Hanatarash live, still from a bootleg recording

How A Bulldozer Became A Musical Instrument

If you were to give some god-like artificial intelligence out of an Asimov story the task of creating the ultimate noise music band, after processing every single noise musician to ever exist it’d produce a perfect copy of Hanatarash, a Japanese noise duo formed in 1984. Things their frontman Yamatsuka Eye did on stage:

• Frequently brought random pieces of machinery on stage
• Destroyed said machinery, and threw the pieces at the audience
• Cut a dead cat in two with a machete
• Threw the aforementioned cat’s halves at the audience
• Tied a circular saw to his back and almost cut off his own leg with it
• Drove a bulldozer through the walls of the venue, chased the crowd with it, crashed it, and had to be physically restrained from setting the gasoline-covered wreck on fire with a molotov cocktail.

The last event in particular is the one which concerns us. Why would someone do something like that? They got only negative press, had to pay ¥600,000 (~$9,000 USD) in repairs and were banned from performing in any Tokyo clubs for over a decade.

Photo by Gin Satoh

To answer this question we need to understand noise music. What is noise music? The futurist Luigi Russolo first used this term in 1910, in a manifest called “The Art Of Noises” (translation mine):

Today, music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-music. This evolution of music is parallel to the multiplication of machines[…]. Machines have created today such variety and competition of noises that the pure sound, in its scarcity and monotony, no longer sparks any emotion.

Luigi Russolo in his lab, with the instruments he invented and called “intonarumori (literally “noisemakers”), from Art Of Noise

Russolo saw noise music as the natural consequence of the proliferation of machines, which introduce noise to our ears, our minds, our culture and thus our music. That is true in a literal sense: noise music as we know it wouldn’t really exist without elaborate enough machines (computers, synthesizers, guitars, etc) to make it. But psychologically, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Isn’t Hanatarash doing the same thing as a caveman banging rocks together, except with industrial grade construction equipment and gasoline? Was the impulse to make music with a backhoe bulldozer a consequence of having access to the instrument, or was the instrument just a casualty on Yamatsuka Eye’s path towards his version of musical Nirvana? We know what was in his hands. But what in his mind?

Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975) is perhaps the first (in)famous noise record, as far as more mainstream audiences might be concerned. It’s 64 minutes and 11 seconds of pure feedback. Lou placed a guitar in front of the amplifier, strummed it here and there, for the most part let it play itself. It sold 100k copies. What matters here is noise music as popular music. Music outside of the halls of academia or the sheets of a few esoteric composers. Metal Machine Music was the first entry into the pantheon of noise music as a scene rather than a genre. For Russolo it was a way to interact with machines; for Reed it’s also a way to interact with the public. A space for shared self-expression, not just a set of sounds with shared characteristics.

Noise was, for the 80s japanese music scene and for Hanatarash, a way of being, not just a way of playing music. Here’s a quote from Hiroshige Jojo of Hijokaidan, possibly the most influential band from that scene, as reported in Dave Novak’s Japanoise, the Bible of japanese noise music:

“I loved the moment when Jimi Hendrix smashed the guitar — but the rest of his music is so normal.”

Japanoise contains a lot of personal anecdotes about how people from the scene relate to noise music. Mikawa Toshiji and Kosakai Fumio from the band Incapacitants, by day ordinary bank clerks, drown on stage under a cacophony of noise, blanketing out the mundanity of daily life. The music writer Murasaki Hyakurô likes it because he can offset the noises of his daily job at a flour mill with a more personal, aestheticized form of it (somewhere Russolo smiles). And why did Yamatsuka Eye of Hanatarash drive a bulldozer through the wall?

Let’s ask him.

“We got on this thing and rode it-bang!-through the doors of the hall. It’ll spin a full 360 degrees, so we were spinning and driving through the audience, chasing them around, when suddenly there was this wall we spun into and opened a rather large hole in. The wind came blowing in. […] The place was all concrete walls and no windows. We smashed everything. It’s amazing, really, how little sound comes out of something you’re smashing with all your might.”

It was all about the sound. I don’t really have a great unifying theory of noise music. I don’t think anyone does. It is, by itself, such a broad and disparate term, and the scene itself allows so many different kinds of sounds, that it’s really about what it means to you rather than what it means in general. Hanatarash had a part to play in this discordant, weird, beautiful symphony. They played it with a bulldozer.

Thank you for reading, I’m Joe. Follow me here and on twitter for stuff about tech, writing, music, game development, whatever I find interesting and worth sharing.