Fight Your Own War

These are sample pages from a Headpress book copyright Š Headpress 2016

For more information or to buy a copy of the book visit www.worldheadpress.com

FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR Power Electronics and Noise Culture Edited by Jennifer Wallis

A Headpress Book

FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR Contents Foreword Introduction

Mike Dando....................................................................... 1 Jennifer Wallis ...................................................................3 PART I: SCENES

The Genesis of Power Electronics in the UK Philip Taylor ................................................................... 10 Maurizio Bianchi: Symphony for a Genocide Andrew Cooke ................................................................ 19 The Rise of Power Electronics in Finland Mikko Aspa ..................................................................... 21 RJF: Greater Success in Apprehension & Convictions and Blood Ov Thee Christ: Master Control Richard Stevenson ......................................................... 30 Order of the Boot. Interdiction by Force: Streicher and the Growth of Power Electronics in Australia Ulex Xane ....................................................................... 32 Streicher: Annihilism and Kulmhof: Morality’s Simulacra Richard Stevenson ......................................................... 40 Chronicling US Noise and Power Electronics Scott E. Candey.............................................................. 42 Werewolf Jerusalem: Confessions of a Sex Maniac Grant Hobson ................................................................. 62 A Physical Legacy: The Enduring Role of Underground Zines.

Some personal musings from the creator of Spectrum Magazine and Noise Receptor Journal Richard Stevenson ......................................................... 65 PART II: EXPERIENCE AND PERFORMANCE The Power of Performance Nathan Clemence .......................................................... 74 Consumer Electronics: Estuary English Richard Stevenson ......................................................... 91 “The Horror! The Horror!” Leeds Termite Club and British Noise History d foist.............................................................................. 93 The Bongoleeros: The Fat Arse’d Report Tom Bench ................................................................... 112

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Power Electronics and Noise Culture

Power [Electronics]: Exploring Liveness in Japanese Noise Daniel Wilson................................................................ 115 Hijokaidan: Emergency Stairway to Heaven Duncan Taylor .............................................................. 134 Listening to the Void: Harsh Noise Walls Clive Henry ................................................................... 137 Sounding the Abyss: Schloss Tegal’s Black Static Transmission Stephen Sennitt .......................................................... 155 The Creative Process of Uneasy Listening: Noise from the Deathtripping Perspective Nick Nihilist .................................................................. 159 Stalker Process Bindweed ...................................................................... 166 Noise, Rhythm, and Excess from Whitehouse to Cut Hands Jack Sargeant .............................................................. 168 PART III: READINGS Questionable Intent: The Meaning and Message of Power Electronics Richard Stevenson ....................................................... 176 Genocide Organ: 虐殺機関 and The Grey Wolves: Blood and Sand Richard Stevenson ....................................................... 185 Object Histories. The Black (Visual) Economy of Power Electronics Jennifer Wallis .............................................................. 187 The Servitudes of Slapstick: A Comedy of Violence Spencer Grady ............................................................. 199 Farce the First Time Round? Encountering Noise as Comedy Paul Margree ................................................................ 212 BRUT — The Killjoy of ‘White’ Noise Sonia Dietrich............................................................... 219 Dave Phillips: 6 Clive Henry ................................................................... 229 Talking about Noise: The Limits of Language Kevin Matthew Jones ................................................... 235 Selected further reading ........................................................................240 Photographer links .................................................................................240 Editor’s acknowledgements ..................................................................241 Contributor notes...................................................................................241 Index .................................................................................... 245

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INTRODUCTION Jennifer Wallis

FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR

“W

ho the hell needs a book about power electronics?”

That was a question I was asked more than once while putting together the volume you now hold in your hands: who needed a book-length account of an apparently niche music scene when you could access countless blog posts and YouTube videos online? The idea that print has been made redundant by the internet is — as many contributors to this book emphasise — grossly simplistic, but there were other reasons for doing this besides the desire to produce a tangible physical thing. First and foremost, I’m a fan of power electronics. There’s nothing I fi nd more calming than coming home to listen to a particularly nasty bit of Steel Hook Prostheses or Navicon Torture Technologies, or blocking out the noise of the offi ce and the din of public transport with my own, harsher, noise.

A second reason, though, was that although power electronics is extensively documented in zine and web format, no book currently exists in the English language that deals with the genre. In consequence, accounts of it by many music writers and academics tend not to delve beyond surface appearances, or to actively seek the input of artists. Hence, the widespread view of power electronics as a group of (mostly male) socially unaware, jackbooted fascists with an unhealthy interest in death, murder, and sexual sadism. Of course a few of these do exist, in the same way that there are a few Marilyn Manson fans who take their MTV-friendly fascistic chic rather more seriously than most, but generalisation seems particularly rife when it comes to power electronics and its associated scenes. In The Lyre of Orpheus (2014), Christopher Partridge notes that the sense of ‘evil’ surrounding early industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle was imagined as a kind of polluting infl uence, tainting any other people or institutions with which the artists were involved, and the same is often true today in relation to power electronics and its fans.1 Yet existing publications dealing with noise or power electronics rarely include the voices of artists or fans themselves. Does this matter? Do you need — as one friend challenged me — to speak to every actor and director to write about fi lm? Considering that what power electronics is ‘about’ has been the preoccupation of so many writers and music journalists — Are they all just over-grown teenagers acting out to shock people, or should we be taking all that right-wing imagery and talk of butchering whores rather more seriously? — then I think it is important that those artist and fan perspectives are given broader coverage.

Of course, we can’t say that power electronics hasn’t brought this on itself.

Marco Deplano, of Italian project Wertham, is critical of artists ‘who attempt to provoke extreme reactions by using dangerous topics and then … complain about negative reactions’.2 The genre has made a career out of being as aggressive, disruptive, and confrontational as possible. At the same time it has made a virtue of its distraction tactics. This was evident from the earliest days of power electronics as soon as Whitehouse chose to name themselves after crusader against media ‘fi lth’ Mary Whitehouse (and a top-shelf magazine of the

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Power Electronics and Noise Culture same name, itself a cheeky anti-tribute to poor old Mary). This refusal to present a clear line of argument, and the alignment of oneself with those you disagree with, clearly frustrates commentators who struggle to handle the genre’s ‘apparent glorifi cation of anti-social behavior, pathology and the nihilistic fringe elements within post-industrial society’.3 One of the few academics writing excellent, informed, accounts of power electronics in recent years, Andrew Whelan, has noted that being off ended seems to be the ‘default position’ when discussing the genre, and that many writers on power electronics ‘(mis)take aesthetics for politics, and politics for analysis’.4 The absurdist element of some noise and the adoption of personas — wearing masks, for example — immediately complicate the idea that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Noise artist and owner of Swedish label Segerhuva, Tommy Carlsson, astutely observes that proclaiming the noise scene to be a cliché — obsessed with misogyny, violence etc. — has itself become a cliché.5 Certainly projects like Blackhouse — rhythmic industrial sound with a Christian message — give the lie to the idea that it’s all gratuitous sex and death.

It’s perhaps the ambiguousness of power electronics that is most threatening to its detractors. Whether your projected stance is ironic, deadly serious, or done for comedic eff ect, listeners are in the privileged position of being able to make of it what they will. This works both ways: you can dismiss the screaming wrath and dark aesthetics as nothing more than a vulgar burlesque, or take it at face value (or, like many fans, stand somewhere in between). However, as some of the chapters in this book suggest, it’s doubtful that power electronics poses the grave threat that critics often credit it with. ‘Transgression’ is not a permanent state, but a moment: a boundary is transgressed. Just as noise stops being ‘noise’ (i.e. unwanted) for some listeners,6 what is initially labelled as ‘transgression’ ceases to be so when it is repeatedly employed over a long period. Noise and power electronics also relies heavily on popular culture to inform its transgressions. It might be viewed as being somewhat obsessed with the mainstream, as one author suggested to me during the construction of this book, but in pursuing that ‘obsession’ power electronics secures a space for itself that ensures its exclusivity. No one is going to hear Iron Fist of the Sun or Deathpile in a shopping mall or a coff ee shop, and thank god for that.

This book, then, collects together writings and reviews from a number of fans, critics, and artists themselves. The aim isn’t to present some grand theory about power electronics, to defi ne it, or provide an answer to what it’s ‘doing’.

It’s to bring together several voices to provide recent histories of the genre and snapshots of how people see it now, both positively and negatively. The defi nition of power electronics is broad, hence the recognition also of ‘noise’.7 While some readers will disagree with the inclusion of noise acts like The Bongoleeros, or the ‘Japanoise’ of Incapacitants, they appear here in refl ection of the fact that many of us will listen to these other subgenres alongside power electronics, that they may share bills with power electronics artists, and that many artists themselves will cross these boundaries in their work.

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FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR The design of the book intentionally echoes that of zines, but unlike many traditional zines there is no united front or political position.8 The reader can dip in and out of the book as they wish, reading the chapters in any order.

Part I: Scenes presents perspectives on the development of power electronics in the UK, Finland, Australia, and America from those who were — and are — there. Part II: Experience and Performance focuses on power electronics and noise as a live event, from pubs in the north of England to Japanese Live Houses. This section also considers what noise does for the performer and the listener, in terms of eff ects on the body, psychological release, and even spiritual experience. Throughout Parts I and II, most chapters are paired with a relevant review, and I recommend reading both together. Part III: Readings addresses some of the more contentious points surrounding power electronics: the diffi culty of decoding its confl icting messages, its thematic and visual preoccupations, and its comedic potential.

As with any book dealing with music, there are gaps. As a snapshot rather than an encyclopedia, it has been impossible to cover everything and certain labels, acts, and individuals are conspicuous by their absence. The Grey Wolves are less prominent than they should be and artists like Mauthausen Orchestra and Le Syndicat are absent, as are recent key players such as Danish label Posh Isolation or UK-based Unrest Productions. Gaya Donadio, responsible for putting on a large number of gigs in and around London, has been a key fi gure in the scene — her eff orts could easily fi ll a companion chapter to that by d foist on the Leeds Termite Club. Power electronics is a continually growing fi eld (some view this in a critical light, with the ability to make and distribute music leading to a ridiculous amount of sometimes sub-standard material), and there are some recent arrivals to the scene worthy of special mention: the neatly-crafted fi erceness of Am Not, for example, or American tape-based label Fieldwork.

There are no clear answers here as to what power electronics ‘is’ or what it stands for, and neither should there be. The book does not speak for the genre as a whole, but for those individual voices that are contained within it. Power electronics is, to me, less a ‘collective’ than a group of people using noise to articulate their own, often very personal, ideas and agendas. Some of the writers would, I’m sure, disagree with each other. Whilst I recognise the humour of some power electronics as articulated in Spencer Grady’s damning, hilarious, and wonderfully written account of power electronics as comedy, the strong misogynistic current that Sonia Dietrich describes in her piece is more alien to me — a disjuncture that serves to highlight the varied personal experiences and readings of power electronics. I’m fairly comfortable with power electronics’ controversies and contradictions, if not entirely uncritical of them. How far would ‘power electronics’ still be ‘power electronics’ if it was somehow sanitised and homogenised? It’s supposed to be challenging. Noise has been described by more than one author as both everything and nothing: it can carry excessive meaning or no meaning at all. It allows both the artist and the listener — paraphrasing Genocide Organ — to ‘Go your own way. Fight your own war.’

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Power Electronics and Noise Culture NOTES

Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, the Sacred, and the Profane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p.83.

2 ‘Wertham’, Noise Receptor Journal, 3 (2015), pages unnumbered.

3 Thomas Bey William Bailey, Micro-Bionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century (London: Creation Books, 2009), p.31.

4 Andrew Whelan, ‘Power Electronics and Conventionally Transgressive Assembly Work’, in Scott Wilson (ed.), Music at the Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream (Jeff erson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015), p.63, p.67. Among these few academics I include Paul Hegarty, whose Noise/Music: A History (2007) should be read by everyone with even a passing interest in the genre.

5 ‘Treriksröset/Tommy Carlsson’, interview by Mikko Aspa, trans. Andrew MacIntosh, Special Interests, 6 (2011), p.7.

6 Paul Hegarty, ‘Brace and embrace: Masochism in noise performance’, in Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle (eds), Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p.133.

7 Paul Hegarty’s defi nition of power electronics: ‘initially (c.1980), it applies [sic] to music based on synths, electronic machinery, often with use of eff ects and samples, and connected to ‘extreme’ events, characters, obsessions.’ Paul Hegarty, Noise/ Music: A History (London: Continuum, 2007), p.121.

8 Some took the harking back to pre-digital days a little too seriously. This book would have included a piece by one of the members of Smell & Quim, were it not for the fact that he posted the sole — handwritten — copy of his chapter to me, which was promptly lost in the post.

9 Available online at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/noises.html 1

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PART I: SCENES

THE GENESIS OF POWER ELECTRONICS IN THE UK Philip Taylor

These are sample pages from a Headpress book copyright Š Headpress 2016

For more information or to buy a copy of the book visit www.worldheadpress.com