While these first-nighters behave like the audience for a symphony, a man onstage runs radio static through an endless feedback loop to create an intolerable roar that is comparable, perhaps, to sharing a living room with a sputtering jet engine.
Other artists bang their fists wildly on flaming, gasoline-doused steel plates. Or splice cassette tape into miles of senseless chirps. Or use electronic devices to make sounds that resemble what an avalanche produces -- an unmodulated, 15-minute-long avalanche.
It is, truly, an appalling spectacle. More appalling yet, however, are the aesthetic proclamations the perpetrators of this thuggish pageant-cum-art-form deliver. They spout a rap that is as tight as a drumhead:
"This is probably one of the few genres that is pushing boundaries."
"What we're trying to do is achieve ultraharmonics."
"Listening to a tractor motor, there's a constant grind, a constant hum, and you start realizing that disparate things are comprising that sound."
These cafe intellectuals of the headbanging set are turning San Francisco into a vortex of the worldwide "musical" movement known as "noise." Performing their concerts in converted warehouses and abandoned theaters, the noisicians have taken the raucous, rebellious, irreverent spirit inherent in other avant-garde art movements to its logical extreme, defying art, religion, society, property -- even the idea of matter itself.
"For me personally, it was very much a celebration of entropy," says one noisician, speaking of a period of time in which his performances involved bashing up musical venues with crowbars and then fleeing.
Noisicians' creations have been referred to as post-punk, post-industrial, post-everything experimental music. But the fact is that many of this genre's practitioners have no truck with anything that's come before them.
"You see, I've never been all that interested in music," explains noisician GX Jupitter-Larsen.
Jupitter-Larsen is a portly man with an oversize eye-patch; an earring that lets a dime's worth of light through his earlobe; and a Vienna Bauhaus architect's bemusedly nasal conversational style. His "band," the Haters, is one of the San Francisco noise world's most famous. Their concerts consist mostly of pressing miked objects against a shop grinder. "I've always been more interested in spectacle and the dynamics of absurdity," Jupitter-Larsen offers by way of explanation.
Jupitter-Larsen is at once characteristic of and unique among noisicians. This paradox reflects the noise movement's diversity; its ranks are drawn from everywhere: horror-movie sound-effects professionals; punk-riot practical-jesters; rural Kansas farm boys; Silicon Valley technology wizards; homeless drifters; and wayward, classically trained musicians.
They are united by a quest to be original; to tickle people's fancies, then offend their sensibilities; to take the idea of creating compelling sounds away from the realm of melody and rhythm and into shifting aural moods. The result is an ill-defined sound space at once repulsive and soothing, monotonous and intriguing, awful and exciting.
"Really? It's like nothing you ever heard?" gushes one SOMA noisician, who also happens to be an engineer at a nuclear accelerator. "For a noisician, that's the most flattering thing you could possibly have said."
As is fitting his avocation as a creator of horrid, screeching drones that seem to drag on for hours, noise doyen GX Jupitter-Larsen makes his home in a grimy cubbyhole in the South of Market industrial warehouse known as Survival Research Laboratories.
SRL is a performance art cooperative famed for producing fire-breathing metal monsters the size of tractor-trailers that are programmed to battle to the death. The warehouse looks like any other sprawling machine shop, except that its drill presses, lathes, cutting tables, and welding rigs are interspersed with the occasional cooperative member's unmade bed.
Jupitter-Larsen provides "soundtracks" to SRL "shows" -- amplified grinding sounds that precede the clandestine, staged battles between SRL's backhoelike monsters.
Despite Jupitter-Larsen's connection to the SRL madness; despite his work, which consists of creating the kind of aggravating sound you'd hear if your head were being dragged behind the fender of a speeding car; despite his get-up, which consists of clinging, black, gothic garb that balloons out, Ronald McDonald-like, into scuffed Doc Marten boots -- despite this outlandish context, Jupitter-Larsen doesn't at first strike one as being of this brutish, clamorous noise world.
His manner is courteous, even decorous. He is articulate and erudite. He speaks softly in well-crafted, complete sentences, referring to principles of biochemistry and thermodynamics as he forms cohesive, convincing arguments about the meaning of his work.
"I find that the concept of entropy is quite ironic. It's the whole nature of biology, right? You have unstable molecules transferring energy to stable molecules. That's the basis of biological life as we know it. This process that creates life has a negative byproduct, and that's aging. So the one thing that life teaches us is that you can't have life without also losing it," says Jupitter-Larsen, whose rhetorical curlicues almost obscure the fact that he's actually talking about grinding up live microphones and bashing barrooms into splinters. "That's ironic, and I find irony really funny."
His erudition notwithstanding, Jupitter-Larsen is indeed brutish, indeed clamorous, and very much a piece of noise's seamy underworld.
Jupitter-Larsen came to San Francisco by way of Denver, where he passed his Haters off as a punk band. There, he'd book himself at bars, college student unions, and small theaters as if he and his associates were a legitimate musical act. But unbeknownst to promoters, he'd infiltrate concert crowds with "inside instigators" who were instructed to incite the audience to riot. Jupitter-Larsen and crew would smuggle crowbars into the venue, and turn on a 20-minute cassette at high volume, in hopes of obscuring the fact that he and his cohorts had set to physically ruining walls, furniture, the stage -- whatever they could reach.
"We'd book ourselves as a band, then we'd show up, and then we got out crowbars and started wrecking the place," Jupitter-Larsen explains.
After a few years it became difficult to book gigs, he says, recalling a performance at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"At this one particular performance, one inside agitator got a little excited, and instead of lighting the smoke bomb after 20 minutes, he did it after two minutes," Jupitter-Larsen recalls. "Now, these weren't like your ordinary Halloween smoke bombs. These were military smoke bombs that we were using. So the air went from being perfectly clear to being this milky white smoke in a matter of a few seconds. So it was complete pandemonium. The Police Department came; the Fire Department came because there was so much smoke. They evacuated not just the club, but the residential buildings that were adjoined, and the entire student union building had to be evacuated. Then the poison control board had to come, because people were having allergic reactions to the sulfur, and, um, so we were banned from the campus after that.
"And, in fact, in '88 I had to leave Colorado, because I was banned from every venue there."
Indeed, the smoke bomb is still legend among University of Colorado police, officers there say.
So Jupitter-Larsen headed to California, tired, he says, of bashing clubs to bits. Besides, club owners had taken to chasing the Haters off with firearms, which gave Jupitter-Larsen the jitters.
"After 10 years of wrecking venues, the novelty wears very thin," Jupitter-Larsen notes. "I personally thought I had made my point, and there was no need to go on."
But entropy remained to be celebrated. So Jupitter-Larsen changed his approach.
"I got more and more interested in erosion, in sanding and grinding things," Jupitter-Larsen says. "So I'd do shows like pushing live microphones into power grinders. So the amplification of erosion has become the recent theme. It's kind of like this year's motif. During most of this decade, it's been things like that, just amplifying things getting sanded or ground up."
Helpfully, Jupitter-Larsen's new compact disc, Drunk on Decay, is adorned with this black-and-white sticker: "All sounds on this CD were produced from a suspended, amplified funnel dragging and eroding on rotating sandpaper."
And that's exactly what it sounds like: Bzzzzzzzzzzz Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz Bzzzzwrrrr oooombbzzzzzzzz Bzzzzzzwrrrr oooombbmmmmzzzzz ....
For what seems like hours, and hours, and hours, and hours.
Maria Moran, aka Zipper Spy, aka Pauly Ester, blinks into the sunlight as she opens the door to her southwest Oakland industrial warehouse. It's 3 p.m., and she's just waking up for the day. She often spends her evenings composing and recomposing synthesized snippets of noise, she says, and she has just finished a particularly long night of it.
Maria is a tiny woman -- slim, wiry, shoulder-high -- and her shy, halting manner hints at a past life as a smallish version of Rocky Balboa's wallflower girlfriend, Adrian.
But Maria's no Adrian. She helps make ends meet doing professional industrial welding jobs. She worked for years as bassist in a touring L.A. punk band. She's created soundtracks for B-grade horror films, and still does sound work for movies and television. She's a producer for local rock bands. She's a sculptor, and her steel, human-esque figures sprout up sporadically from her warehouse's gray pavement floor.
Her true love, though, is her noise, which she makes by assembling subtly altered natural sounds into eerie waves of groans, chirps, clangs, thuds, and buzzes. Recorded, looped back onto themselves, layered over each other, and faded one into another into the next, the sounds Moran creates contain subtle rhythms that are at times monotonous, and sometimes startling. While distinct, each composition seems to evoke that uncomfortable horror-movie feeling that something untoward is about to happen.
Moran first started making weird sounds as a college student in Colorado. This early noise began as a form of therapy, she says.
"I was wondering why I was so crazy, so I started to take samples of sounds with my tape recorder, and I started making weird instruments out of garbage I found. I was able to make these big pieces and make sounds out of them, and I ended up getting a grant," she says while nervously trying to occupy her delicate hands. "Me and a friend started to write music for those instruments, and I thought, 'Even if I'm crazy, I will at least be heard.' "
She started recording soundbites from talk radio shows -- "I was just amazed at the things they would say," she says -- and then looping the words into her groaning, chirping, clanging noise worlds.
The effect is quite disturbing.
"We have confirmed things you couldn't believe: about extraterrestrials visiting the planet Earth; ghosts walking on the planet Earth; demons from hell appearing; angels from heaven; the sightings of the Virgin Mary; and the dead walking among the living. I wonder America!" is a transcription of one of her more alarming splices of radio samples.
She arrived at an artistic crossroads about three years ago, Moran says, when she was out with her digital audio tape recorder, grabbing snippets of sound. She happened to have a parka on, and her microphone picked up the noise from her zipper. Run through her sound mixing equipment at home, its muffled, crackling buzz became a wonderful, haunting, "most amazing" sound, she says.
"Now, I try to include amplified zippers in everything I do," she says.
The zipper sounds -- run through synthesizers, mixed via her dining table-size studio sound board, slowed down, warped, then looped into endless hums, rattles, and chugga-chugga sounds -- become part of the crawling aural montages that make up Zipper Spy's brand of noise. One track on her new CD, called Watch Your Damage, consists of an echoey, clangy, clanking noise, which repeats itself amid far-off buzzing, muted, drowsy-sounding, train whistle-like cries, and a constant, tidal-wave roar.
If you heard the tape at the drive-in movie theater, you'd know some foolish teen-agers were about to get the knife.
The first question that occurs to a visitor upon entering the home of Thomas Dimuzio -- a hulking, long-haired, pallid man who shares an Inner Sunset two-level house with his wife and $150,000 worth of audio equipment -- might be, "Do you, perchance, have a job in the computer software industry?"
The answer, of course, is yes. Dimuzio aids in program design for Headspace Inc., a start-up company that produces audio software for the World Wide Web. He's also a rising star on the Bay Area noise scene; his sound performances are drawing middling noise crowds to venues around the city.
He has achieved this version of better living through technology.
"Believe it or not, I use all this shit," he says, waving to the three Macintosh computers, hay bale-size racks of synthesizers, a half-acre of sound-mixing board, dual programmable keyboards, and a pumpkin patch's worth of special-effects pedals, cables, and other equipment. "I really just love to capture sound, mainly process sound, manipulate sound, using processors, bridging processors with oscillators and tone generators and using them in ways they probably weren't designed to be used."
Dimuzio has been a sound junkie for nearly two decades, and has been making recordings since 1987. His break into the high-tech yuppie scene came a couple of years ago when he was hired by the audio software producer OSC, which, in the irreverent tradition of the Silicon Valley young, stood for "Our Shitty Corporation." Dimuzio was hired to test the company's new Deck sound processing software. More than a great career move, the job gave him the opportunity to obtain the kind of expensive audio equipment he needed to make his noise.
Dimuzio moved from Boston to San Francisco not long before the software firm Macromedia bought OSC. He lost his job earlier this year when Macromedia laid off its OSC employees as part of a restructuring, but was soon hired on as a software tester at Headspace.
"Next, I'm going to buy a faster computer," he says, motioning to the audio-software-packed Macintoshes humming in a sealed-off corner of his garage.
Like most denizens of Silicon Valley's northern reaches, Dimuzio's preoccupations deal mostly with the limits of technology. He records or digitally produces sounds, distorts them through audio processors, mixes them via audio software, then blends them into compositions with his keyboard. In the future, he says, he'd like to be able to do all these things with the stroke of a single key.
"The current level of technology is unbelievably limiting," he says.
Dimuzio would like to be able to create his compositions on the fly on a concert stage, rather than piecing digital sounds together one at a time. The idea, he says, is to play the ambient sounds of a concert hall through his equipment -- in real time -- and thereby turn the world itself into a digital instrument.
While it is the subject of his frustrations, Dimuzio's audio equipment obviously brings him joy. And if you let him, he'll talk about the capabilities of his roomful of audio gadgets for longer than a human would naturally seem to be able to speak without taking a breath.
"This is one of my most touched pieces of gear. It's simply a digital switching matrix. I have all my digital gear plugged into there, anything with a digital input or output. My computer, which is plugged into this. The DAT machine. Pro Tools is in there, my Eventide DSP 4000; a couple of Lexicon things; two DAT machines; the sampler that I just booted up. This is an analog-digital converter, which is hard-wired to these analog pieces, which is also routed into here. So I can basically call up a signal chain and make a very elaborate signal chain. I can say, 'All right, I want my sound source to go through here, then here, then here, then into the computer.' All just by dialing this up and tapping in a few numbers -- so this is a beautiful piece of engineering," Dimuzio says.
"Now this is a noise gate, which I typically run four radios into and trigger the key inputs so that I can open up the gates and play the radios or other sound sources in real time. This is what is plugged into the computer, which allows me to play digital audio into the computer, and these are just patch bays that just sort of wire all the rest of the gear together," he explains, having only completed the first fourth of a seemingly endless list of equipment.
Dimuzio's status as a high prince of techno geekdom proves well-earned as his hands spread like melted butter over the knobs on his mixing board, spit like lightning across his computer keyboard, then whirl across the room to his synthesizer piano as he locks in a piece of sound.
The resulting noise compositions create the creeping, haunting sensation that nature itself has given way to bits and bytes -- computer wind, computer waves, computer echoes, and computer clarions calling from the computerized pearly gates.
On his new CD, Sonicism, Dimuzio blends the distorted sounds of guitars, a water spigot, trumpet, and other natural and unnatural noises into something like a digital nap at the beach. There are ocean sounds overlaid with what could be sea gulls and a foghorn or two, muted by a smoky wind -- just as sea gulls and foghorns would sound if they were created by $150,000 of looping delays, solid-state audio compressors, PCM-80 processors, Kurzweil K2000 digital samplers, MIDI interface units, and digital delays.
Just as with any music scene, noise has its crass, cash-driven commercial underbelly. In the Bay Area, this mostly consists of AMK, the short, slightly tubby, scruffily dressed owner of Banned Productions. AMK, like some other noisicians, prefers that his initials be used as his full name.
As if to prove once and for all that noise is an obscure, underground artistic phenomenon, AMK is, for all intents and purposes, a homeless person. This is so even though his record label carries the work of some of the more prominent -- relatively speaking -- noise artists.
When he can, AMK housesits for friends in the San Francisco area. But mostly he stays at his parents' place in Fremont, carting his vinyl Adidas bag full of noise CDs, cassettes, and records to Northern California record shops, giving away free samples to journalists, and otherwise building brand identity. AMK makes a few thousand dollars a year pressing records for the Haters, Mectpyo Blut, Com. Sa., Crawl Unit, Chop Shop, Smell & Quim, Merzbow, and other luminaries on the international noise scene.
But the music distribution big time -- or even medium time -- has eluded AMK. Sales have remained slow for years, AMK says, drooping particularly low this year.
"I'm not sure why, they're just not selling," he says, in an airy, high-pitched, depressed-sounding voice.
Making matters worse, AMK's lately been losing a high-stakes legal battle with British Petroleum, the international oil conglomerate. For years, AMK had used the company's green-and-yellow "BP" in a shield logo without hearing a peep of complaint from its owner.
Then, in 1996, AMK got himself a Web site, which provoked a nasty letter from BP's legal department, demanding that he "IMMEDIATELY disassemble your web page so that all use of our BP IN SHIELD DESIGN trademark and all references to the letters 'BP' are totally and completely removed from it. Anything less than that is unacceptable."
AMK flouted the cease-and-desist warnings, posting British Petroleum's haughty letters on his site and putting token circles and crosses across the BP logos. British Petroleum responded by retaining the services of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, a large California trademark infringement firm, threatening to extract "injunctive relief and money damages" from AMK.
Broke and tired, AMK relented, removing the BP shield from his Web site. Now he's holding a listener contest to select a new record label design.
"It was funny that a company that made over 2 billion [English] pounds in 1996 would care, let alone pay a firm $400 an hour to shut Banned Productions down," AMK complains.
Although his mood is dour, AMK's cassette tapes, vinyl records, compact discs, and custom-made tape player seem almost festive, once strewn across a conference table. This is so for a reason: AMK follows the strain of thought, common to some noise musicians, that says the package that contains a recording is nearly as important as the actual sound the recording contains.
A cassette of cicada chirps, for example, is stuffed with leaves, grass, and other natural material from the insect's habitat. A vinyl record is offered in a thick, glove-leather sheath, which is sewn completely shut with heavy nylon thread, so listeners must cut open and ruin the package to get at their records. One cassette is sealed into a foam rubber brick. Another is held by a luminescent package originally designed for protecting materials from airport X-rays.
"I feel that it's silly for someone to spend six months producing a piece of music, then put it into a slipcover you made at Kinko's," AMK explains. "Some of the packaging goes with the way the music sounds. It sounds like industrial noise, and it's packaged in industrial materials -- you know, like riveted tar paper."
AMK came to the music packaging business by way of being a noisician himself. His work consists mostly of taking floppy vinyl records -- the kind that used to come inside magazines -- snipping them up with scissors, and gluing them back together in a reassembled pie. He then plays the hodgepodge record, recording it onto a compact disc. His latest CD is adorned with the phrase "only the finest in Flexi-disc Montages."
Imagine, if you will, forcing yourself to listen to an oddly skipping record without getting up to move the needle. You know it's skipping, and you know it will keep skipping unless you do something. But you don't. You just sit there, enjoying the sound: "Bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp ...."
"I go into restaurants, and they sometimes have jukeboxes. I find it great if the record starts skipping. I don't like digital skipping as much as I like analog skipping," AMK explains. "Most people don't want to hear scratches on a record, or tape hiss, but I do. Part of this is taking what is negative and making it positive."
And so it goes. A philosophical, intellectual, aural abstract expressionist soul train is rolling unnoticed through San Francisco. But its unique throbs, howls, and unidentifiable walls of sound will inevitably make their way into the language of more popular music.
Some more traditional musicians have been hitching a ride for years.
Jaiyoung Kim, for example, is mixing jazz, rock, and other genres into an intriguing noise-music blend that he's been playing with his band, Job, at local clubs -- and successfully passing it off as music.
Portending what may be the attitude of noise-influenced musicians to come, Kim shamelessly rejects noise's anti-establishment conceits: He even refers to his individual musical compositions as "songs." He uses some traditional instruments such as guitars, drums, and keyboard. He keeps things like music theory, rhythm, and artistry in mind while composing and playing his work.
"I'm not completely enthusiastic about saying, 'Fuck you,' to all the structural rules. I'd like to use that to my advantage," says Kim, who began playing piano at age 5, violin at 8.
Accordingly, Jaiyoung Kim's compositions drift through woozy versions of avant-garde harmonics; bent conceptual rock music; and other, more familiar genres. It's even approachable as a sort of real music, with bass lines meandering through some of the pieces, cymbal beats punctuating others. As if to debunk Kim's musical charade, however, the songs often disintegrate into a modulated, metallic roar. In one case, a lilting, jazzy mishmash segues into sounds of breaking glass, a repeated sob, a baby's shriek.
But until more interlopers like Kim arrive, noise will remain the stuff of San Francisco cafe conversations, back-alley warehouse concerts, and late-night experimental sessions. It will continue to be composed of the incomprehensible obsessions of a few people who are either pioneers or eccentrics, depending on your point of view.
But what is it, exactly, that they are trying to do?
Dan Burke, who plays throbbing, electronically generated whines while scratching rocks across a miked metal table, puts it this way:
"If we're trying to do anything more than therapy, we're trying to create a gateway, a space to allow for the creation of a mood."
Scott Arford, who hosts friends' noise concerts in his three-story-high Illinois Street warehouse while making his own noise by distorting and redistorting radio static, explains thusly:
"It's all about listening. It really requires closer listening. At first you hear a single sound, but there is a lot going on on another level. With your eyes, at a minimalist level, looking at a post in the distance, you might just see a shape, but as you get closer, you see the post itself. With my noise, it's the same. My mixer is feeding back on itself, and it creates a lot of rhythms and patterns -- it becomes its own organic system."
Scot Jenerik has built an amplified flamethrower into a playable instrument. Some of his concerts consist of banging on inflamed, gas-soaked metal plates with his hands until they are too burnt for him to continue. And he, too, has an explanation:
"It's like a glacier. It has intricate fractural patterns. You can see it as a mass of ice, but the fractural patterns might be just as interesting. It's the same way with noise. I'm really interested in the physicality of sound."
Thuggish, raucous, brutish, appalling, intolerably wonderful sound.
