The WKCR Noise Festival
An interview with Organizers Matt Moses and Susie Jae
by Jessica Rylan
At midnight on Monday 29 July, WKCR-FM (Columbia University’s station) plunged into a seventy-two hour noise orgy. WKCR has jazz festivals once or twice a month, and a week-long Bach festival every Christmas, but their noise orgy was a first. (As far as anyone knows, a first for any station ever.) I was happily shocked that they would devote three days to a genre that most people don’t consider music. Organizers Matt Moses and Susie Jae took a very democratic approach to the question: “Is noise music? Of course it is. Why? Well, the people who make it call it music…” The station manager, April Salazar, was a little more highbrow: “While [the music of Noise] may not be immediately appealing to many of our listeners, its compositional ideas have been extremely influential on contemporary New Music.”
The festival was equally divided between live performances and recordings. There were tributes to “noise heroes” Merzbow, Masonna, Borbetomagus, and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, and segments focussing on different noise genres. There was the trashy, improvised noise set (e.g. Hijokaidan, Dog, and Cock ESP), the beautiful noise set (including an in-studio performance by Michigan’s D.L. Savings T.X.), the misogynist noise set (e.g. Macronympha, Whitehouse, Taint), and noise by women (Azita, Christine 23 Onna, and Monotrona). I found Matt and Susie camped out (literally) in the WKCR studio, deep inside the beautiful Riverside Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Also present for the conversation was author and new music aficionado Cole Gagne, who’s interviewed Conlon Nancarrow, Sun Ra, Morton Feldman, et. al.
How did you get into noise?
Matt: I grew up in Connecticut, and there was one record store that was vaguely hip. One day this guy there said “I just got in this CD and it sounds like a car crash slowed down and extended for forty-five minutes.” At the time, I was like, wow, this is the end of music, this is the most extreme thing in the world. Now I think it wears thin, to be honest.
Susie: I fell into it backwards. I started out as a really big indie-rock fan. And slowly you make these connections, like Gastr del Sol and Jim O’Rourke’s solo stuff, which is extremely conceptual. I grew into appreciating noise, it wasn’t any sort of immediate, visceral thing for me.
Matt: It’s a small community, but once you fall into part of it… Next thing you know, everyone’s giving you something to listen to.
Do you think of noise as being ultimately low-brow or ultimately high-brow?
Matt: (laughter) There’re no absolutes going on with this kind of music.
Cole: Has the festival included Cage and Stockhausen as well, or Varese. . .
Matt: No. Last year we did twenty-four hours of Stockhausen, on his birthday. And we’ve done week-long things for John Cage.
Susie: And a half day of Xenakis.
Cole: But those projects are all outside of the purview of this festival.
Matt: Well, they’re not really approaches to noise as noise.
I think of it as music produced organically versus broken electronics.
Matt: We’ve played some stuff that is organic, or even acoustic, just altered. But when the composer makes stuff that sounds like noise I think there’s something different behind it. What, I can’t say.
How have you organized the live performances?
Matt: We’re having ten bands in person, and twenty bands in spirit, over the telephone.
Susie: But we have to call them, because of the phone bills. We had Mlehst from Britain, Stillupsteypa from Iceland…
Matt: Spastic Colon told me they were going to play very quietly over the phone, but they misunderstood my directions to hold the line while I hooked them in. I turned them on and it was this really quiet tone that built for forty minutes, but only got a little bit louder. I was like, ‘Okay, it’s conceptual. Though it’s gone on a little too long.’ Then I got a phone call from them: ‘Hey! When are you calling us back?’
Susie: They’d accidentally hung up.
Then did you have them do a real performance?
Matt: Yeah, I announced it as one actual, and one conceptual. Last night we had a band play who were so loud, when I left this studio to go into the main control room, the people there were bobbing their heads with the volume off.
Susie: Everything was shaking.
When I saw E.A.R., my right ear hurt for three days.
Matt: My ears have been hurting since ten o’clock Monday night, and now it’s Thursday.
Can we talk about misogyny in the noise scene?
Matt: There’s something about noise that a lot of people find inherently violent. Early along, maybe cause of Whitehouse, it became sex and violence.
Susie: I guess they thought the combination would be more visceral. I actually think all that bondage imagery started with Merzbow, cause Masami Akita has a strong background in ritual bondage history.
Matt: He makes his living writing bondage literature… sort of highbrow bondage porn.
Susie: He’s a scholar of it. Somehow that took off. I think by now it’s gotten very tired, and that’s why people have stopped focusing on women and moved on to children.
Does Peter Sotos have anything to do with that?
Susie: I don’t think anyone takes him seriously at this point.
Matt: Those zines (Pure) were pretty widely circulated when they came out. Some of my friends…uh, acquaintances in the noise community were swearing by it.
His book (Total Abuse, Goad to Hell Enterprises) got banned from Tower Records in Boston, because some guy who was a ritual abuse survivor read it and got freaked out and wrote a letter to the president of Tower. I got a copy because my friend who worked there grabbed a couple when they were throwing it out. So a month after that they had their “Banned Books Week” display, and of course that wasn’t in the window!
Matt: It’s an important book.
Susie: For someone who can’t write.
You’ve been sleeping in the studio, right?
Matt: I’ve been living the noise lifestyle. People play concerts in my bedroom.
Susie: It’s not as attractive or as exciting as you might believe.
Matt: But we’re doing it for the kids! We’ve been working on this since April, but for the past month our hair has been pulled out strand by strand to get this done.
Susie: So we’re bald.
Matt: You’ll notice in the pictures accompanying this article that we’re wearing wigs.
At this point, Boston’s Dan Six started doing their sound check, and I couldn’t make out any more of what was on the tape. Matt told me that “Some crazy kid from Michigan” has offered to release the entire festival as a twenty-tape box set. However, they’re hoping that someone else will put out a best-of LP, in “a more abridged and listenable version.” You can contact them at wkcr@columbia.edu, or WKCR-FM, 490 Riverside Drive, NYC 10027.
