G.X. Jupitter-Larsen
...But you know, again, there's no dogma in noise. someone like
Merzbow believes he is composing beautiful music and he sees it as music. a lot of people in the scene do believe that
they are musicians. I'm not one of them. i have very little interest in music, per se.
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An Interview with G.X. Jupitter-Larsen
by James Alday
JA: How did you get started in noise music, where did it all begin?
GX: Oh my god. um, i uh let's see. there isn't really a linear beginning to it all but i guess as much as a beginning as anything would be when i lived in new york in 79 and you know it was a crazy scene in new york at the time, you know the late seventies in particular. it was pretty nutty. the east village, in particular. the punks had more or less taken it over. i mean there were crazy shops. people were modifying the architecture. there was this one shop, it was covered... the front of it, the facade was covered in zebra skin. fake zebra skin. the inside was done like the flintstones. it was all cave man with dead baby dolls hanging from the ceiling. it was just you know crazy clothing, trendy punk new wave-y clothing store. but i mean the amount of effort put into their presentation you just wouldn't see anymore because it was all done by hand by the people who were actually... you know, there weren't any professionals, right? it was still early enough in the punk scene that punk was still an attitude about music as opposed to a musical style. i mean, later on, i mean a little bit in new york but especially in the pacific northwest, which i moved to after new york. in 81, 82, you would never find a punk band without a sax player. i mean, they all had sax players, you know, cuz they didn't know better. so pretty much anything went, you know. for the most part. anyway, so I'm stuck in new york. the year is 1979 and i can't not get kicked out of a band to save my soul. it's just impossible. i was one of these punk rockers who refused to learn to play his instrument. i just figured that was punk, not knowing what you were doing and just going ahead doing it full steam ahead blindly and just seeing what came out of it all. well, apparently this wasn't the common, this wasn't the majority point of view, which i learned time and time and time again. you would think that i would eventually learn from my mistake but i didn't and so i kept getting kicked out of bands, usually quite quickly. and it seemed to me kind of, a lot of people talked about punk as if it was noise but to me, the cliche goes, it was "not noisy enough" for me. everyone was trying to be a musician. and i had no interest in being a musician. i like the whole social dynamics of punk which kind of was a reflection of my interest in professional wrestling. because the audience was as much part of the show, if not more of the show, than the performers on stage. and you know certainly in punk in 78, 79, 80, i mean, really the crowd was much more of a show than any of the bands regardless what the bootleg records might have you believe. i mean really it was the crowd that showed up. the way they dressed (me saying something). they did, i mean no one had purple hair before that scene kind of, you know. now everything's being absorbed into the mainstream but at the time it was just completely nuts. you're space aliens. so um that's what i was interested in. really was more that kind of energy.
JA: What do noise artists expect out of their listeners? What do you expect someone that is given your noise, what is the expectation from them?
GX: i think different... the thing with noise, and its the one thing that's kept me interested, and it's an important issue, no matter what question you ask about the noise scene or noise culture there's a key element which should be addressed, i think. like in the early days of punk, punk was an attitude towards aesthetics. it wasn't a defined aesthetic in and of itself. it was more like what you did with music, what you did with performance, or fashion or whatever, your hair or whatever. it wasn't like a set... like now you can basically, you can look up in an encyclopedia, and most encyclopedias actually have a very good one paragraph definition of what punk is or was. noise is like that still. there isn't really a well defined dogma to what it is about, how it is done. i mean certainly there are scenes within... there's subcultures within this subculture. there's strains, there's variations. certainly like the japanese noise scene during the 90s could very easily be defined. with basically turning the volume up as loud as you can, essentially. but there's the scene in new york is very different. the scene in L.A. is very different. the dutch scene, the german scene, the italian scene. and there are different time periods for these different sub-scenes as well. and each kind of sub-scene had its own aesthetic, had its own agenda, and had its own expectations. and it's a very fragmented kind of network. i mean, really, there's a wide variety of political attitudes. there's a wide variety of aesthetics. depending where the person, the project came out of. you have people who are from academia, they didn't really succeed in academia so they found noise. i have people from the punk who for whatever reason got bored or didn't make it in the punk scene, people who kind of came out of cassette culture from the 80s. you have a whole lot of people from the industrial music scene from the 70s and the 80s. so depending which agenda you are interested to begin with really does effect what your expectations happen to be. i think for a lot of the guys in the english scene and the british scene still to this day, although some of them come from industrial music, some of them come from punk, they have a very strong social-political agenda, for the most part. they're reacting to the social dynamics of where they live and for some american noise aficionados british noise isn't always easy to listen to cuz there's a lot of yelling and screaming and agony and pain and they don't really relate to it. but when you're actually in england the scene makes total sense as to what they're reacting to. the LA scene, they're really into, most of the kids down in LA to this day are really technophiles. they build their own gadgets. they're totally into developing the technology, developing it on their own, not like buying technology but building it from scratch and they approach it almost in a scientific way. some of the main projects there, like speculum fight and fin (?), they're really like just unofficial... they're mad scientists
JA: if you look for noise you're going to look for noise music. there's a lot of artists who've pushed the boundaries of art. is that what noise music is doing? is it supposed to be music or is it something as its own?
GX: ...But you know, again, there's no dogma in noise. someone like Merzbow believes he is composing beautiful music and he sees it as music. a lot of people in the scene do believe that they are musicians. I'm not one of them. i have very little interest in music, per se. i think John Cage oversimplified the argument by saying... although what he originally said was that all sounds could be used _in_ music and then that's been oversimplified to all sounds _are_ music. i don't believe that all sounds necessarily have to be music. and i don't believe what i am doing is music, i mean i don't compose anything, i don't use musical instruments. i like noise and i like noise as noise not noise as music. and i don't think it's semantics. i think it's an important detail in an argument which over the years has just been oversimplified to a ridiculous degree. when you say, like, "well, all colors are blue", "all people are albinos", you can say anything and you basically make the argument meaningless when you give it this kind of universality and I'm not interested in universality, I'm interested in the details, and i think that noise... a lot of people when they listen to the audio that i do have a difficult time dealing with it if they think of it in terms of music. i say "oh, don't worry about it. just think of it as what it is, noise." and they totally open up to it and they can listen to it and they understand, they have a better understanding of what it is that I'm doing. this is my attitude, this is my direction. there are other people, though, who adhere more to the cage point of view, which is that all sounds can be used in music and what i want to do is music, but what i want to do is extreme and harsh music. and yes i want to push the boundaries of what art is and is not. for myself, personally, i think this is an irrelevant argument. there's an argument that maybe made sense back in the 50s and the 60s but at this point i think it's completely irrelevant. i don't care if it's art, and if it is art then that's great but that's not my concern. that's for historians or critics to decide. it doesn't affect what i do. it doesn't affect the way i think about it. i do it because, well, it's noise. i mean, i also paint, i also write, and ok that's either art or it isn't art. but again, it's not a question that ever enters my head, really. it enters a lot of other people's heads, sure...
JA: You had an album that was just a blank CD...
GX: Wind Licked Dirt
JA: Can you tell me what inspired you to do that album?
GX: Well there's a few variations... It deals with a couple different issues that are important to me. One was the element of audience participation, and that the audience is as much a part of the performance as the so-called performers. I like the idea of blurring the lines to a point where you couldn't tell one from the other. And i also like the idea of inventing one's own technology, not just conforming to the popular technology of the day, but maybe trying to invent technology which reflects your own experience and your own personality. so, with this in mind, a variety of releases were born. the first in this on again/off again series was a self-titled 7" record that came out in 83 and it was a 7" record with silent grooves. i mean, it was pressed, it was an actual record, but it was completely silent. and it came with instruction, it said you had to complete the record by scratching it before you put it on the turntable and then you could listen to the scratches. this, to me, seemed like a lot more fun than just recording scratches and then releasing a record of pre-recorded scratches. so this had basically the audience participation, that you were a member of the haters by the simple act of actually completing the record and listening to the piece. at least you were as much a part of the project as, say, i was in that case. later on there was a 12" record that was completely flat. it had no grooves but it came in a bag full of dirt and the idea was that you'd rub the dirt against the record, bypassing any need for a turntable, because the thing with the record in '83 was that you still needed a stereo, you still actually needed a turntable to listen to the scratches. so i thought, well, let's get rid of the stereo altogether. you just have a blank sheet of vinyl, and your action of playing the record was rubbing dirt on it. so it became a complete performance piece. that was in, i think 89 that came out (Ed: Wind Licked Dirt, 1988, RRRecords) and then a few years later i did a CD version (Ed: Wind Licked Dirt, 1993, self-release) where, it wasn't in a jewel case, but it was literally just a blank CD and it just came in a plastic container full of dirt. after that i started doing pieces where... making conceptual records out of fabric and cloth and broken plastic, and then coming up with all kind of instructions on how these conceptual records were actually played, and it never involved a turntable, it never involved a stereo. basically, you had to enact a performance in order to hear the piece. so that's how that all came about...
JA: The Album Drunk On Decay... Can you tell me the whole...
GX: The whole Drunk on Decay was a series of performances and recordings and some visual projects as well. essentially the motif was a tin funnel hanging off of something and then the funnel would be allowed to drag on rotating sandpaper. the funnel itself was amplified, ah, an important detail. i should've mentioned this to begin with. an amplified tin funnel hanging off of something so it would be dangle. it would dangle on this rotating sandpaper. originally i just used a toy turntable with a sanding disk on it instead of a record and then we would feed the signal from the funnel to a bank of effect pedals which would go through a mixer, a PA, the whole bit. i eventually had... soon after i actually made a turntable that specifically didn't have a stylus, didn't have a needle arm. it was basically just a slow rotating platform for the sandpaper. because i didn't want that ready made. this was a specially designed turntable, which itself was amplifiable. then having a sense of humour, by pure happenstance, really... the first thing that i, i think, if i remember correctly, probably was a wooden pallet, like the kind of pallet you end up with if you ever do any shipping and receiving in a warehouse usually a whole lot of items come on a wooden pallet, so it was that kind of pallet. and then the objects that the funnel hung off of... and this is all within an live context. this is all within bars and clubs and galleries and what have you... they got smaller, and someone pointed out to me that i was going the wrong way and that the items should become bigger, and i said, well, how hysterical that is, what a great idea. so then every time, live context, not so much in studio, but in a live context every time we did the piece the object that the funnel hung off of got bigger, to the point that we ended up hanging it from this... we had to perform in a garage and we had a car and we hoisted the... actually it was a truck, and then we wanted to raise a house and put the funnel under the house. we never got to do the house bit. most people when they hear this piece don't believe that all the sounds they hear are coming from just a funnel as the sole sound source, and i get that from the piece "mind the gap" which is amplified staple guns. but actually, to me, what's so fascinating is that, and this is why i still don't do much digitally, even in the studio, which is the way physical objects can sound, depending on what filters you're using, depending what form what form of amplifications you're using. but you can get a wide variety of sounds depending on what you're doing to the physical object and that still interests me quite a bit.
JA: more about that... a lot of the sound i've heard, including industrial, uses a lot of digital things today...
GX: i think that there's a certain aesthetic where you want to use the latest technology. you want to incorporate the latest techniques. and i wouldn't go so far as to say it's trendy but it is a certain attitude. one interpretation of being in the forefront is to master whatever the latest technology happens to be and certainly you've seen this attitude in art and music ever since the renaissance for that matter. everyone wanted to use oil paint because that was the digital technology at the time if you knew how to use it properly, right? and really there's a certain attitude that hasn't changed since then and I'm sure it was there before the renaissance even. but using the latest technology, to me, isn't always all that interesting. i mean, not that i have anything against digital recording techniques. certainly i incorporate them in the studio, i mean i release CDs. i use digital filters sometimes in the studio. but still, for me, i like the way the physical world sounds and i like exploring... entropy is a big deal with me. it's a big fascination with me. it's been a recurring motif. it's what drives me to explore, to examine, and to experiment. and I'm interested in how things fall apart. I'm interested in how things decay, how things erode. that's why the grinding wheel, the sandpaper. i like tools that I'm using constantly. any kind of erosion i find kind of fascinating and I'm interested in measuring. entropy in our western science implies measuring, implies some kind of counting going on. this is another recurring theme i have in a lot of my work is counting and measuring. and the two, it's almost two obsessions of mine, is decay and counting and how the two are interrelated. in many respects my noise is an illustration of that obsession. this is why I say I'm not a musician, because I'm not. i don't have... musical issues don't enter what I'm doing. more like issues, a fetish really are what drive me, my fascination for these subjects and i want to use noise to illustrate this fetish. so really it's more almost like visual art to me more than it is a musical endeavor.
JA: Reading over your website regarding the polywave and the trans-numerical unit. could you go into a little more of that? a little background.
GX: Without trying to get too wordy over the whole thing, trying to keep it simple, at least for myself even... one thing that fascinated me about punk was the passion that people had in dealing with whatever the topics happened to be. if you were indifferent to something you never, no one ever bothered singing about it or doing an album about it or writing poetry about it. even the punk poets of the time were very passionate about whatever the topics happened to be. so this is going to sound like an old fogey talking but the problem that i had with punk, one of the problems i had with punk, even though i was a participant at the time, i mean, by looking at me you knew i was a punk, i was the whole cliche... but punk was never about anything. it was always against something. which is fine on a certain level. and we all had to react against the status quo in order to find who we ourselves were but a lot of my colleagues, they never went any further than that. they rebelled against the status quo but they never developed into "what's the alternative then?" even though the alternative is probably impossible. but nevertheless, what is it? what would you like it to be? and that was like some, a questions that was seldom brought up except around the drinking table but once you got onto stage it was always us vs. them. so i wanted me own work not to be just a simple linear reaction against the status quo, because personally i find that actually kind of boring. so i had to figure out what my work was about because i decided my work, whatever it was had to be about something and had to be about something i actually believed in, as ludicrous as that might sound, especially in this day and age. but nevertheless i had to come up with something and... i had been politically involved in my youth and i was disgusted by any political model that came my way, regardless of right wing, left wing, center, it all just seemed like ah, i don't know, like a complete waste of time for me personally. i wasn't even sure if i even believed in society and therefore did i even need politics? so i had to invent subject matter. now, i didn't want to live in an imaginary world, i didn't want to be like the cliched outsider artist who invents his own fantasy world and gets absorbed into it and creates this whole self-contained mythology, i didn't want that. i still wanted to live in the real world. but at the same time i had to develop my own subject matter. and since, and entropy again being like a main force behind everything i do and that entropy by its very form implies measuring, so i started to invent my own forms of measuring to see if that effected the way i understood the world or the world understood me. so these things polywaves, zylowaves, kettleday, transexpansion numeral unit, all these things are a kind of measuring, they're a form of measuring. in fact, the totimorphus is the combination of all possible shapes as a single form, therefore it is size-less. so that's a whole range of topics right there.
JA: I've read a bunch on the website... but I'm obviously going to have to dig deeper...
GX: Yeah, a lot of these things i've dabbled with for like 25 plus years so there's a lot of depth there. you can just get to the basic joke which is on the surface and have a little bit of a chuckle or mind itch or you can get deeper and there's always more levels. i've always added, over the years, i've always added more levels so if anyone want back to the project or went back to explore what it was i had said because they thought i was funny so they wanted to figure out what it was so they could repeat it to someone else, there'd be something else there waiting for them, kind of like an added bonus. so i've just kept adding jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes to the point that it becomes this really dense... almost like noise, you get this real dense white noise of concepts that are all interrelated somehow and they all refer to each other somehow on some level. and, yeah, i guess that's how i kill my time, i just see how thick i can get this nonsense.
JA: Speaking of entropy, some of the sub-genres that i've encountered in noise are these scientists and whatnot that are doing mathematics. there's a researcher who did DNA music, sequencing DNA as sound. have you ever explored any chaos mathematics? you've created your own counting methods and whatnot, I'm wondering if you've dabbled in any of the...
GX: I've dabbled. i can't say that i've gone any further than that. nasa calls it data sonification, which i always that was a great great term because sometimes what they'll do is that they'll get, through a radio telescope, they'll get, for lack of a better term, a picture of some cosmic even happening and they'll translate that into an audio signal to help give them a fuller picture as to what's going on. they call that sonification, something like that anyway. it's a great term, and i've explored that idea a little bit. i've read bits and pieces here and there, but I'm almost too self-absorbed to get too much into somebody else's idea of a joke. and i use the term very broadly, I'm not putting anything down but to me even death should celebrate life and in part it's done through irony and to me that's very amusing. i find rot and decay very funny and i find mathematics very funny too. i think there's a lot of beauty and a lot of wit in a lot of mathematics. that's just me anyway.
JA: A lot of the noise i've encountered, it constantly reminds me of the idea of synesthesia, of senses crossing over...
GX: Yeah, i think that's true. i think for a lot of noise people, a lot of noise artists, that does become part of the underlining aesthetic. i know i've been to performances that the sound is just so strong both in volume and in texture and in physical presence that it almost effects your vision. it certainly effects your sense of smell even. one project in particular, speculum fight, damien romero's, is probably the greatest living american noise artists of our age. i mean, it's absolutely amazing what he's been able to do. a lot of his records and CDs don't really begin to capture what it's like to see him live. and it's all standing waves, feedback loops, all done with home made microphones and various other instruments that he makes, usually from scratch. it's really hard to describe what the experience is like but synergy is definitely one of the adjectives that you would use. certainly there are other artists that have tried to take the opposite approach as far as not using volume so much but using just using the absolute minimal amount of volume to try and make the pieces so quiet that they basically can't be heard or they'll compose in a spectrum that human ears can't actually detect, that kind of thing. but i think it's an attempt at a kind of alchemy, i really do. and i think it's not necessarily an audio alchemy but certainly a kind of aesthetic alchemy or social alchemy that does recur with a lot of people's work.
JA: It reminds me of Dune or 7hz... the idea that a sound could kill, that a sound wave at a certain frequency could damage you or the loudness of it...
GX: This goes back to what i said earlier how the john cage argument, or what's become the john cage argument, was an oversimplification by saying "well, it must be music because all sounds are music". but that's not necessarily true, and if that isn't true then what are the other things that sound could be? and so then you get into that kind of alchemy, that kind of synergy where you actually explore issues that aren't musical issues at all. and they may be scientific issues, social-political issues, or aesthetic issues, whatever, military issues. but a lot of people in the noise scene, these are the issues they're interested in. the whole concept of "all sounds are music", it's just absolutely irrelevant and passe. it just doesn't matter if you agree with that or not, depending on a few individuals i guess. it's what all these other things that could happen. so in a way it is pushing a boundary. depending on which project, i guess, would dictate which boundary they're trying to push. but it all does seem inspired by a certain amount of some kind of curiosity, be it political or social or aesthetic.
JA: Well, i think that covers everything i had. did you have anything you wanted to add? anything i should've asked?
GX: No, not really. thank you for not asking how i came up with the name "The Haters", or where i formed the haters, or when i formed the haters. i appreciate that. maybe the only thing i'll add about the noise scene is that over the years, because i was involved in punk and in industrial music and then cassette culture and then parts of that mutated into the noise scene. The noise scene goes through various, for the lack of a better term, oscillations. sometimes there's more of a scene than other times. but it always seems to be somewhere. i mean, when i put out my first record there wasn't, i wasn't even aware of a noise scene, i just put out noisy records because that's what i wanted to do, but then somehow a scene started to form and a network started to form and develop and it seemed everyone was listening to it and then it seemed like no one was listening to it. and then all of a sudden in the 90s people were listening to it again because of the impression that the japanese noise scene had made here in the west and now there seems to be a lull again. now it seems that people are burnt out, the network has kind of fallen apart, it's kind of re-defining itself. but there have been peaks and valleys over the last three decades. but there always seems to always be some kind of element of a sub-culture that seems very fascinated with trying to find a redefinition of something, of maybe everything, and expressing that through experimentation with sound. and I'm very interested to see where it goes from here because it could go in many different direction and i have no idea where it's going to go.
JA: One of my motivations to do this project was people who told me that music i had listened to was noisy, and i thought to myself if you think this is noise you have no idea!
GX: Well, it's true. i know how people get freaked out by a project like Marilyn Manson and i have to say, well if you think that's noise you just have no clue as to how pure a concept of noise people have been able to achieve. based entirely not on what the mainstream thinks is extreme and what's not extreme. a fascinating thing about noise culture is that people were just doing and would usually just stumble into the noise scene by accident. i mean, occasionally you hear that someone heard a noise record and got inspired and wanted to join the noise scene but most of the time most of the people were just doing it on their own and then through happenstance, through chaos dynamics!, they stumble onto the noise scene or vise versa. and it amazes how year after year after years that's still the golden rule.
JA: A lot of the people that i've discovered online, their motivation was the same thing i used to do as a kid... we had a tape recorder and i'd tape this, tape that, and make noise and then go, "oh! there's other people doing this"...
GX: It always amazed me, like in the early years, like in the late 70s/early 80s when i was doing this, no one else in my town was interested but i could somehow find some other person in another town who was interested. and he knew one other person in a third town who was interested. so this is partly how the network eventually took form, because you just couldn't believe that anyone else was interested in this. and then when you do it opens up a whole new world, really.
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