Noise rock
Noise rock ( Engl. Noise "noise") is a style of music.
The Velvet Underground and The Stooges had the most important influence on noise rock . The scene was also inspired by Lou Reed's album Metal Machine Music , Yoko Onos Fly and the work of Chrome in the 1970s and the no-wave scene in the 1980s. Here you can also find references to Teenage Jesus & The Jerks , the live performances of Suicide or the Australian The Birthday Party .
history
The term noise rock is borrowed from the 1981 noise festival in New York . The Noise Festival introduced the term New York Noise and alternatively stood for the city's no-wave scene. From this background Sonic Youth emerged, who also appeared at the festival and who are still among the most important representatives of noise rock. Their first release appeared in 1982. The Swans followed in 1983 , their first album Filth represented a kind of industrial with guitars. In the same year JG Thirlwell came to New York and gave a concert with Lydia Lunch , Marc Almond and Nick Cave , among others . His album Hole from 1984 under the name Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel was a musical extension of noise rock in that collages and samples as well as elements of electronic music were incorporated.
The term then also included bands from other regions. Big Black came from Chicago , whose first release came out in 1982, and a band from San Francisco called Flipper . Both practiced a disharmonious variant of punk . So did the Butthole Surfers from Austin , Texas , until they released a very psychedelic album with their 1984 album Psychic Powerless, Another Man's Sac , thus expanding the spectrum of noise rock. This also made bands such as B. Bongwater assigned to noise rock. Other representatives were the Happy Flowers, Pussy Galore, Scratch Acid , Phantom Tollbooth, Unsane , The Jesus Lizard , Cows and God Bullies. The latter two already overlapped what was later called grunge . The band The Melvins also processed influences of noise rock and was initially included.
There were few representatives of noise rock in Great Britain. In addition to the first release of Thirlwell in Great Britain, there was a band called Head of David with the successor band Godflesh . In Great Britain, however, at the height of noise rock in 1986, another direction called noise pop emerged .
The music
Musically, noise rock tries to sound as inharmonic as possible with unnotable sounds, so-called noise riffs , with mostly rhythmic drum accompaniment . To use Sonic Youth systematically detuned guitars as the main element of style. The music gets an atonal character, similar to industrial . The generation of noise and chaos through shrill and brute sounds are just as possible as dreamy sound carpets and imaginative sound painting . It should be mentioned, however, that Sonic Youth has converted the "noise" of the early days into an almost "pop" element in the course of their last releases. Marked by permanent further development, the last albums have become much more "audible".
In terms of playing technology, limits are also explored and happily exceeded. In addition to the deliberate and targeted generation of feedback , this includes striking the strings behind the bridge , scratching and scraping on the strings with the pick or various other aids, preparing the guitar e.g. B. by sliding drumsticks under the strings, rubbing the guitar neck over the floor and combinations of different techniques.
In noise rock bands, the guitar predominates, which distinguishes them from industrial bands.
Typical noise equipment:
- Various guitars in sometimes obscure moods (e.g. Sonic Youth )
- Transistor amps
- Sound effect pedals
- Tools for manipulating the strings, e.g. B. Slidebar / Bottleneck , violin bows, drum sticks
Timeline
