Since you’re a Stylus reader, you’re between the ages of 18 and 30, and hate life. You grew up with your parents telling you how great the Stones were—or if you were lucky, the Stooges or the MC5—and how proud they were when their parents would bang on their closed bedroom doors demanding that they turn that noise down! That noise, of course, being Satisfaction. Ah, the innocence of youth! The pique! The esprit de coeur! If only they really knew what noise was.

Cluster - Track One

As with most brutally efficient things, noise as we know and wear latex in public to it basically begins in Germany as a loose adjunct of the Krautrock phenomenon. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, the appropriately-named Dieter Moebius, and Conrad Schnitzler, then a leading light in Berlin’s underground music scene, formed Kluster in the late 60’s. By the time of this album, Schnitzler bounced off to presumably druggier pastures, the boys learned the English spelling of their name, and Reodelius and Moebius fashioned this scraping, careering space music all by their lonesomes. The result is closer to the industrial drone of early Einstürzende Neubaten than the noise we know and whip each other to today—more space-trip than temper tantrum—but then, a few minutes in, they turn on what sounds like a turbine engine and start sending metal shards through it. Ah, that’s the stuff. Then they made the sheeny synth-pop classic Zuckerzeit, which is a fantastic record, but irrelevant here.

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Whitehouse - Prosexist

Power Electronics, he called it. Come Organisation is his personal little label. And his name is William Bennett—not that William Bennett, unfortunately, but we’ll take what we can get. This one’s from England, and known primarily for bludgeoning audiences and home-based psychopaths into submission for going on 25 years now. There are lyrics this time, only they’re basically unintelligible (Steve Albini would start removing the distortion from the vox in the late ’80’s), but apparently they revolve around such timely, hot-button issues as sexual predation and sexual violence. On this one, the best of his first 10 releases from the first three years of the nom de guerre’s use, you might find something that approaches melody in the pitch-shifted squeals, and something else, perhaps an irreverence masking itself as malevolence. You know, if you’re inclined.

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Incapacitants - Necklacing

Incapacitants began life in the early ’80’s as the solo noise project of erstwhile bank manager Toshiji Mikawa, eventually adding Fumio Kosakai—erstwhile government bureaucrat—and both flail about on electronics, and apparently voice. No, you can’t tell. Instead, they approach their walls of noise like endurance tests, stretching out the screeches and wails in a manner akin to La Monte Young, only minus any semblance at all of classical structure. Incapacitants are particularly notable, however, for a decidedly tasteful search for beauty in the racket (especially noticeable on longer-form works like The Curse of Ceausescu), which either presents itself through layered textures and vast reserves of discipline, or perhaps through hypnosis. Like it matters.

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Merzbow - Yellow Hyper Balls

Ah, Masami Akita. Deafening blasts from enormous amp-stacks. Faked snuff-films. Ball-gags as far as the eye can see. Fist-fucking, people. Akita’s ritualized-fetish-as-shock-tactic is well-documented—the heights of obscenity being, of course, the 50-CD Merzbox–but since his music has never made me want to skull-fuck a cat, I can’t speak to any of that critically. Musically, however, Akita is about as extreme and borderline-un-musical as it gets. This arcehtypal bit of pre-millennial Merzbowery (post-millennium, he’s actually started to make music, with surprisingly un-tragic results) brings his high-pitched squeals and ADD-rattled anti-structures—you know, just batting the gimp around a little more—to play. Sitting through any given bit of Merzbow can admittedly be a chore, to put it feather-touch lightly, but worth it for moments like here, where for a brief moment, everything drops out but a bit of squeal on the left and a sucking void of bass on the right, and it’s as skull-rattling at its quietest as it is at its loudest.

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Wolf Eyes - Stabbed In the Face

And thus we’re brought to Michigan’s favorite booger-eating noise pin-ups. Aaron Dilloway, John Olsen, and Natalie Young released this album last year with the backing of the notoriously effective Sub Pop marketing machine, picking this track as the single, and it’s likely as close to pop as noise can get while still retaining its outsider appeal and innate ability to piss off large swaths of people at once. While Dilloway screams about whatever—something about blood, I think—everyone drops a simple three-beat squelch rhythm and skittering squeaks, sputters, and scrapes, and somehow manage to form a song-like structure that’s equal parts menacing and deliriously funny. You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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