The deafening noise blasting from the warehouse speakers continued as the plainclothes officers filtered through the crowd. They had blown by the man paid to be the show’s security guard, paying him no mind when he asked for the admission charge. It was a balmy night in June on South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, Officer Alex Archaleta recalled.
It sounded like pure noise
He approached several attendants. “Who’s in charge here?” he would try to ask, but no one could hear him and no one knew anyway. The “music” was overpowering, horrendous, Archaleta would later recall. “It sounded like pure noise.”
Backup arrived as uniformed officers from LAPD’s Vice Divsion — which handles illegal venues alongside their usual duties confronting drug dealing and prostitution — entered through the side door. They announced themselves loudly. This gathering had no permits associated with it, and the building had not been inspected for fire safety standards.
The music stopped, the lights came on, and at once the crowd knew the show was over. As the room emptied, officers were still at a loss who to cite as the real owner of the venue. They ultimately handed their citation to the “DJ” — or whatever you call the person making that awful noise. The real owner of the venue had escaped this time.
So what was the awful sound that Officer Archaleta heard?
"Like children undressing animals"
Austin-based Johnathan Cash, performing as "Breakdancing Ronald Reagan," wails on a power grinder. (Photo Credit: JA Clo)
Take any song by Toby Keith or ABBA or, why not— the Beatles. Turn the amps up to maximum overdrive. Switch out Ringo’s drumset for a chainsaw sample set. Replace John Lennon’s guitar with explosive static. Plug the mixer into itself and let the feedback overpower everything else. Make it as loud as a jetliner and as beautiful as radio static. Forget about the melody and the rhythm, and really just forget about the Beatles or whoever, because this isn’t even music.
This is Noise, a loud and violently experimental countercultural music scene.
It’s a sound with the power to crack teeth — literally — as one Hollywood-based Noise artist claims happened at a San Francisco venue in 2011. “I was rubbing two amplified toy shovels against an amplified suitcase,” GX Jupitter-Larsen wrote in an email. “During this performance, the noise cracked the filling in a woman’s tooth. Julia was her name and she had to have an emergency root canal the next day. She said it was ‘worth it’.”
Jupitter-Larsen said it is “common” in many of the louder shows for “people and things in the audience, if not the whole building, to vibrate due to the frequencies involved.”
I heard the story first from a man named Daniel Munoz, likely the world’s only ethnographic expert on Noise music. Munoz spent years interviewing Noise artists for a hefty dissertation at UC Santa Cruz, and shared some of his insights with me at a hip coffee shop in West Hollywood.
Noise is about “pure sound worship,” Munoz explains, paraphrasing how one artist defined it to him. At its core, this is a sound that celebrates spontaneity and rejects repetition, which means not only rhythm, but notes or pitches too — which are really repetitions measured on the level of hertz.
Munoz’s interviews are all meticulously transcribed in a 1,600-page, extra-sized binder he pulls from his bag, from which a Nietzsche book also peeks out. He flips through the enormous binder with a bony hand painted with black nails. The interviews range from modern Noise artists like Jupitter-Larsen to early pioneers like the Los Angeles Free Music Society, a collective of avant-garde rockers and classical musicians in the 1970s who sought to disavow their musical training and embrace a “naive” approach. “We were children undressing animals,” one member told Munoz.
Across the country, similar efforts were bubbling up, reaching a boiling point in the late 80’s as the modern sound of Noise began to crystallize. It tied together the harshest fringes of punk, industrial electronics, and academic art music.
It appeals to those always seeking sounds that are louder, harsher, noisier, Munoz explains. “They want to hear something they’ve never heard before,” he says, and “there’s nothing noiser than Noise.”
The popularity of Noise is difficult to measure. It boasts a presence in the underground of nearly every major U.S. city — Cleveland’s scene is known for its subgenre of “Harsh Noise Wall,” Austin’s for its use of synthesizers. Famous listeners of Noise include respected musicians like Daveed Diggs, whose performance in the musical Hamilton won an Emmy.
Hear the Noise
The live performance is the focal point of Noise music. Many musicians say they much prefer listeners to see their live sets, rather than listen to recording after the fact. But while the full experience is diluted in recordings, this has not stopped artists like Los Angele's GX Jupitter-Larsen and Ohio's Aaron Dilloway from releasing a prolific amount of recordings. Both have had careers spanning decades.
Breaking through to the mainstream
A flyer for the International Noise Conference, which in 2018 gathered acts from across the country to a DIY venue called the Handbag Factory in Los Angeles.
Watching a Noise performance is mesmerizing and overwhelming. Across the border in Tijuana, the “Borderland Noise Festival” put several Noise and experimental artists back to back. In one act, I saw a single drummer pound over the sound of soaring static. A second man, also dressed in all black, kneeled beside a mixboard full of knobs. He carefully turned them, giving only the lightest impression that some influence was being directed over the chaos.
The festival took place in a dusty coliseum-looking structure. Cracks in the walls and the lack of electricity, except for the stage area, gave the impression of Roman ruins that had been occupied by squatters.
It is the typical kind of habitat for Noise. These are so-called DIY venues, short for “do-it-yourself.” The name is less of a formal category and more of an ethos. Most of the organizing is done on a volunteer basis. Professional help, by way of contractors and formal inspectors, is avoided. That would be far too expensive and cumbersome.
Peter Kalisch, a Los Angeles artist, performed in one of the festival’s late night sets. His sound roared out of the amplifiers, pulsating a slowly drifting, synthetic drone sound. DIY venues more often “get” what he’s trying to do, Kalisch says. “They have a better feel for it . Some places just don’t get the sound, and that’s a bitch.”
Perhaps an unstated reason many Noise artists favor DIY venues is they are simply more punk— which is to say, transgressive and anti-authority. This comes from its lineage out of the counterculture of the late 70s and 80s. But whereas lighter shade of punk can be heard in some trendier grocery stores today, its uncertain whether some would believe this could ever happen with Noise.
Noise has gotten more popular with the internet, says Adrian Diemond, the owner of Obfuscated Records, one of the countless small independent labels that helps distribute Noise.
Los Angeles-based Peter Kalisch says he incorporates more performance art in his Noise shows. The practice blends music into extreme theatre. (Photo credit: Genevieve Munroe)
He says that when he first started experimenting with harsh industrial music, he would only share it with close friends and exchanges with other artists. “These days you can get in touch with people around the globe, even in remote places,” he says. The result is a proliferation of Noise that spans the breadth of the internet. But whether the market for Noise is deep enough to solicit the attention of mainstream, big name labels is another question. Diemond says he could never imagine Noise becoming mainstream.
The biggest breakthrough for modern Noise may be the New York-based Pharmakon, with 12,200 monthly listeners on Spotify. By comparison, Post Malone, one of the top artists today, is just shy of 61 million.
But Noise can break out of the basement to reach a larger audience in other ways. And that is through influence on more mainstream sound. Many rock, rap and electronic acts have begun to incorporate the shrill tones and harsh static of Noise music into their sound. Clipping, a Los Angeles hip hop act with nearly 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, seamlessly blends the sounds of “light” Noise into the background of rapping. Pop star St. Vincent’s 2017 album MASSEDUCTION, which peaked at No. #10 in the Billboard 200, incorporates segments of Noise at the album’s most dramatic points.
Below is a sample of Clipping, from the intro track of their debut album "CLPPING." The album heavily borrows from Noise music, and was released in 2014 by Sub Pop, a major record label.
A sound as experimental and novel as Noise was always bound to end up on the airwaves in some form or another, even if not in the form its purest artists practice.
And even DIY venues might be going the same route. Months after the summertime raid called in by Officer Archaleta, the venue’s real owner, Samer Khouja, says there’s a silver lining. For years, he’s run the warehouse venue, which he preferred not to be specifically named, as an unofficial gathering place for experimental musicians. Downstairs orm the venue, he also operates a professional sound studio, where — ironically enough — he produces pop music.
The summer’s citation — which he is set to appeal in court this month — has been an impetus for him to organize the venue and the studio more professionally and legitimately, he says. He’s in the process of registering the venue as a non-profit.
