If Feedback's Nonlinear, It Can't Be Straight Noise Music as Queer Expression

According to composer Milton Babbitt, traditional tonality, twelve-tone tonality, and atonality are all constructed ideas of musicality that lie in some multi-dimensional spectrum, one no more natural than the other. Similarly, Michel Foucault emphasizes in his History of Sexuality that “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check... It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.” When “musicality” is substituted for “sexuality,” Foucault's description of the “great surface network” of sexualities is practically indecipherable from Babbitt's account of tonality. Like Foucault's constructionist theory of sexuality, Babbitt's idea recognizes the historical invalidation of non-tonal music and denies the essentialist presumptions of naturality that underlie it. But while social stigma may make atonality queer in the musical realm, is there anything about noise music that links it directly to queer sexuality? How queer is noise music in practice, and how can you even tell if it is?

Extreme music has always been a haven for outsiders, providing both an outlet for frustration toward mainstream society and a community where being a freak is celebrated. Unfortunately, this often means only a particular brand of freak is celebrated, and much of the extreme music being performed in the late '70s – primarily metal and hardcore – was hyper macho and sometimes even overtly homophobic. But as electronic noise began to emerge and noise rock grew out of the no wave movement, an even more extreme alternative to metal and hardcore had appeared.

While the queercore movement developed from traditional hardcore, electronic noise has been queer from the start. Throbbing Gristle, the pioneers of industrial music, consistently used lyrics and images depicting extreme and queer sexuality in their performances with songs like “The Old Man Smiled” from Heathen Earth: “A plaintive smile of the boy as he lies on the bed/ And the old man smiled as his/ Prick started to twitch twitch twitch/ And little drops felt out and fell to the floor.” Peter Christopherson continued exploring these themes with Coil, his post-TG project with partner Jhonn Balance, composing “ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy.” And although the violent sexuality embraced by early power electronics groups such as Whitehouse was generally straight, it was still deviant, as on “Bloodfucking” from Right to Kill: “You'll die, you shit/ Blood pumping from your ass/ You'll burn by my fuck...As I eat from your guts/ I'll fuck the wounds/ Spill blood from your cunt.” In fact, the 1982 Whitehouse album Psychopathia Sexualis is named after Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 book of the same name, one of the earliest works on the psychology of sexual deviance and also one of the earliest works to reject the notion of homosexuality as a mental illness. Beyond the UK, Merzbow was incorporating themes of sadomasochism, pornography, and fetishism into his music on releases like Sadomachismo, Ecobondage, and Music for Bondage Performance. A Merzbow performance could even be considered a sadomasochistic act in its own right, with Masami Akita subjecting the listener to noise at a volume well above the pain threshold.

While sexual deviance is not strictly queer, a way in which noise performance can be interpreted as a sexual act similar to that of Merzbow comes from lesbian composer Pauline Oliveros, who states that her motivation for composing music is the “pleasure, ecstasy, and euphoria” that comes from listening to her pieces being performed. When music critic Martha Mockus listens to Oliveros's Rose Mountain Slow Runner, she finds “the stories of lesbian erotic exchange sounded out” in the breaths of the singers and the accordion bellows. In the 1983 recording of Horse Sings from Cloud, Oliveros performs the accordion drone piece with Heloise Gold, Julia Haines, and Linda Montano, the latter being Oliveros's lover at the time. As Dolores Hajosy explains in the liner notes, “The listeners may tune into the different breathing patterns of each instrument... The instruments and vocalizations combine to create a rich phasing of breath cycles.” The “shimmering” dynamic between the deep bass of Oliveros's bandoneon and the soprano voice of Montano's concertina establish the butch-femme relationship that Mockus also identifies, with the breathing patterns of the instruments representing sexual vocalizations. The pleasure of listening, then, is coupled with the pleasure of reenacting a sexual encounter.

As a queer (and thus marginal) form of music, noise suffers from and reflects the same misconceptions and prejudices that surround queer sexuality, making it a perfect medium for the expression of queer political statements. In 1993, the Kronos Quartet and Bob Ostertag released the EP All the Rage, a powerful 16-minute recording that straddles the border between musique concrète and avant-classical. The piece was, according to Ostertag's liner notes, “developed from a recording [Ostertag] made of a riot in San Francisco in October 1991, which followed California Governor Pete Wilson's veto of a bill designed to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination.” Ostertag transcribed parts of his recording for string quartet, with the notes and sounds of the instruments recreating the sounds of the chanting crowd, police sirens, gunshots, and breaking glass. The final piece has both the Kronos Quartet and the recording playing simultaneously, each reinforcing the other, with dramatic readings of the transcripts of interviews with riot participants spread throughout.

This unsettling and deeply moving piece derives much of its dramatic effect from the unexpected musical contextualization of a non-musical recording. Ostertag took this idea of noise music as contextualization as queer political soapbox even further six years later with PantyChrist, an “improvisational collaboration” between him, Japanese noise legend Otomo Yoshihide, and San Francisco drag queen Justin Bond. Describing the conceptualization of PantyChrist in his interview “Why I Work with Drag Queens,” Ostertag explains that “the act of appropriation has become the quintessential act of the late 20th century avant garde, [so] it seems only reasonable to recognize that for drag queens this is nothing new.” Indeed, queer theorist Judith Butler suggests that “Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation.” In this sense, noise music is misunderstood for the same reasons as drag: it shows through the appropriation of non-musical elements that tone and rhythm are, like gender, simply social constructs.

But before Ostertag, Oliveros, and Throbbing Gristle, John Cage was the foremost queer noise artist. Rather than publicly embracing his homosexuality and composing outrightly gay pieces, however, Cage took a more acetic approach to queer politics. In his essay “John Cage's Queer Silence,” Jonathan Katz compares the “conspicuous silence” in many of Cage's works, most notably 4'33”, with Cage's silence about his homosexuality. Explaining that “Cage became notable precisely for his silences,” Katz justifies Cage's unwillingness to talk about his sexuality by theorizing that Cage found silence to be more powerful than words. Perhaps surprisingly, compositional silence can be classified as noise: 4'33” is meant to be an aleatoric piece, one that is composed by chance through the sounds of the surroundings. Engaging the curiosities of his fans with his ambiguous silence, Cage encouraged speculation about both the meaning of his music and his sexuality, thus undoing preconceptions about exclusively binary systems of musicality and sexuality.

Despite the strong theoretical connection between queer sexuality and “queer” forms of music, noise doesn't always signify queerness. For example, the ubiquitous violence and misogyny in power electronics place it closer to the hypermasculinity of grindcore and gore/death metal. Today, the harsh noise and black noise genres are also dominated by artists and bands that occupy a similar niche, where tolerance for noise is used as a measure of machismo. The rosters of labels like Hanson Records, Troniks/PACrec, and Hospital Productions are almost entirely male-dominated, and their catalogs feature collaborative releases from seemingly every permutation of the artists they represent. This “bro-down” approach to noise is perfectly illustrated by the PACrec release Total Slitting of Throats, a single hour-long track of largely unchanging almost-white noise made by layering individual tracks from maximal harsh noise solo artists The Cherry Point, Sewer Election, The Rita, Mania, and Treriksröset. In a manner opposite but parallel to the emergence of queercore from hardcore, harsh noise today tends to reinforce gender constructions through the very sounds that try to dislodge them.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of examples of noise music as queer expression today, from the documentarian approach to musique concrète taken by Matmos on The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast to the inevitable commandeering of power electronics as a gay medium by The New Pledgemaster. On songs such as “Dr. Troll” and “Yellow Raspberry,” Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart harnesses the cathartic nature of harsh electronic noise in order to express and simultaneously ease the pain and anger experienced by his queer subjects. And bands like Gay Beast follow Ostertag in using noise to make a political statement while still managing to have fun. It's impossible to pinpoint anything specifically relevant to queer sexuality that unites all noise music, but it is a subculture with a history that is very familiar to queer musicians, one that is a safe haven for queer expression, be it for the purpose of advancing a political movement or simply for the purpose of entertaining each other. But given its roots in extreme queer sexuality, it seems that noise music, for better or worse, will remain a marginal form of queer expression while more palatable (and predictable) styles of queer music take the spotlight.

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