Anti-Music

With practically every man and his dog currently making music of some sort, it gets to the point where you wonder if it’s even possible for anyone to make anything that’s different anymore. And with so much “product” oriented music being generated, one really gets sick of how perfect everything sounds these days. I’ve found that an interesting and enjoyable alternative to being jaded is to expose one’s self to any number of artists working in the varied fields of anti-music.

Anti-music is nothing terribly new, but it certainly receives a lot less publicity than the Taylor Swifts of the world. But there are a myriad of artists forging ahead with sound and texture, creating music that has as little to do with tradition as it does to the entertainment industry. There have always been composers who wanted to work from different stock to their peers; names like Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varese, Iannus Xenakis, Igor Stravinsky, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, Anton Webern and John Cage come to mind. And there were the Futurists, led by Filippo Marinetti, who famously proclaimed “We want no part of it, the past.”

Futurism and it’s obsession with mechanical noises climaxed in a series of performances around Russia in the 1920s by composer Arseni Avramov, who had written pieces for live artillery, the navy, infantry, tanks, a machine gun division, hydroplanes and factory and ship sirens. Fast forward this intense repudiation of music to the 1970s and we find nihilistic composition occurring from one side of the world to the next. As Lou Reed was outraging Velvet Underground fans with his bleak Metal Machine Music, Throbbing Gristle made the transition from performance art and underground film to musical “demonstrations” which more often than not involved altercations with the audience. The group swiftly became notorious following a performance that degenerated into a riot.

Throbbing Gristle were of devastating importance to music as we know it. Aside from founding the movement of Industrial Music (albeit unwittingly, as the offshoots of the genre often perplexed and dismayed the group) they were revolutionary in that none of them were musicians. Working with a foundation of electronics wizardry, cynical intellect, sexual deviance and staunch non-conformist ethics they set about turning society on its head. Rejecting Capitalism, they issued their albums in blank sleeves and cheesy bargain-bin style jackets, communicated with the press via messages printed on buttons and with fans via newsletters, cards and catalogs. Their importance was clearly demonstrated when a member of British parliament labeled them “wreckers of civilization” following the aforementioned riot.

Punk emerged shortly after TG, continuing the concept of non-musicians as musicians and reactionary politics as the primary source of material. Chris Watson left Cabaret Voltaire and formed The Hafler Trio, who saw their existence as being purely for the purpose of acoustic research and were interested in “revealing these effects to the listener, making them conscious of the effects that particular sounds are having on them and finding ways that these effects can be utilized for positive ends.”Australia became involved via several very important figures emerging from the underground scenes here (although often migrating overseas in order to connect with like-minded artists). Antipodeans Jim Thirlwell, SPK and John Watermann (RIP) are still renowned and highly influential figures today.

Reactionary music continues on in the new wave, spurred by left-field labels such as Warp, Mute and Beta Lactam Ring. Autechre, Murcof, SoiSong, Nurse With Wound, Merzbow, Pole, Richie Hawtin/Plastikman, :zoviet*france:, CoH and even David Lynch continue to take music to places it hasn’t gone before and help us to find new forms of expression outside the banal and hackneyed paths trodden by ninety percent of today’s performing artists. All considered, there is as much fresh and inspiring music out there as one could possibly hope to find; all we need do is widen our nets and open our ears.