Music is just organised noise - the degree of organisation is where the arguments start. One person’s migraine-inducing cacophony is another person’s emotional, spirit-touching experience. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the genre of noise music, which eschews traditional musical structures and sounds for extreme distortion, howling feedback and violent volume.
As practiced by artists like Merzbow, Pharmakon and Winterkälte, with a history that includes luminaries like Throbbing Gristle, SPK and Iannis Xenakis, noise music is an often brutal - some may say brutally beautiful - genre.
