It may just be coincidental that Animal Collective released both Animal Crack Box and Merriweather Post Pavilion in the final year of the 00s. But the two releases-- one a long-awaited mix of early experimental work, the other a massive crossover success-- frame the band's progress pretty neatly. Over the course of the decade, a group that started off noisy and challenging grew into one of indie rock's most well-known and key acts, opening their sound to audiences who became increasingly more receptive to "difficult" music.
Animal Collective weren't the only noisy act to take that path this decade. The road from ACB to MPP is also emblematic of how noise music-- underground sounds that value volume and dissonance over structure or melody-- evolved in the 00s. It grew from disconnected, homegrown scenes to something more recognized and more diverse, more sophisticated and more direct, more ambitious and more reverent, and more open to new sounds, new approaches, and new venues. Thanks to forward-thinking labels and festivals, the umbrella of what could be called "noise" widened considerably. Many followers now think of it as not just harsh sonic assaults, but also abstract improvisation, ecstatic free jazz, lo-fi pop, outsider avant-rock, minimalist drone, power electronics, and more.
You can posit many reasons for this growth-- the increase in local scenes working cheaply and communally; the Internet helping them grow and connect quickly; indie rock's mainstream drift driving more adventurous fans to edgier music; noise-leaning bands of the 90s-- from the Flaming Lips to Sonic Youth-- encouraging people to seek new sounds. But whatever made it happen, few would deny that noise has come a long way since the turn of the century.
In fact, as the 2000s began, noise and the rest of the experimental underground were floundering a bit. Many interesting acts of the 90s-- Whitehouse, the Dead C, Sun City Girls, the Japanese throng headed by Merzbow, Boredoms, and Keiji Haino-- were still at it, but their activity became sparser and less widespread. And the possibility of overground exposure hinted at previously-- such as Siltbreeze's distribution deal with Matador, or Boredoms signing to Warner Brothers-- was waning.
In addition, computers became an obstacle. There was much talk in the 90s about how computer-based music was the future, and many noise artists took advantage of the possibilities. But noise gets most of its vitality from performance-- take the Sun City Girls' costumed carnivals, Harry Pussy's screaming freakouts, or the art-prank spectacle of the Boredoms' Eye Yamatsuka driving a bulldozer into a club as the audience ran for cover. Computers threatened to sap that energy, as sitting on stage and staring at a laptop became commonplace. At the 2000 Transmissions Festival, a burgeoning showcase for experimental music, I sat through six artists in a row who barely moved behind their glowing screens. The practice got rote so quickly that complaints were rampant. Even folk legend John Fahey spent part of his Transmissions set making fun of laptop jockeys, mock-marveling at how his loop pedals could make music without any visible effort.
Perhaps as a reaction to those staid presentations, new noise scenes emerged that revitalized the spectacle of performance. The most important came from two surprising locales, Rhode Island and Michigan. In both places, bands collaborated, shared bills, ran labels, and generally avoided self-destructive infighting. They were filled with life-long music freaks for whom the Internet offered new potential for creative discourse and the kind of simple networking that gets bands playing in each other's basements and talking up each other's music. And both scenes had been bubbling since the mid-90s. So when a void needed to be filled in the 00s, they were up to the task.
In Providence, R.I., an arty community grew up around the Rhode Island School of Design and the performance space Fort Thunder. It produced one of the most important noise labels of the decade, Load Records, and two of the most significant bands, Black Dice and Lightning Bolt. All three trafficked in a kind of art school version of 90's scum rock, mixing in overloaded effects, damaged electronics, and gimmicks like masks and in-mouth mics. (Load also highlighted the darker side to Providence noise, embodied in bands such as Kites, White Mice, and Landed.)
Ultimately, it was Lightning Bolt's amazing live shows that took the Providence scene farthest. Setting up on club floors rather than stages, and starting mere seconds after the previous band, the duo of Brian Gibson and Brian Chippendale flailed away while engulfed by thrashing crowds. Albums such as 2003's Wonderful Rainbow were mini-masterpieces of churning energy, but it was their tour-doc DVD The Power of Salad that best displayed their remarkable effect on crowds. These were audiences who presumably had never bounced around to noise, which even at its most sensational had attracted mostly chin-scratchers. It all prompted declarations that Lightning Bolt had revitalized DIY punk of the 80s-- that "hardcore was back." But perhaps more accurately, Lighting Bolt made noise punk again.
The same could be said of the Michigan scene centered on homegrown labels American Tapes and Hanson Records. In 2001, the two jointly released Dread, the first record by Ann Arbor's Wolf Eyes. That debut was somewhat sparse, but soon the trio of Nate Young, John Olson, and Aaron Dilloway would have as many fists pumping and heads pounding as Lighting Bolt did. "When we started playing we wanted to make music that people would have fun to," Dilloway told The Wire. Olson agreed: "We're trying to bring the good times to the noise, totally. There's a really good vibe going on right now, where it's a bunch of kids who want to have fun but want to listen to interesting music."
Yet Wolf Eyes never sounded pleasant. Even as the band signed to Sub Pop, opened for Sonic Youth, and nabbed a spot on an ill-fated Lollapalooza tour-- taking them closer to the mainstream than even the more accessible Lightning Bolt-- their music remained bracing and pure. In fact, their two Sub Pop albums-- 2004's Burned Mind and 2006's Human Animal-- are among their most difficult. Stirring a stew of influences-- the dirge of Swans, the clang of Einstürzende Neubauten, even the dark hardcore of the Misfits-- the band lurched from blasted beat to dense feedback.
But it was Wolf Eyes' cage-match live act that got their crowds so pumped. They threw themselves into the kind of noise that their predecessors stood glumly behind, as they banged on homemade instruments, huge gongs, and even weaponry. (Olson did the Boredoms' Eye one better by swinging a mace, which at one show accidentally gouged him and produced a cascade of blood.) It got to the point where Wolf Eyes shows were likened to underground frat parties, and certainly the audience enthusiasm could spill over into lunkhead land. But the fact that people became so viscerally involved was testament to how Wolf Eyes had made noise so engaging.
The Midwest scene that spawned Wolf Eyes multiplied quickly. There was Hair Police, a trio who looked like a rock band but sounded like a broken radio in a blender (and whose Mike Connelly would eventually replace Dilloway in Wolf Eyes); Burning Star Core, featuring the drones of violinist and vocalist C. Spencer Yeh; Sick Llama, equally capable of minimalist ambience and exploding blasts; 16 Bitch Pile-Up, a darkly raucous female collective who eventually landed in the Bay Area; Hive Mind, whose Greh Holger churned out dense electric fields and ran the vital Chondritic Sound label; and most recently Emeralds, blasting out kraut-style clouds in Cleveland.
Those acts' camaraderie is evident in their sonic similarities and frequent collaborations, but neither the Michigan nor Providence scenes were insular. All these groups got out of town and played shows, rather than just spewing out CD-Rs from their basements and bedrooms. This led to a new global scene built partially via the Internet, but mostly by good old-fashioned touring.
As early as 2003, Olson invited Black Dice to trek to Ann Arbor. Within hours of their arrival, the groups decided to collaborate on one of the best noise records of the decade, Wolf Eyes and Black Dice. Similar intersections would proliferate throughout the 00s, connecting groups like the Skaters, Yellow Swans, and Axolotl in San Francisco, to John Wiese, Robedoor, and the Cherry Point in L.A., to Nautical Almanac and WZT Hearts in Baltimore, to Magik Markers, Bill Nace, and Chris Corsano in Western Massachusetts. Such cross-pollinations made for a convivial scene, especially remarkable given the music's reputation for aggression and confrontation. Global noise became a local phenomenon, a web of scenes equally devoted to each other and the world around them.
Next> New Noise in New York and Noise's Old Guard
This web's ultimate nexus turned out to be the place in America where things often congeal, New York City. Carlos Giffoni's No Fun Fest was the biggest catalyst, but before it debuted in 2004, New York's noise underground had already begun a bold comeback. The scene was as wide-ranging as the city, and impossible to sum up in generalizations. Among its vital participants were Black Dice (who moved to Brooklyn at the start of the decade), Animal Collective, and Gang Gang Dance, all of whom blended tribalism, cracked electronics, outsider folk, and the artiness of noise-forefathers the Residents. Black Dice first mixed in dreamy psych, then later a kitchen-sink big beat. Animal Collective steered toward electronic rhythm and vocal melody, with Panda Bear re-imagining the Beach Boys as glitch-hounds, while Gang Gang Dance morphed their tribal rhythms into skewed synth-disco.
Elsewhere in New York, another abstract take on electronics came from Excepter, formed by ex-No Neck Blues Band member John Fell Ryan. He drooled slow-burn vocals over his bandmates' bleeping synths and overlapping drum machines. Sightings played high-volume rock songs that were less lo-fi than no-fi, extending the narcissistic din of no wave into more extreme sonic territory. Kneeling around a gaggle of effects pedals, Double Leopards forged massive drones that felt as eternal as the earth. Later in the decade, members Mike Bernstein and Maya Miller brought their noise sensibility to organ-driven garage rock as part of Religious Knives.
As Prurient, Dominick Fernow channeled obsessions with industrial and metal into harsh noise. Starting each set with his back to the audience, Fernow created a swarming din with pedals, then howled like a heavy metal hero in front of a packed stadium. And Mouthus-- to me the best noise band of the 00s-- featured Nate Nelson banging on a hybrid of acoustic and electronic drums pumped through a mixer, while Brian Sullivan channeled clanging guitar and cavernous vocals through overdriven pedals and amps. The result was a sludgy but detailed clatter, like abstract art mixed with a splatter film.
Almost all of the above New York artists participated in what became a global noise convention, Carlos Giffoni's annual No Fun Fest. Himself a noise pioneer as a solo artist and with his group Monotract, Giffoni started the annual three-day festival on the hunch that he could attract hundreds of fans to day-long onslaughts of noise. It helped that members of Sonic Youth were supporters from the start, and all participated in the first installment (Thurston Moore even gave the Fest its name, inspired by the title of a Stooges song). But even as it moved from Williamsburg to Red Hook to Manhattan and back, the Fest remained a success.
Packing a noise festival would be impressive enough, but Giffoni did a lot more. His choice of participants galvanized the scene, re-defining the modern underground to include all strains of experimental music. (And not just American artists, but also Russian, Japanese, German, Austrian, and so on). Though widely varied in style, these groups shared many common goals-- a constant search for new sounds, a willingness to explore extremes, an acceptance of conflicting approaches-- were clear. Just glance at the lineups from the five installments of the Fest, and you get a perfect nutshell of the 00s noise scene.
No Fun Fest also increased the communal nature of global noise, providing a way for artists who communicated from afar to collaborate in person. In the process, the fest forged partnerships between Mouthus and Axolotl, Giffoni and British noise veteran Dylan Nyoukis, and Sightings and Tom Smith of Miami noise legends To Live and Shave in L.A.
Note the words "veteran" and "legends" above. Perhaps the biggest achievement of No Fun Fest is how it bridged the past and future of noise. Giffoni involved forefathers like free-noise trio Borbetomagus, Japanese master Merzbow, and kraut-space pioneers Cluster. And even without No Fun Fest, one of the big stories in 00s noise is how many veteran bands continued strong.
New York's No Neck Blues Band remained a vital collective unit, forging a signature sound from open improvisation. Portland's Smegma maintained their indefinable blend of noise and weirdness, pushing Wolf Eyes to make one of their best releases of the decade in collaboration. And the guitar assault of England's Skullflower was more destructive than ever.
Of course, when it comes to the old guard, there's an elephant in every noise room-- Sonic Youth. If anything was a constant between 90s and 00s noise, it was their status as overlords of the underground. Where last decade Sonic Youth invited local noise groups to open their sold-out shows, and Thurston Moore gave a solo album to Corpus Hermeticum (the label of the Dead C's Bruce Russell), in the 00s Moore did the same for Giffoni's No Fun label, and released records by subterranean stalwarts like Richard Ramirez and Emil Beaulieau.
More importantly, Sonic Youth continued to make challenging experimental music of their own, be it through conceptual releases on their SYR label or their many collaborations and side projects. Moore's innumerable partnerships led to his most intriguing project of the decade, Original Silence, an underground supergroup including Jim O'Rourke, Terrie Ex of the Ex, and horn-blaster Mats Gustaffson. Their two albums on Smalltown Superjazz melded swinging rock riffs with top-level free improv.
Just as intriguing was another Sonic Youth offshoot, Lee Ranaldo's Text of Light. In tandem with guitarist Alan Licht, turntabilist DJ Olive, and many others, Ranaldo found another new way to perform noise-- as improvised soundtracks to classic experimental films. The band didn't score the movies so much as collaborate with them, responding to the visual rhythms and textures with equally dense sonic tapestries. Along the way, they managed to both engage and disturb, stirring up controversy among silent-film purists, and questioning the relationship between sound and image.
Next> The Survival of Improv and the Lo-Fi Revival
Text of Light were less noise than improv, more akin to experimental jazz than brutal dissonance. But the two scenes-- noise and improv-- overlapped in the 00s. One major player in that crossover was drummer Chris Corsano, equally comfortable churning out free-jazz with saxophonist Paul Flaherty or dropping bombs with Giffoni's Death Unit. He even drummed for Björk, making him perhaps the first noise musician ever to grace the stage of "Saturday Night Live". Odd, then, that his most stunning creation was his first solo album, the searching and playful The Young Cricketer.
Corsano was also part of a small sect of percussionists who used minimalism and even silence in improvised noise. Tim Barnes, Jeph Jerman, Sean Meehan, and others treated drums more as objects than instruments, playing them with odd implements like violin bows and tuning forks. As Corsano put it to Perfect Sound Forever, "A cymbal is simultaneously both a cymbal and a piece of metal. And in a pinch, it's a hat, or a Frisbee, or an umbrella. It's all how you look at it."
Meehan extended these object-based concepts into packaging. The two CDs in his 2005 release Sectors (For Constant) were sealed inside large sheets of construction paper, accessible only by tearing the cover apart. On the discs themselves, using only cymbals and snare drum, Meehan mixed ringing drones and hypnotic timbres with long stretches of silence. Hearing it all required patience, but no one could argue that Meehan and his cohorts weren't onto something new.
At the other end of the sonic spectrum, a new movement of underground groups attacked improv with rock energy. Zs, Owl Sounds, Hat City Intuitive, and Graveyards (which included Wolf Eyes' John Olson) were just a few of the groups churning out raucous sounds on labels like Color Sounds, Evolving Ear, and Tiger Asylum. The most promising of these groups were Talibam!, frenetic improvisers for whom no style-- synth-punk, prog-rock, gutter-jazz-- was out of bounds, and Peeesseye, an unclassifiable outfit whose subterranean releases deserve wider exposure.
Elsewhere in improv, pockets of creativity abounded. In the Midwest, Kevin Drumm applied the patience and detail of improv to raging, metal-influenced noise. In Norway, Supersilent persisted with deep electro-acoustic textures. In Italy, young multi-instrumentalist Valerio Cosi brought psych and electronics to his eager free jazz. And in the most mind-blowing development of the decade, former recluse Jandek became a touring machine, playing with a who's who of experimental music, from Corsano to Richard Youngs to C. Spencer Yeh, and members of Charlambides, No-Neck Blues Band, Magik Markers, even the Mountain Goats.
Finally, in New York, experimental improv first thrived at Lower East Side venue Tonic, then later at John Zorn's performance space the Stone. Tonic's mid-decade demise was a blow, but it's been countered by recent news that Issue Project Room-- previously occupying an old oil silo in the far-flung reaches of the Gowanus canal-- has been given a new, subsidized home in downtown Brooklyn.
Of the myriad performers at these New York locales, two stood out. Master guitarist Loren Connors continued his legacy of uncompromising exploration. His haunting, utterly unique guitar style, heard best on 2006's ambitious Sails and 2007's moving Hymn of the North Star, ranks him as an avant-garde legend on the level of John Fahey, Derek Bailey, and few others. And cellist Okkyung Lee, with a carefully-arranged free jazz album on Zorn's Tzadik label and a scorching solo effort on Moore's Ecstatic Peace!, planted a flag for the future of boundless improv.
Meanwhile, back aboveground, a different strain of noise poked into the mainstream of indie rock in the 00s. "Lo-fi"-- melodic rock drenched in the fuzz of cheap recording-- is certainly much more beholden to melody and convention than a lot of the music discussed above. But its connections to noise are clear. The lo-fi act that broke through earliest in the decade, Ariel Pink, was brought into the limelight by Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label. And Siltbreeze, a legendary 90s noise-rock label, was revitalized by lo-fi in the 00s.
Pink met Animal Collective in 2003, passing them his music via a mutual friend. The band decided to put it out, and subsequently supported him through numerous releases and opening slots on their own tours. The mixed reception of those albums and shows would set the tone for lo-fi's contentious path through the decade. For every fan smitten with the way Pink coated his sugary pop in 70s AM-radio haze, there was a detractor who felt he was, as Adam Moerder put it in a Pitchfork review of House Arrest, "too insecure to show his songwriting at face value." And for everyone enamored of his wildly varied live shows (at one, he walked back and forth across the stage like a metronome) there was someone left wondering if they'd been had. "People boo me everywhere," he told the L.A. Weekly in 2005. "They don't even hide their contempt."
Similar charges were branded against more successful bands like Wavves and Vivian Girls. They had the added disadvantage of garnering attention before they could develop songwriting chops on the level of Pink, who had been making music for years before meeting Animal Collective. Still, it often seemed like these new lo-fi acts were controversial less because of their music than by the surprising hype surrounding it. Predictably enough, that hype bred infighting. Take snotty Ohio group Psychedelic Horseshit (part of a lo-fi subset dubbed "shitgaze"), who reamed Wavves in an epic Washington Post interview, suggesting that anyone who could afford to do better should never let their music sound so cheap.
It was an odd charge to bring against a sound that had been so prevalent and accepted in the 90s, when acts as diverse as Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices, and numerous UK indie-poppers all went the lo-fi route. Back then, lo-fi was assumed to be a financial necessity rather than an aesthetic choice. That assumption flipped in the 00s, as inexpensive computer software made it easier to record cleanly (though still not as easy as plunking a tape deck down in the middle of a practice space). So going lo-fi was seen as at worst a contrived way to mimic heroes, at best a defiant refusal to conform.
The strongest lo-fi of the 00s hewed closer to the latter, staking out a reaction against sterilized music that didn't get any less sterile just because everyone could do it. Lo-fi can still convey emotional and thematic rawness, and add mystery to music whose ideas were never meant to be clear. And there are still audiences who appreciate bands that use sound as much as melody to communicate.
Luckily, a few lo-fi bands in the 00s fit that description. In L.A., No Age used raw production and unrefined singing to match the urgent rush of their songs, which sounded bigger than the work of a mere duo. In Ohio, Times New Viking wrote tunes so giddily frantic that only untamed aural splatter could contain them. In Brooklyn, one-man mystery act Blank Dogs turned sonic gauze into a comic villain's mask. And in Portland, Eat Skull slathered lo-fi on their music like glue, pasting pop and noise together into one sticky package.
As the 00s come to a close, it's hard to say whether lo-fi will die off as a fad or permeate indie rock further. But there are signs that it may become more visionary and less retro-centric. A new set of groups, many with noise backgrounds, are melting lo-fi melodies into abstract sonic ambience. In a recent issue of The Wire, David Keenan coined the term "hypnagogic pop" as an umbrella for these various sounds and approaches, citing the outer-space soundtracks of James Ferraro of the Skaters, the muffled tropicalia of Ducktails, and the gothic haze of Zola Jesus. This may be less a movement than a coincidence, but either way it's promising.
If this new strain is to congeal and persist, it will likely need local scenes to push it forward. Despite the vast changes in the way music was made and distributed in the 00s, noise's mutations still began as locally festering phenomena. Noise didn't ignore the Internet's global power, but its strength continues to lie in small numbers-- overlapping circles of like-minded comrades who watch, support, and challenge each other's experiments. Often improvisational and rarely repeatable, noise depends on live performance, and local venues and communities remain its most fertile audio labs. In the 00s, those labs were most noticeable in Providence and Ann Arbor, Baltimore and Oakland, Los Angeles and New York. But in every city in America and around the world, someone is making noise. Maybe it's not so much what noises they make, but where they make them and who they make them with, that keeps noise alive.
