(Credits: Far Out / Last FM / Tuff Beats)

Noise music takes everything we think we know about sound and flips it on its head, as the sounds that famous noise artists have created consist of completely inaccessible and un-listenable… well… noise. Despite the chaos, though, it has a rich history, one made up of political unrest, rebellion and, in some senses, sadism. Japan has always been a frontrunner when it comes to innovative – and sometimes psychotic – artists brandishing the static and shattered banner of noise, to the point that bulldozers and highjacked planes have been cited as inspiration in the music made.

It’s worth noting that noise music didn’t begin in Japan; it was Luigi Russolo who is credited as being the founder. In 1913, Russolo published a manifesto called The Art of Noises, where he spoke about the changing landscape of the world brought on by the Industrial Revolution and how that would impact the music we listen to. 

“Music originally sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound,” Russolo said. “Musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines… the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.”

Russolo essentially argued that as people became more accustomed to the sound of machines and industrial noises, it would be impossible for them to hear something as simple as a guitar or a piano and still be stimulated by it. Over 100 years later, this prediction isn’t entirely correct; however, when you consider 100 years in terms of music, it’s not actually that long.

“[People] talk about 100 years as if it’s a long time,” said Jonathan Snipes, who makes up one-third of noise-rap trio Clipping, a group that takes influence from noise music and blends it with modern hip-hop. “I think it’s actually still just a blip,” he adds. “If someone doesn’t really listen to classical music and doesn’t have a sense of music history, [then] if you play them Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, they might not be able to tell the difference, even though they’re like years and years apart.”

Noise music was always inevitable, but it isn’t just down to humans being more familiar with the sound of machines; it’s also due to inaccessibility being used as a form of protest. Early instances of this can be seen throughout World War I and II, where many composers, given it was such a bleak time, made music that reflected said hopelessness. Pair that with free jazz throughout the 1950s and ’60s, a form of improvisation that dismantled chords and tempos to create discordance and chaos within music, and you can easily see how musicians in the past have rejected politically neutral music in order to make sounds which better reflect the times they were living in.

The music scene in Japan post World War II was interesting, to say the least. The country was still in a state of recovery following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as a result of the US occupation, all of Japan was smothered by American popular culture. Radios throughout the country had their airwaves dominated by jazz and rock ‘n’ roll from the States, and eventually, in the same way, the likes of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie topped charts in countries all around the world, so too did they break records in Japan.

Why were all those artists so popular? There are many reasons, the hair and the look, but in the words of Kenji Enzo, a student at the time, they were “creating something that has never been created before”. This realisation was shared by musicians all across Japan, who slowly abandoned the blatant mimicry of these artists and instead tried to rekindle a fractured sense of national identity by using Western music as a major influence but twisting it to better represent their culture.

Japanese bands seemed to have more creative license in this sense. People at the time felt like they had had their sense of identity taken from them. Many people in bands will have grown up in a US-occupied Japan and, as such, trying to find that sense of self meant not being limited to a specific sound, country or moment in time. It gave rise to many different movements in music, one of which was the acceptance of noise.

One of the more obscure bands that rose to popularity was Les Rallizes Dénudés, an eclectic group formed in 1967 at Kyoto’s Doshisha University. They are considered by many as one of the most important bands to have ever made music as what they did utilised feedback and fury in order to create what would today be parallel to shoegaze. The sound they created isn’t necessarily ‘noise’ but is certainly adjacent to it. There is an attack cemented in tracks, but there is also an attempt at melody, a light brush upon what would have been considered conventional at the time.

The music was quite mysterious but not as mysterious as the band themselves. Members kept their lives completely private, so when singer Mizutani passed away in 2019, people were not made aware of it for another two years.

Another member, Moriaki Wakabayashi, was involved in hijacking Japan Airlines Flight 351, a move which the Japanese Red Army orchestrated. The Red Army were a militant communist organisation, one frustrated with the current regime in the country and so took up arms. It’s hard to call the music made by Les Rallizes Dénudés ‘protest music’, but its inaccessibility and fury could certainly be interpreted that way by some.

Hanatarash is another band from this period who didn’t limit themselves by region when trying to find the most effective form of expression. They turned towards Germany, a country producing a huge amount of ‘weird’ music that had roots in European rock ‘n’ roll. Noise was a big genre at the time and so Hanatarash members, after working in Germany as stagehands for some time, brought the sound back to Japan, which was steadily building a large underground noise scene.

The band clearly used noise as a form of rebellion, given how so much more of their attitude towards music was shaped by punk antics. Their brand was based on neo-punk movements, taking what bands before them had done and turning it up to 11. If you think the industry-based noise that makes up Hanatarash’s discography is a bit aggressive, be thankful you didn’t go to a stage show.

Hantarash relied heavily on shock value; their whole point was to make music that disturbed people and put on live shows that traumatised them. It resulted in not just wide-eyed audience members but genuine chaos, something even the boldest punks would have considered too far. For instance, a dead cat was brought on and sawed in half during their first stage show. During another show, band member Yamantaka Eye strapped a saw to his back, which fell during the gig and nearly cut his leg off. Later in their career, to keep themselves out of harms way, they turned towards the audience, smashing panes of glass over punters heads. Finally, when it felt like things couldn’t get more chaotic, the bulldozer came out.

“Bill and I used to joke,” said Jonathan Snipes from Clipping, talking about first making music with his bandmate. “It’s easier to be a noise musician in an apartment complex because people will assume that whatever the sound is isn’t music. They’ll think it’s construction or a malfunctioning appliance and they don’t bang on your door and ask you to turn the music down, they just assume it will go away because somethings gone wrong and you’re gunna fix it. The sounds of a harsh noise set are more like the sounds of everyday life than a symphony is.”

Given how much industrial noise music has the ability to blend into everyday life, fans in the Japanese venue likely won’t have noticed any difference when they heard a bulldozer revving up. These people had gathered to watch their favourite experimental and sadistic noise band, only for the duo to start bulldozing down the venue with them inside. This stunt would form part of the act, something that fans seemed to enjoy, and it was only when Eye began threatening to throw a Molotov cocktail into the audience that the event was brought to a halt.

So, where does such a convoluted history of noise music in Japan bring the genre today? Frustration manifests itself in various forms and a lot of people feel the most effective method to highlight that frustration is through music. In that sense, it would be unfair for noise music to be branded as a dangerous genre just because people previously have used it as an excuse for violence. There are many other artists who use the genre safely and for its intended purpose, as an accurate reflection of the outside world, machines and politics represented in every decibel.

In that sense, the noise world is thriving in Japan (and all over the globe). The sound is used to convey emotion and is also incorporated into various genres. In rock music, outfits such as Boris blend the two together perfectly; there is also the group Clipping, of which Snipes is a member who blends noise and hip hop seamlessly.

“The noise music scene is like a non-academic version of something that was academic,” he says, “You get the feeling that with a lot of early noise music there wasn’t a language to judge whether it was good or not: it was about the process and the act of doing this unlistenable thing and any result was acceptable. Then the next generation heard those recordings, developed taste in them and said ‘oh let’s cut these together and make them beautiful’.”

He adds: “I love the idea that our contemporary music – which is so specifically-genred and sub-divided – that in 300 years you play somebody Philip Glass, Lil Wayne and Merzbow and they’re like, ‘oh yeah that’s 20th Century music’… to me it’s funny. People say ‘oh isn’t it funny that these two worlds have nothing to do with each other’, whereas really they do have something to do with each other. And to me it’s more about pointing out similarities, trying to speed that future along where nobody can tell the difference anyway.”

Japan’s attitude towards music from the ’50s onwards is all about expression and a sense of identity during a time when much of the country was stripped away. As is always the case with change, radical approaches are taken to either halt or spur it on. This manifested itself in political movements such as The Red Army and the kind of music that was made. There was obviously risk here, but if positives can be taken from the situation, Japanese musicians were given a sense of freedom when it came to finding artistic influence, which took them through time and around the world. This resulted in many variations of sound, but one of the most impactful was noise. 

Noise has since stopped being something completely inaccessible and instead has a new generation of artists who use it to both convey emotion and merge it with other genres. The result is a newfound sense of freedom for artists who can convey emotion both in lyricism and sonically. So, can a bulldozer be an instrument? Well, in terms of the continued development of music and the ability for musicians to push themselves creatively, it’s not only an instrument but may well be the most important one there is.