions of idealism and progress; it resonates perfectly with post-modernist takedowns of the rational. The genre is ultimately informed by decades of 20th-century experimentation in recording intense feedback. Harsh noise wall grew out of industrial music scenes in the ‘90s. The form envisioned more ambitious constructs with the concept of walls: vast, unflinching, lengthy and noisy compositions with little sense of dynamics or movements. It truly puts the concrete in musique concrète. It completely strips back all symbolic meaning from music—one harshnoisewaller, Vomir, sardonically (perhaps?) described it as having "no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse." Whatever you think of that statement, I do feel harsh noise wall is a powerful experiment in music. It elicits questions about what art’s purpose is, what sound will be left if humanity destroys itself, and just how sonically enveloping music should be—harsh noise wall aims for complete unity between listener and sound, only for the small price of your eardrums.
Today’s hour-and-a-half album by a Japanese HNW outfit plays with the dichotomy of ambience and noise. The first track, a breezy 48 minutes, ensconces the listener in a fog of cicada field recordings—cars quietly rush by occasionally in the background. A waiting-room, chimy piano melody echoes through the background. Over that period, the soft frequencies in the background gradually and subtly tighten before going wholly silent. The album plays out like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—the silence is explosively shattered by mechanical choirs of screaming noise. The second phase is dark, dissonant, unreasonable and unrepentant. It’s an impressively ambitious experiment as much as it’s a test of one’s patience for postmodernist art, but its extremities and dread intertwined with the ability to push creative capacities so far are nonetheless thought-provoking.