In the beginning it was the rhythm, yes, but then the always grumpy Dave Davies appeared, ripped the speaker of his Elpico AC-52 amplifier with a razor blade and, black magic, the light came on. And the noise. Especially the noise. ‘You Really Got Me’, the youthful ‘angst’ turned into a Herculean guitar riff by the Kinks and distortion as a spigot to release anger and fever. A knockout hum. A glorious outrage. “Pure agitation in tune with the hormonal uproar of some subjects lost in no man’s land,” as Oriol Rosell writes in the first pages of ‘A formidable short circuit. From the Kinks to Merzbow: a noise continuum’ (Alpha Decay), an admirable essay that follows the trail of noise in popular music and evaluates its role as an essentially subversive element throughout the decades. «Noise is a reminder of everything that people cannot do, of what we cannot control or dominate; “It is a shadow of the useless, the unproductive and the absurd,” explains Rosell, a cultural critic raised in the rigors of hardcore and the pirate broadcasts of Radio PICA and eminent professor of Sound Dramaturgy and History and Ethics of Electric Music. Oriol Rosell , author of ‘A formidable short circuit’ ABCBeing a child, Rosell already began to suspect that his thing was the speed of punk and the muscle of hardcore, but ‘Psychocandy’, the wild and poisoned debut of The Jesus & Mary Chain, had to arrive , so that the noise mutated into epiphany and revelation. «Why would anyone want to bury their melodies under such anger? “Why did that noise repel me and not Disorder’s?” he asked himself minutes after trying to return the record and the clerk telling him that that salad of couplings, that hubbub made of ‘feedback’ and electrical noise, was not a accident. It was like that. ON PURPOSE. “When there is something I don’t understand, it doesn’t generate rejection in me, but rather curiosity,” he points out. The songs by Throbbing Gristle, Nocturnal Emissions, Einstürzende Neubauten, SPK and Coil that played in ‘School of Mermaids’ took care of the rest. “Why would anyone want to do something like that?” he asked himself again before those very strange structures, industrial cacophonies without verses or choruses, which barely seemed like songs. A little silence Blessed is the hour, because from those first shocks it has been built a praise of noise that, paradoxical as it may seem, ends up vindicating a little silence. Yes, too much noise. Too much of everything. “We live in a tremendously noisy world, not only at the sound level, so the great challenge, the great transgression, is to choose silence, which is what is continually denied to us,” he explains. Also in art, he assures, emptiness is the last frontier. «There is an absolute panic of silence, so some of the most challenging proposals that can occur on stage are those that play with extremely long silences, because we do not know how to live with that. I don’t think anyone is scared today by noise or distorted sound,” reflects Rosell. Throbbing Gristle, ABC industrial scrapyard It wasn’t always like this, so ‘A formidable short circuit’ is also a review of all those moments in which Noise has been an engine of change, a countercultural hammer or a simple roller coaster from which to emerge disheveled and happily decomposed. From the cerebral avant-garde of Russolo, Schaffer and Cage to the industrial scrapping of Throbbing Gristle. From that first Kinks blast to the decibel cult and Manowar’s loincloth. And, above all, from buzzing free will to rebellion institutionalized by the distortion pedal. «It is the definitive control device. Do you want the revolution? We sell it to you, but with the seal of the Gibson or Vox brand,” says Rossell ironically. It is no coincidence, he adds, that months after ‘You Really Got Me’ came ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, a Rolling Stones anthem recorded with a Maestro FZ-1, the first fuzz pedal marketed by Gibson. . “In the context of youth music, the ultimate negative commodity,” writes the author. In this praise (and sometimes also condemnation) of noise as an empowering agent, seed of chaos, bearer of evil, celebration of foolishness and vernacular of anger, the protagonists are not Rosell’s favorites, but rather those who best help him explain himself. Those that most clearly show the relationship between music and noise and draw that ‘continuum’ that goes from the furious strumming of ‘You Really Got Me’ to the merciless drone of Merzbow. This is the case, to name a few, of Whitehouse, Mayhem or Hijokaidan, names that, from nightmarish electronica, wild black metal or japanoise, feed that idea of noise as a “wild shadow of desires.” «In some ways it is also a residue of pop culture; something that, like subcultures, was not foreseen when pop culture was born. It is an attempt to conquer something that has been given to you and in which you have never been allowed to participate,” he explains. Related News Standard MUSIC Si Genesis P-Orridge: self-help manual to destroy civilization Javier Villuendas Caja Negra publishes the memoirs of one of the key figures of the counterculture of the last half century. Exemplary are, in this sense, the chapters dedicated to heavy metal and its conquest of thunderous volume as a way of standing up to authority. «Talking about noise and distortion and ignoring heavy metal is idiotic; It is the most popular noisy expression, the one that most people know or have heard. Furthermore, after the skinhead movement there is nothing more ‘working class’ than heavy music,” notes Rosell. Noise, writes the journalist and cultural critic Javier Blánquez in the book’s prologue, “is a metaphor for power, for revolt, of the denial of the norm. Furthermore, he adds, it is inevitable. It’s everywhere. And yet, Rosell concludes, he will never be able to win. Nor fail. «The sound that cannot be controlled is reduced to marginality and will never be able to emerge from there. Basically because when the proposal is so extreme it is very difficult for it to be incorporated, conveniently decaffeinated, into the aesthetics of the mainstream,” he says.
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