The Trouble With Noise

So Daniel, one of the guys i work with, came over to my desk about a month ago wanting me to listen to something, a band he'd come across - kind of a 'Hey, these guys got a record deal so anything's possible' joking around sort of thing. He's like, "You gotta check out this band Skullflower, it's absolutely fuckin' horrible!" So I put on the headphones and was ATTACKED by what sounded like the highest frequencies of cymbal crashes and guitar feedback. Kind of like one of those Sonic Youth noise pieces they'll slip into their songs only more dense and assaulting... Less like music and more like a construction site amplified or the sound of a twenty car pile up in slow motion. It was an imediately oppressive and painful blanket of tingling noise that caused my face to bunch up in an ugly grimace. Daniel laughed and walked away, feeling confident in my disgust. But after he left i kept listening. I couldn't turn it off. I listened to each of the nine tracks on the album (which is called Tribulation, by the way, and came out this year on Crucial Blast Records) and then went back and listened to them all again.

Since then I've gone back to Tribulation many more times and despite the fact that I feel complelled to listen repeatedly I still can't tell whether I like this shit or not. This is the trouble with noise - it's so hard to tell brilliance from sheer laziness and stupidity. It's art that tests our capacity for acceptance of art. Like John Cage's forrays into organized silence, noise art forces us to question where the boundaries of music lay. And that's all good but it's just a fancy way of talking around the big question at hand: is this stuff any good? Well I still can't say with any certainty that noise art, or even this Skullflower stuff is good, but I CAN say their album, Tribulation, has caught my attention and held it better than any other noise oriented work I've been exposed to from Merzbow to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music to contemporaries like Wolf Eyes... Tribulation is a deeply textured and forcefully earsplitting record that achieves psychedelia in a way that's entirely different than any 'psychedelic' music of the past. If your looking for melody or structure or anything that even remotely makes sense you won't find it here - but you may find something that mystifies you enough to keep listening.