Ulka Pind Records and the “Why” of Noise Music
[I originally published this in 2022.] This young independent label out of Bhopal has been churning out some insanely cool sounds. Here are their top 3 recent releases and some accompanying thoughts on noise music.
Recommended if you like (RIYL): Merzbow, Metal Machine Music, the sound of glass breaking over and over again.
Hello! In past publications, I settled on a format of doing three quick reviews of new music that was thematically related in some way. Sometimes it was just a mood, sometimes it was an indie label spotlight or regional scene report. This time I’m going to highlight the experimental label Ulka Pind Records based in Bhopal, central India.
I feel obliged to give you a fair warning that if you don’t enjoy music that is intentionally ugly this is probably not your cup of tea. But if you are the sort of person who genuinely doesn’t know how to answer the question “what sort of music do you listen to” because an honest answer would sound too longwinded and esoteric for polite company, this might be the blog for you. Sometimes it’s useful to show the most extreme and ridiculous music you genuinely enjoy, and the source of the resulting incredulity for me has lately been this new album from (sona) formo, violent purity of data. It was immediately followed by another album, data of violent purity, which is also pretty great.
(sona) formo, also known as user-402891939 by his SoundCloud URL, is a Japanese electronic musician who describes himself as: “While being attracted to the chaotic state of noise music, he aims for the cool appearance of electronic music. He wants to create his own sound world by expressing sounds that range from calm to violent, or inclusiveness of calm and violent.” For the past decade or so, he has been experimenting with “digital harsh noise,” in particular through music programming languages like Max/MSP. It goes without saying that noise music made with computers can be designed to be far more chaotic with less effort — more intense feedback, jarring anti-melodic patterns, and rapid patterns of static — than with keyboards and synthesizers.
To his credit, (sona) formo exploits the advantages of the medium tremendously. If you enjoyed the harsh atonality of dial-up modem sounds, this is sort of like listening to that while being hacked apart with a chainsaw or force-fed hallucinogenic drugs by mad scientists. Rather than any perceptible harmony as such, there are layers of chaos competing for your attention: rapid-fire electronic bleeps and bloops, whirlwinds of radio static, and the former gradually turning into the latter in a disorienting zig-zag across stereo channels.
While VPOD aims to raise your blood pressure and maximize chaotic tension, DOVP condenses the waves of chaos into monotonous drones with minimal variation over time. It’s convenient to have a pair of digital noise albums as a morning coffee and evening nightcap.
Lastly, I’m excited to highlight one of my favorite noise bands ever, Torturing Nurse from Shanghai. After seemingly hundreds of releases on dozens of indie labels including their own, they seemingly never run out of energy or new musical ideas that ultimately all boil down to the same musical idea. The idea sounds sort of like this: EEEEEEEEzzkshhhhhhhhhh etc.
I mean, just look at this demented performance! It’s only a minute long, with one of the two members, but it’s intense and outlandish in all the right ways.
I’m pleased to report that Censor, released on the first day of 2022, is yet another banger from these weirdos. It’s some of their best stuff that sounds just like some of their other best stuff, while also totally different — jarring waves of distortion and microphone feedback, some guy intermittently screaming and yelling in the background, and unsettling layers of talk-radio samples with voices mumbling just outside the threshold of discernibility. What exactly is going on is a mystery that does not need solving.
Okay but wait, I don’t like this at all, Diego. Why do you? And why would anyone else care?
Well, fair enough. Just as Lapsang Souchong isn’t my preferred cup of tea and I probably wouldn’t care to read a blog post about it, I wouldn’t blame you for opting out of an experience you find just plain unpleasant. On the other hand, I could definitely imagine an interesting essay about the artisanal methods of smoking tea leaves with pinewood to make that disgusting drink (I once edited a short book about tea that the author ultimately decided not to publish). Similarly, you might consider with curiosity the idea that people spend their limited time and resources making what sounds or looks like total garbage to you.
While this line of inquiry has not yet helped me enjoy Lapsang Souchong, it was this sort of morbid curiosity that led me to eventually — and unexpectedly — enjoy the hell out of some freaky-deaky noise music.
I’ve discussed in other publications how music is made in liturgical or ritualistic settings, or deeply personal and idiosyncratic settings, and still move the individual listener in a subjective or “sublime” way. So art has been the starting point of many a philosophical analysis about the so-called is-ought puzzle, because we seem to experience things in an irreducibly private way yet are constantly compelled to make public commitments and contracts to participate in society.
Music is just one of many forms of that ongoing conversation, but it’s the coolest one for people like me with bad eyesight, which unfortunately for me has precluded a deeper engagement with other forms like painting or basketball. Anyway, a lot of music is like, oh no society really sucks and I hate it so I’m going to throw poop at the walls; while a lot of other music is like, hey our society is actually really cool and we love these beautiful walls!
Naturally, audiences don’t always like it when a performer is trying to make them experience unpleasant things, intentionally or not. There’s a lot of music that goes out of its way to say yes this is intentionally extremely unpleasant and people pay money to experience it. There’s a real opportunity cost in that expenditure — you could buy cheeseburgers or drugs with that money, or save it! — but in countries rich and poor alike, people do it anyway. If you think there’s no point to this crap, then that persistent behavior certainly is weird, isn’t it?
Noise music feels like one way of sincerely conceding that music might be trying to punch above its weight in the moral arc of the universe, while also optimistically playing to its strengths — i.e. improvisation can sound really cool and we can’t really explain why. When acoustic instruments became amplified, and guitars started becoming more electrified, musicians and engineers discovered a simple yet efficient way to derive infinite possibilities from the nuances of mechanical feedback loops between input and output. Suddenly you could play a chord, but then the amp could screech and hiss and do other stuff you hadn’t intended, and you could make that stuff trigger other other stuff and so on. Fast-forward to the late 70s to present and eventually you have “noise” where people skipped the first part entirely. It’s an improvised sound that doesn’t really do or say anything, but also goes out of its way to sound different and maybe even be disliked.
Sometimes this has no greater political or moral valence than sports team rivalries, but sometimes it tries to carry deeper messages about justice vs. injustice, love and hate, etc. How inconvenient that artists and their audiences can different or even opposite affective interpretations of the same physical inputs? After all, it’s just changes in air pressure hitting your eardrums. Who’s to say if it’s good or bad?
There’s an individual psychological question — why do people voluntarily experiment with leisure activities that are unpleasant or frowned upon in their community? — paired with a political philosophy question — do certain practices distribute power and resources among in-groups and out-groups better than others? I would venture further to suggest that we are intuitively answering these questions when we engage with products of media, current events, and institutions — likely relying on educated guesswork and rules of thumb that, in hindsight, might look something like your general vibe or aesthetic. Does that sound about right?
I don’t know, maybe reviewing annoying music I enjoy will lead someone else to also enjoy it, and having a noisier vibe will make them happier than otherwise. If so, the effort will have been worth it. How’s that for effective altruism?
