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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.
