Yes, the question is more of a philosophical query opposed to the more straightforward give me the secret recipe type inquest.

When it comes to making music in the vein of Noise, Harsh Noise, Power Electronics, Death Industrial, one may find that artists' deployment of post-production refinements vary greatly. Some artists make well crafted, dynamic, rich environments. Meanwhile, others let the clipping go so hard it will make your monitors cones do jumping jacks like a damn trampoline. My question is, are you a producer/ engineer who has a particular set of bases to cover or tools to employ in their experience to fundamentally bring some order and fidelity into this madness?
I focus firstly on phase personally. I run very little actual post-production tools, when the initial performance and mix can often be captured in real time, rather than pieced together like traditionally structured music.
Furthermore, I am just curious to see any hands on the topic come up from the noise dungeons to put in their 2 cents.

Noise is limitless and uninhibited by “rules of musicality”, the amount of detail you wish to create is truly the demarcation line for most artists who are noise heads.
There are those who love the oppressive doldrums hum of burgeoning Harsh Noise Walls, some artists are rooted in industrial beats and pass for closely relatable common digestible acts. Some marry dark ambient soundscape cinematic with assaulting weaponized synths and bleed out squelching resonance into reverberation oceans. My overarching consensus is that a love of texture is what bundles us all into our obtuse and unusual taste strata, as “Music” is based in structure, and can utilize elements of “Texture”. Quite the opposite is true in my observation that “Noise” is rooted in Texture and can utilize elements of structure from traditional theory.

Mass Graven Image.

 

Hi @massgravenimage, exciting topic, here are a few thoughts from me, the topic is so big, you can talk about it for months.

Recording studio:
The artist pays for the mastering and expects the studio to get the best out of his production. The mastering professional has only the task to mix it the way the artist wants it and to make it usable for duplication and use like internet, CD, record, TV and radio. As a mastering professional you are not the artist and it is not your place to judge the music.

Noise:
What is noise for one person is music for another. What is music to one person is noise to another.
It is the creative, artistic freedom of man to create something - whether the good or bad does not matter. Creatively you are already, if you as a child, with a cooking spoon on a pot beats and sound waves produces. If you are older and have a DAW, you can record these pot beats, 4/4 time - tempo 140 and a few effects to a base drum and ready is the techno song. Whether you can reach the charts or earn money with it, I do not believe.

So far it has been shown that inharmonic and noise sounds do not last long and end up in the garbage, because no one likes to hear it or buys it. It's also a question of where you grew up and whether you had access to such music as a teenager and whether you like it or not.

The song is from me:

Spoiler: Videos

Throbbing Gristle (Re-TG)-At The Astoria Theatre, London 2004-05-16 (First Part)

Front Line Assembly - The Initial Command

Skinny Puppy - Cleanse Fold and Manipulate (Full Album) [1987]

EDIT: I just heard your music, I like it - do you have a link to your music?

 

Last edited: Jan 22, 2023

Whatever makes it sound right.

 

At some point you have to differ to artistic intent.

Balance and package the lot so that it translates across as many playback scenarios as possible and allow the creators intent to pass through.

When you dealing with something esoteric or avant-garde it's usually best not to let your personal judgement interfere too much into what sounds best and just allow whatever came through with only necessary changes for technical reasons.

 

it is not more an oxymoron than having the concept of making postconceptual music.

 

I'd even say all kind of industrial and noise stuff needs a very talented mastering engeneer.
These are somethimes quite unbalanced mixes that need to be treated heavily to make the most of it.

 

I am in absolute agreement with you inasmuch that any matter of personal taste is according to the beholders' threshold of experience and what conveys pleasurable input or contrary thereof. In axiom that is a generally sound assumption of humanities experience and is applicable to anything according to the singular individual. I mean, I can imagine due to the existence of let alone the band but Dominatrix professionals that some dudes are beholden to cock and ball torture as a sexual proclivity NO, THANKS! I'M ALL GOOD. Yet, the same individual will be in an agonized contortion riding five minutes in the car with me while I am road testing a new release. A strange dichotomy, but all too familiar and real in my assessment.
Secondly, I think you are making a valid point, and a discerning one at that. Although I wasn't involved or exploring harsh noise, P.E. or those specialized subcultures of music as a teenager, (that discovery come into my life in my late 20s purely by happenstance at SXSW.)
I was into darker music early, like metal / punk / grind, and as time went forward more obscure and extreme representatives of those genres.
The beauty and most interesting allure to the H.N. / P.E. scene for me is, Electronic music has always held a very special place in my world of preference. Aphex Twin, The Prodigy, Boards of Canada, they all had a significant place in my time space of musical consumption and enjoyment.
Through those influences I started to learn how to make my own music, I went with a puritanical techno/ dnb sound in my formative days of making music. ( SoundCloud has all those works still and is excluded of my other noise works)

I will wrap all this non-important trash up with this idea to lend out for pondering among the thread. A great deal of imagination or unparalleled gift of ability is required in order to not, ultimately, be the conceptual bastard children of all original acts of meaning and merit before oneself. Most musicians are confined by the depth of a predecessor's vision to emulate and reorient to our personal narratives, so to say.
What if as we are approaching a crescendo of potentiality applicable to the invention of conceptual abstractions of any given style of music.
I will give Polyphia (Tim Henson?) as an example that I can say with a confidence that they at least were trend setting stewards of a whole new paradigm in guitar skill and structuring. If you are not fallowing, and I am not putting this concept in clear terms, forgive me.

Massgravenimage

OH and cool track btw!

 

Hello @massgravenimage, i look forward to your input and experiences.
P.S.: If you answer please do not write into the quote, but below it. Can you change that again, your valuable contribution can be read badly.

If you grow up in the ghetto in the USA, for example, and hear the same hip-hop rap everywhere, how can you develop your own musical thinking? That's why every song sounds somehow the same. Somehow it's always the same brainwashing.

You were like me and some others a "seeker", one knew instinctively, there is still more to music and expressiveness. The garbage from the radio, that can not have been it yet. I heard a program called Grenzwellen, where the editor interviewed and introduced new bands. Then I bought their records, friends of mine had brought me music from England, which was not heard anywhere here at first. So I broadened my musical horizon.

I was also interested in film music. In the credits of some movies I wrote down the bands and researched. I bought a synthesizer and explored sound possibilities. I would take samples of videos and cut them up again freely following the motto of Dadaism, cut it up, glue it back together and look at the random result.

I think you should also read something about music. Because you can only think what you have heard or read.
There are great interviews by Klaus Schulze. https://www.klaus-schulze.com/interv/welcome.htm

I would consider myself a sound explorer - here is my website: http://ohlenbostelhelge.magix.net/public/

 

Personally my job is to organize the chaos..

 

Thats an interesting idea! I appreciate the feedback!

 

I would like to make clear that I am not a music professional / professor or theorist, my views are simple opinions, uneducated guesses and personal bias. Furthermore, I do not know anything and am always interested in learning more than I could ever demonstrate as being right from my way of doing things.

Cool, I will definitely look into the link you had posted here. I was mostly amused by the odd subject material that you had chosen to use for a theme, and love the NOAA or National Emergency Alert style robot voice used. Now you lastly said, “I would consider myself a sound explorer"
I have a sense of complete wonderment and dumbfounded awe when I watch videos of producers who are highly adept at using Euro rack modular rigs, especially massive ones. I have the belief that those tools are able to possibly create sounds that have not existed yet, perhaps? I hear artists like Richard Devine or other producers on the far end of abstract IDM / electronic, and they are able sometimes to make living bubbling creatures out of the complex and seemingly limitless possibilities. Do you use those type of systems to create? what kinds of synths do you own?

Any who. I will look at your links and get back to you on any feedback.

 

I am enjoying this. Different. I gave you a fallow. Are you familiar with another french artist Couronne de Merde? a very interesting act. Cheers!

 

I made 201 sound sets with 125 different synthesizers.

Sonic Sirius - Synthesizer Soundsets
Freeware Soundsets for Software and Hardware Synthesizer
http://ohlenbostelhelge.magix.net/public/
https://audiosex.pro/threads/sonic-sirius-200-synthesizer-soundsets-from-2010-to-2022-free.61484/

 

Last edited: Jan 24, 2023

thank you for your opinion .. no I do not know at all I will go and look for it.

 

I'm listening to Couronne de Merde right now, I hear music full of anger for the message conveyed.. interesting indeed. Mine is above all inhabited by a spirit of transcendence, at least that's what I try to convey. Attempt to open the listener to another metaphysical dimension. Ambitious isn't it??