MuSICK

Note: This article is dedicated to the late Leigh Julian, a.k.a "Leigh Stench," who ran the Smell the Stench netlabel way back in the day, and who always published all of my noise stuff. RIP.

If I can't, as a writer, get my talons into you and carve deep, long grooves into your skull, I'll do what I can to assault your eyes. As a painter.

If that doesn't work, I'm not proud. I'll go one better: I'll tear your fucking ears to shreds.

Been doing it since about 2006, thereabouts. Actually, I started goofing around with punk rock bands and shit as far back as 1994 or 5, but the results were never, ah, really great. I went to college, taking a hiatus from the high school bullshit, and, hot on the heels of graduation (yes, I am, believe it or not, a bonafide recipient of a useless university degree), and fresh from the dissolution of my short-lived marriage, and still reeling from tooling through the netherworlds of a very unique period of spiritual and occult exploration, I started recording "noise music" while I was working as a (get this) substitute teacher. (I know all of my Readers, the two of them, are aghast and agog at the fact that America once trusted Yours Truly with the edumacation of their wee little ones. Yes, yes, I confess, it's all true.)

I had always been fascinated with the recording techniques of Boyd Rice, a.k.a "NON", a pioneering industrial noise maven, Satanist, Darwinist, provocateur, underground culture guru, and all-around Nice Guy Good Citizen, who was reputed (erroneously) to have recorded his first album, the untitled but generally referred to Black Album (sometimes called Boyd Rice's Black Album), which, decades before Metallica hit on the idea, was a vinyl of 85 copies or so that also had a solid black cover, using TAPE RECORDERS. I was assuming that meant those little shoebox affairs that took an actual cassette tape. But no, he used vinyl turntables and reel-to-reel recorders.

Years before, my friend Crissa introduced me to some CDs from a Japanese (Japanoise is the generally agreed-upon genre designation) "noise musician" calling himself MERZBOW. His real name is Masami Akita, and he's been doing this, like Rice, for decades and decades. Unlike Rice, however, his recordings are almost insanely prolific. Merzbow has HUNDREDS of albums and thousands of available recordings, and the two styles of I suppose "noise" couldn't be more different. Boyd has ventured from looped/locked grooves to ambient, and industrial, to even working with pop electronica acts like Hirsute Pursuit and most famously the neo-folk stylings of Death in June.

Merzbow, by contrast, does harsh noise collages that are a true test of psychological endurance. Much of it can be redundant as a listening experience, but some of it incorporates beats and other experimental audio elements that set it apart. Of course, "musique concrete" and Dadaist audio experimentation existed long before these guys came on the scene, but it was never a popularized music genre until the advent of these artists, as well as groups such as Throbbing Gristle and SPK.

I'm not much into it. I prefer to experiment WITH noise than listen TO noise; I'd rather jam Madonna than Massona. (I mean, you know, Eighties Madonna, when she seemed so much more, uh, jammable. ;-)) I'm not crazy about Throbbing Gristle, although I've read most of Cosi's biography and found it fascinating in a weird, utterly surface-level way. (I was more interested in her abusive relationship with her father, which she transferred to an abusive relationship with the late Genesis P-Orridge, and the social scene in Hull, England in the Swinging Sixties pre-punk rock era, than the endless notes of her tours, art exhibitions, etc.) I like a few things from various groups here and there, but I have to be in the mood for a lot of the stuff. Stockhausen and Merzbow, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and Xenakis, and all of it; quite interesting. But music must, first and foremost, be FUN. Again, as it used to say on the old Unpop Art website, FUN IS THE LAW.

Doing "noise" (or, maybe "Noise" as in the sense of the genre) became a way to "reclaim my psychic space." I could take the audio detritus, the random, mundane aural assault of the day-to-day grind of life, and, capturing it, through an alchemical process, I could turn lead to gold (or rather, shit into "music"), and make a verifiable abstract work of arguable "art" out of...nothing. I considered it a form of expression, and release. I could challenge the conventions of traditional music that kept me out, and I had an aural torture device in case I wanted to join the CIA.

The most fun I ever had with noise as a weapon of cultural jamming was the "drop lift project," which started my audio odyssey to begin with. I got the idea from a friend who brought me over a "droplifted" (as opposed to "shoplifted") CD, an anarchic remix of pop tunes, unauthorized and a clear violation of copyright, by audio anarchists. It inspired me with the idea for a prank.

"Droplifted" music (I suppose you could extend this to books and pamphlets as well) were (perhaps still are) CDs dropped at random like pamphlets in various places, so that they may be freely given to whoever finds them; thus subverting the capitalist paradigm of advertise, commercialize, commodify and PROFIT. At least, in theory.

I decided I would do this, and I would do it in such a way as to make it a real larf. I'd record a CD of pure noise, but disguise it to look like a regular pop music anthology. I'd call it EXTREME VOLUME POP, a name I came up at random by just looking around the internet. Almost twenty years later, I'm still using the moniker.

I recorded a lot of bad, computer-generated noise stuff, and slapped a weird-as-hell cover on it (a shot of butchers working at a slaughterhouse back in the Seventies, which was a promo for a drive-in in Muncie, Indiana when they showed Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and left the thing all across town, in coffee houses, libraries, and a few thrift stores and flea markets, etc. Anyway, one day, on my birthday, a couple of friends came over and they'd been walking around downtown Marion when they found a CD in the gutter.

They came in laughing. "Someone has really done a number on this. Look."

And my friend handed me the CD. Someone had thrown it to the pavement, stomped on it, and then turned it over, and used their keys or whatever to carve grooves in it, so it could never be played again. Then I started laughing. My prank had worked. I recognized the sticker on the front. it was MY CD.

It was then that I realized that irritating people had a certain power. I have maintained this philosophy of random absurdity all across my various creative endeavors.

At first, I started doing noise with just a computer, but progressed to keyboards, and hooking together strings of effects pedals and processors. Also, found sounds, turntables, manipulated vinyl recordings, and computer-generated stuff. I posted to the message boards and found the noise scene to be a place with a lot of people flaming and abusing each other, trying to appear "tough," edgy, and cynical, and generally behaving like bad mental fuckups. It kind of grossed me out, actually, but I started sending out packages of tapes, art, and even my self-published writings, and that paid dividends. I often got quite expensive packages in return, from all over the world.

I tried to make MY noise as harsh as possible, as grating on the nerves as I could; or, I did ambient, drones, and creepy, harsh ambient "landscapes" to place behind the mental visualization of your personal nightmares. When I got bored, I recorded Halloween music. When I got bored with everything, I started mashing together noise, punk, metal, jazz, and anything else I could throw into the trash compactor and recording a form of music that was, really, all my own.

I've done albums that were largely vinyl record loops, some which were various loops of me rattling the dishes. I've done walls of harsh noise, and used found sounds and audio recordings taped surreptitiously of the unsuspecting (including one of one quite insane man who seems to be speaking in tongues). I figure I have done close to five hundred recordings; maybe more. One collection of my early recordings features a hundred or so tracks alone.

In the interest of DADA, which demands an art that is confrontational, absurd, even indigestible, I "drone on in His image," (to borrow a phrase from poet Kenneth Sherman's book Words for Elephant Man), and present to you the "Best of My Worst." Taxed, Tarriffed, and Free as the pendulous bollocks of Arthur Rimbaud, who, despite having swallowed a "fabulous draught of poison," still had his balls, and didn't care. (He was also no HAIR BUTTERER, do you understand?)

Here then, are some (anti) musical memories.

LOVE AND NAPALM,

Tom B.

(Alias"Meat Glue," alias"The Glue," alias, "Extreme Volume Pop," alias, "Two-Headed Lamb," alias "Face-Eating Jackson," alias "Wesley Willis Moonfly," etc., etc. for fifteen pages of my State-sanctioned dossier.)

Extreme Volume Pop - "Cacophonous Music of the Living Sphere"

Tom Baker - Musique Concrete and Electronic Sound Four Selections (Full Album) 2015

Extreme Volume Pop - Harsh Noise # 6

Extreme Volume Pop - Maggot Therapy Part 1

When I started doing actual music and mixing everything up. Very jazzy and noisy and metal, together.

Extreme Volume Pop - Two Severed Heads Fighting Over an Ear - Full Album

And seeing as how this IS the anniversary of Saucy Jack's "Double Event," here's Mary Jane Kelly's favorite song (she was singing right before she was brutally killed). Yes, that's me playing the piano and singing.

"A Violet I Plucked from Mother's Grave When I Was but a Boy" I Jack the Ripper 1888

As it says in that old "Twilight Zone" episode, "Room for one more, honey."

Extreme Volume Pop - "Destroying the Human Element"

And that's not the half of it. Not by a mile. Remember: Literally TENS of people have enjoyed this stuff. Below, is my BANDCAMP:

....Wanna trade tapes?

Muhahahahahahhahahhahahahahhahahhahahahha....

(Snort. Giggle. Fart.)