Michael Tau’s entertaining study of extreme music — a complicated adjective we’ll get to in a bit — starts with a survey of the two most obvious opposing sonic poles, noise and quiet. On one side is a genre called Harsh Noise Wall, which is defined by its inflexibility and its creators’ commitment to relentless, brain-cracking, staticky blares. As one practitioner, Vomir, puts it, the noise aesthetic is almost an anti-aesthetic: “No dynamics, no change, no development, no ideas.”
On the flip side, though, quiet music — soporific New Age drifts and mildly glitchy techno microgenres like lowercase—isn’t much different, at least philosophically. As far back as Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” through Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, and Aphex Twin’s ambient records, quiet music wasn’t meant to be much more than what Eno called a tint. Like noise, quiet music is defined by its relentlessness; it’s just stubborn and unconventional in a different way. Tau notes that Steve Roach, one of the better contemporary New Age artists, “uses drones explicitly as a tool to explore the hypnagogic period between wakefulness and sleep.” But John Cage’s infamous silent composition 4’33” was composed in part to make us recognize the discomfort we feel with long stretches of silence. Much like Harsh Noise Wall, quiet can either lull or upset you.
In the book’s conclusion, Tau notes that all sorts of microgenres tend to hit this kind of sonic vanishing point and begin to resemble one another: “At heart, any conceptual extreme becomes minimal: as you push further toward the edge, a concept becomes increasingly pure, and there is incrementally less room for variety.” Of course, it doesn’t immediately seem like there’s a lack of variety on the surface. Indeed, part of the appeal of Tau’s book is that it thoughtfully and thoroughly sorts through so much weirdness. Ultra-fast techno. Compositions meant to play for a thousand years, or for one second. (“I’ve made songs so short that you can’t even hear them,” one musician tells Tau, tongue not necessarily in cheek.) Found-sound records. Records made out of sandpaper or glue, or adulterated with body fluids. Albums made of chocolate or ice. Albums available only on microcassette. Albums full of silence.
As if to underscore the outsider-ish, weirdo sentiments driving this — and a certain unity in aesthetic — the musicians tend to favor weird, jokey names. (My favorite: The All-New Nissan Pathfinder With 0.9% APR Financing.) Often, though, the guys making this music — and the musicians Tau catalogs and interviews are almost exclusively male — tend to favor the gross-out. One Japanese noise act is called Gerogerigegege, which Tau notes is “onomatopoeia for vomiting and expelling diarrhea at the same time.” Grindcore or pornogrind can feature relatively mainstream metal acts like Napalm Death or acts whose names deal in all manner of horrors. One sidebar is titled “Several Elaborately Anatomical Goregrind Bands,” whose album covers are often collages of the more stomach-churning images in medical journals; Tau includes a couple of tamer examples, enough to suggest you’re not seeing the worst of it.
But Tau, a Canadian music writer and geriatric psychiatrist, isn’t trying to provoke. The book is soberly structured as a dutiful outline of various genres, diligently cataloged, ordered, and explicated. His prose’s chief flaw is a dispassionate passivity. (“Semen is a particular fascination of many extreme music scenesters.”) But that makes the material that might otherwise seem off-putting or marginal feel accessible, and part of a normal world of music-making.
In fact, the extremity Tau describes is often antiquated. Many of the noise artists Tau writes about contextualize themselves around mid-century art movements: “It is hard not to see this sort of ideological grandstanding through the lens of art movements like Dada, Fluxus, and the Situationists, which helped define their ethos through weighty manifestos,” he writes. Many artists fetishize outdated media like floppy discs, or operate under Oulipo-like constraints. One group, the Electric Family, produced a record exclusively via the Nintendo game Mario Paint, which included a rudimentary songwriting feature. As one of its creators said: “The idea was to create something innovative despite a restricted set of tools.” Similarly, a musician who records exclusively on microcassette likes that “it has a very specific-to-the-format lo-fi quality that sounds like nothing else.” And the musicians long to transport their work to the old-fashioned codex. One noise artist has released a 586-page book titled HNW “whose pages are just monochrome static.” Another book, Cementimental, is “300 pages of pixel-noisescapes.”
And what’s so “extreme” about that? It can be easy to see the “extremity” in a book of static, or a record without notes, or a song that drives past 1,000 BPM. But it can be harder to see the “extremity” of a picture disc, which is really just a novelty, or the various ambient music subgenres that just have a subcultural appeal. One of my favorite discoveries from the book is “mallsoft,” music that attempts to conjure the echoey synth textures of background music in an 80s shopping center. One mallsoft musician, Disconscious, describes his aesthetic as exploring the contrast between “the maze-like layout, bright lights and loud people” and “the design intention of being a soothing and relaxing environment.” Those are polarities to be sure, but in practice Disconscious does what all “normal” musicians do — create a mood, capture a feeling.
In some ways, “extreme” music isn’t so much all over the place as it is very narrow: The artists whom Tau features are often exclusively concerned with the bedroom, the bathroom, the emergency room, or the grave. All experiments, in all arts, are revolts against propriety, manners, and social norms; because the number of norms are finite, so are the ways extremity can push against it. It’s often just another pathway to gutter humor and gross-outs. The artists Tau has tracked down all have a similar interest in thumbing their nose at convention, which is their chief value — they’re mapping the social constraints we all live under.
The most obvious of those constraints is time — we all have limited amounts of it, and music puts a frame around it. So perhaps the most provocative extreme music of all is something like Longplayer, a composition that has been playing at multiple listening stations since 1999 and is not scheduled to complete until 2999. One of its organizers explains that Longplayer “helps to reduce the vertiginous fear of infinity and somehow sweetens the fearful thought of our own mortality, enabling us to live with hope.” Another set of polarities, then — the soothing sense that music has ordered the chaos of an entire millennium, and the melancholy that time is short, that we won’t ever be able to hear all the things we want to.
[Published by Feral House on October 4, 2022, 367 pages, $29.95 paperback.]