Deep within the nether regions of the audio arts underground, there lurks a sub-genre known as “harsh noise walls” (or “HNW” for those who like the additional sprinkle of insider clandestinity provided by the acronym). This material sounds, for the most part, exactly as you could probably imagine from the moniker: undifferentiated, often untitled slabs of monochrome static. Imagine if the classic parental whine of “that’s just a bunch of noise” was a purely empirical observation rather than a subjective statement of critical approbation - and you are almost there. With harsh noise walls, the name implies all there is or indeed was meant to be: if nothing else, the anti-dynamism baked into the genre reveals just how much their forerunners in noise-as-music at least offered dramatic contrasts in tone color and texture. Compared with the purest distillations of sound within HNW, heroes of noise-dom like Hijokaidan or Merzbow may as well be Weather Report.
HNW scene mainstays such as Vomir take a cue from the affirmations of self-abnegation scrawled on cassettes released by reclusive black metal artists (“no fun, “no production”, etc.), and raise the stakes of nihilist purity still further: select HNW artists make bold proclamations such as “No dynamics, no change, no development, no ideas” on the grayscale standards they take with them into battle. The uninitiated will probably wonder: what value does any of this have philosophically or aesthetically? Is it truly a confirmation of Lucretius’ “nothing giving rise to nothing”, or can it, in spite of itself, spawn new forms ex nihilo? Is there some profound affirmation of vitality concealed within this demoralizing will-to-nothingness? If not, how well does it accelerate our understanding of an inevitable meeting with death?
I doubt my solitary act of running my mouth will provide the decisive answer to any of these questions, but there have already been plenty of critical commentaries on the value of uniform nothingness as an artistic statement: just look to other artistic forms that have made a static expression or non-action act as an authoritative statement on aesthetics and The Truth. Rudolf Arnheim, in his landmark essay Entropy and Art, cast a wary eye on such statements, noting that “in the extreme case,” “mere noise” would “reach the emptiness of homogeneity.”1 Others anticipated, in critiques of abstract sculpture, the use of “inflated physical scale” to compensate for “diminution of imaginative energy,”2 a dismissal that also feels applicable to HNW’s impenetrable sound barriers, themselves representing a similarly static void that these de-vitalizing transmissions pay obeisance to.
HNW fans and producers would, I imagine, claim that this material is not intended as “art” and therefore anyone attempting to critique it as aesthetic experience is on a fool’s errand. In this respect, though, the style isn’t so much a break with the accomplishments of the so-called noise music as a paradigm repetition with diminishing returns (The New Blockaders anticipated most, if not all, of the programmatic nihilism orbiting the HNW-sphere, famously claiming that “even anti-art is art, and that is why we reject it”).
At a stretch, the proud alignment with a virtuous nothingness / pointlessness is also not different from the established noise underground’s notable associations with sadomasochism. The audio assaults of “power electronics” were often designed either to accompany such practices, inspire their practice, or to actually become an S&M ritual by disciplining and punishing the body with the extremes of the audible frequency range. So the HNW sub-subculture fits snugly into this larger, still marginal tradition. As the masochist preemptively demands punishment before others can dish it out, the audio nihilist can similarly commit acts of self-abasement in advance of critical rejection: well, what did you expect? We *told* you there wouldn’t be any ideas! However, this kind of self-abasement can still co-exist with a conviction that the artist is showing us some terrifying truth; building something new atop the rubble of exposed lies.
Whether they like it or not, this kind of thing can still be put into the service of positive values along the lines of the Nietzschean “becoming what we are”. My personal take is that non-dynamic projections of “nothingness,” particularly those sustained by a misanthropic vision of immutable forces that will survive humanity’s last gasp, succeed in ways they maybe did not intend to succeed. If you ignore the carny barker / “enter at your own risk!” marketing ploy whereby audiences are challenged to come out of the experience with their sense of humanity intact, the psycho-physical effect produced by the “harsh noise wall” is not too different from other artistic forms which aim at tension reduction via simplification. We could point to any number of other similar effects, e.g. the experiences reported in sensory deprivation tanks or during Ganzfeld experiments, or what can be encountered in James Turrell’s illusionistic environments (i.e. his use of curved coving in glowing featureless rooms, which make these rooms appear boundary-less by the simple removal of perceptibly sharp edges).
One of the main lessons of the Minimalist movement has been this: the effect of an almost featureless experience within one sensory modality “activates” other features of our perceptual environment more than it manages to suck us into a total information void. A shift in the locus of perceptual attention, which then enables a shift in critical consciousness, has often been the case with historically avant-garde effusions of “nothingness”: Yves Klein’s invitation for spectators to engage with a totally empty gallery, for example, was one in a series of actions that critic Benjamin Buchloh identified as a shift in valuation from production processes to “the process of reception – the audience’s disposition and demands, the cultural legitimation the works are asked to perform, the institutional mediation between demand and legitimation.”3 Buchloh also contended that artworks slightly more than nothing - e.g. the monochromatic red, yellow, and blue triptych of Aleksandr Rodchenko - had a critical content and were not necessarily hymns to entropy. That particular work “suggest[ed] the elimination of art’s esoteric nature” but, in Buchloh’s estimation, offered a “rationalistic conception of its conception and construction” in exchange, and this in turn would shear art of its imposing elitism.
Perhaps the question of significant differences between the historical avant-garde and the shock troops of HNW can be boiled down to the latter being more decidedly negative, bringing a cynical and misanthropic attitude to a process whose results might otherwise continue in this tradition of clarifying essential values in both perception and philosophy. The “remove in order to improve” ethos animating much of Minimalism could always be argued as the rule, rather than the exception, when it came to art’s process of abstracting from the natural environment, and works created in this mode would still be judged as successes or failures based on their ability to refine ideas of what it is to be human.
So the identification of meaningless, apparently static data purely with death, entropy and negativity is maybe this genre’s concession to novelty. Even in the rare moments where the genre sprouts a sense of humor (not counting the unintended humor of the high school necro-porno art on the cover of a collaboration between Vomir and Legion of Andromeda [NSFW!]), the jokes are leavened by resentment. For example, there is the insinuation that our pre-programmed mass culture is the “real” void, even more offensive for trying to present its numbing monotony as something lovable. (I have patiently waited until now to introduce you to “HNW Swift,” an artist who releases sound-alike HNW digital albums on Bandcamp only distinguished by the cutesy Taylor Swift photos adorning each album cover).
With this in mind, let’s not lose sight of the fact that there is quite a qualitative difference between doing nothing while announcing it to a potential audience (a la John Cage’s legendary “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it”) or merely doing nothing and keeping this inaction off the record. As any practitioner of monasticism will attest, silences and empty spaces can of course be as communicative as information-rich types of experience. This is easy enough to see in the ascetic, private performances of Linda Montano, or TehChing Hsieh’s announcement that, in, 1985-1986, he would completely purge himself of anything to do with art: not only would he not personally attempt to create it, but he would not talk about it, attempt to take in any new information relating to it, and would not frequent any sort of public art event. Even something like the revelation that “weird fiction” grandmaster H.P. Lovecraft, “between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three […] did absolutely nothing”4 has the potential to fertilize the imagination to some degree.
I feel that the reclusive, militantly pessimistic agents of HNW are well aware that they are “saying they have nothing to say,” but also that they believe people will correctly read some polemical content into their exaltations of emptiness. Namely, people will come to understand that their radical muteness, their refusal of Art, is a denunciation of a civilization obsessed with preserving only those things with a clear utility to them. Why not simply say nothing in an effort to hasten the breakdown of a machine that demands every kernel of information, from a stupid Twitter “hot take” to epic literature, contribute to a false narrative of perpetual and linear progress?
Thinking along these lines has fed into another sort of nothing-as-art: the recurring concept of the “Art Strike”, which has been carried out, to some limited degree, on a number of documented occasions. Gustav Metzger, the artist famous for his belief in the value of the “auto-destructive” artwork, was one of the more notable to propose such a concept via his “Years Without Art” from 1977-1980, basing it essentially on the strategic principles applicable to general strikes. Another concerted three-year effort, more or less following Metzger’s original plan to the letter, would again take place from 1990-1993 under the aegis of the Neoist artists and Stewart Home. In both cases, artists of all stripes were encouraged to cease production and to walk out of any established art institution (galleries, theaters, etc.) for these pre-determined durations, and for reasons somewhat in keeping with Rodchenko’s aforementioned rationale of demystification.
HNW artists might not want to rejoice in this comparison, since it’s doubtful the Art Strike concept will ever result in much more than an inversion of established hierarchies of power with a false claim that such hierarchies have been “destroyed”. As Bob Black acidly insists, the Art Strike not only allows for the artist to re-assert himself as something like the pre-eminent moral authority, but allows for another authenticity-based strategy based on exclusivity or scarcity to be put into play: with supposedly no new artwork being created during the strike years, “existing art will appreciate in value since there won’t be anything coming into the market to compete with it […] recent art will lead the price rise as the last of its kind.”5
Black’s lacerating commentary on the subject continues:
Although appearing at first as the suppression of art, the Art Strike is in essence its realization — the ultimate work of art, the culmination of its telos. In the Art Strike, artistic abnegation achieves its final expression: art, having become nothing, becomes everything. If art is what artists don’t do, what isn’t art now? The Art Strike thus becomes an exercise in imperialism. After all, everyone else has been on an Art Strike all along […] Ostentatious renunciation is greed in its most warped and insidious form.
For reasons hinted at here, The HNW movement (and “movement” does feel like an awkward description for such an anti-dynamic aesthetic grouping), never fully banishes the specter of Art. Nor is it any more trenchant in its assessment of “humanity,” particularly when its members or fans insist on reminding us that total entropy is our ultimate destiny. When this is then passed off as being some sort of hermetic knowledge only accessible by an elect and transmissible by Those Who ‘Get It’, the temptation becomes nearly irresistible to add “no audience” to the end of the “no dynamics, no change…” battle cry.
As we know, this is not privileged information requiring high-level security clearances, and moreover it isn’t even completely true. It is not difficult to refute the belief that continued minimization / reduction unto death is the whole story of humanity: if nothing else, our evolutionary tendency towards homeostasis has resulted in ever more complex biological and technological developments. Or, as Stanisław Lem intriguingly stated, “islets of decreasing entropy emerged in the world of general entropic increase.”6
On further review, it feels like HNW embodies the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy as well as anything ever has. Monomaniacally focused on refusing art and the human world that art reflects and expands, the message can only become more insipid - and the vehicle for that message less relevant over time. Chanting memento mori over and over, acolytes of annihilation art go beyond acknowledging the inevitability of death and the void, outdoing even the most sincerely religious ascetics in their unremitting, worshipful meditation on it.
Arnheim, R. (1971). Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kramer, H. “And Now 'Eccentric Abstraction': It's Art, But Does It Matter?” New York Times September 25, 1966, p. 135.
Buchloh, B.H.D. (1986). “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-avant-garde.” October 37, pp. 41-52.
Houellebecq, M. (2019). H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Trans. Dorna Khazeni. Paris: Cernunnos/Dargaud.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-refusal-of-art. Retrieved May 14, 2024.
Lem, S (2013). Summa Technologiae. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.