I never once tried to bullshit myself into thinking that I was going to make something for myself when I was busy creating my 15th new email address under some new edgy pseudonym that I thought up while I was murdering my 5th period calculus teacher in my mind while she stood directly in front of me. In all my angst and my irrational and assuredly unexplained anger during my sophomore year of high school, I was grasping at anything that could separate me and my psyche from the funeral procession of "the rest of the sheep".
Prescribed the traditional choice of music: You were either for the radio, or against it and everything that played on it. My instinctive search for everything offensive and depraved that tickled my warped little ego gravitated me to habits like listening to contemporary minimalist darktronics tracks I would find linked on obscure Xanga pages or in the bowels of CDZ.com or during a random RealPlayer store search I would come across experimental ambient projects with a dark bite to them. But it was a resin-hit, and it only left more to be wanted.
Most of it sounded like shit, but I learned to appreciate it, listening to it on my stolen mp3 player while smoking roacher in the back yard with my friend's older brothers.
A resin high is much different than having a good long drag from a fresh packed bowl. It leaves the mind aching with much more to desire while still effectively achieving the same result: cloudiness that offers the eternal sunshine of the mind some brief shade.
A drag of the hissing boiling sticky residue is also much harsher than a lot of the noise that I indulged in at the time as well, obsessing over iDoser tracks and binaural effects as well as guided hypnosis programme tapes that I would often record myself after painstakingly transcribing them from the upstairs computer. Everything that I learned about the noise was carefully saved onto countless floppy disks that were smuggled back to the bedroom which I shared with my step brother.
I fucking loathe Avenged Sevenfold. He listened to nothing else it seemed, or at least it was the most offensive and unsavory type of music that he would go on to proclaim the hardest-of-the-core. Jesus buttfucking christ, I smelled a challenge, but his overbearing personality frustrated and left me with little motivation to make space for creative expression in my already repressive household, like being constantly hung-over from drinking too much Bud Ice, but being forced to keep drinking it or die of thirst.
The cesspool of failed experiments was called MySpace at the time, and the Music section of the website was definitely it's only good part. Here is where the creative collective would throw "music" at the fucking wall just to see what would stick, and a lot of times it did. But it's easy to get shit to stick to more shit. The dungeon crawl of friends lists and pages with merely hundreds of views lay in hiding buried beneath Merzbow wannabe fashion-noise and trendy ambient projects made the world of contemporary harsh noise seem distant, and perhaps nonexistent. Or at least it was for me at the time.
To save the long-winded explanation, I lived a pretty fucking comfortable sheltered life as a kid and teenager. I even remember my father throwing borderline temper-tantrums when I would make us late for Sunday School by intentionally not getting out of bed. He would speed in the neighborhood and slam on the brakes, and it all seemed normal. Hellfire was a part of my reality. Nothing seemed to be too violent or too uncompromising at the time as well they showed that type of shit in movies, talked about it on the news constantly as if it were a part of our everyday lives, shootings, explosions, fires, snowstorms, crime, it was everywhere. They talked about it in rap songs and in death metal. Hate, fire, punish, death, fucking and fighting. Yet the reality of violence isn't really made apparent until your reality is one of violence. Something in your fucking brain clicks like a switch when someone takes a swing at you with that mean look in their eye and something smart to say in their stupid mouth.
Noise is fucking violence. Like the artificial facade, our protective barrier, our shining metal shield and the desperate hope that we can somehow convince the next generation that violence is not in our nature and still it seems to permeate through. Fuck that was a harsh drag, but knowing that the next one won't be as unexpected and maybe even be comfortable and savory, but eventually it won't cloud my mind as efficiently so I have to move on to something that'll make me cough harder, something that will put me off even more so that I can re-experience the initial effect that worked just fucking fine the first time.
This is why I get so fucking confused when I hear stupid fucking purists and their egotistical hipster banter on social media. Sure, you may look edgy and uncompromising up there with your nihilist mentality and your stupid fucking depressive screamed lyrics and that 160 dollar flange pedal that makes your set go HSSSSSSSSSSSSS and your plastic-wrapped geometrical-fractal artwork that seems so fucking outsider to anyone who doesn't give a flying shit about anything other than looking cool and stroking some artsy-fartsy ego-testes.
The countless hours of research and arguing over which pieces of equipment make the best sounds and the message of breaking down the definition of "art" and "music" or defining a new genre or the need to feel like you're a part of some new social breakthrough in culture and art: Fucking agonizingly pretentious bullshit.
It's a comical parade of the same shit over and over again in the same rooms full of the same people in a self-perpetuating circle-jerk of scattered applause and gawking at some new piece of equipment and silently denying but vehemently defending the delusion that it's something that can be controlled and unique.
"Oh shit! I played wall noise instead of glitch-noise with the mids all the way down! My bad guys, let me start the set over again."
If we wish to actually let the noise community precede it's inherent and overwhelmingly apparent novelty and progress past the formless definitions and the pretentious claiming of names then it must be made as uncompromising as possible, which is making sure the initial hit is a fucking impact and immediately abandoning the idea to avoid letting the audience think that they're prepared for the next one.
This is why I make a new email address every few weeks.
