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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.
