I have been a recent listener of noise music; I only know one artist; I don't tend to make just noise music. But it's something I enjoy making and listening to because, while listening to it, it's very interesting to break a song down to understand it and, while making a track, it is very fun to hear how a music software or even the computer itself can create these weird, noisy... noises.
My discoveries with the genre came from a Discord chat about the different music people from the server liked; I was talking about another genre called breakcore, another was talking about rock and IDM, another about rap. Then someone told us about a musician called "Merzbow". I've only heard of the name in comment sessions on Youtube, but never his music; I thought his would be similar to other breakcore or IDM artists like Venetian Snares or Squarepusher or Lauren Bousfield. We were then given a link to one of his albums - Pulse Demon I believe - and we gave it a listen. I didn't listen to the album completely as I, and the others who also listened, was confused about it. Why did it sound like that? How did it sound like that? What makes this so interesting? It's just noise, isn't it?
I haven't listened to the album in a long time before returning to it out of curiosity. I have gone through the album trying to figure out the music that was blasting the speakers on my laptop. It was an experience indescribable that led me into an interest, so I've searched for more of Merzbow's work. Right now I have listened to four albums out of his rather large discography (Merzbeat, Amlux, Aqua Necromancer, and Door Open at 8 AM) and wanted to listen to more of his music; this also became the inspiration for me to create noise music of my own.
Raw Data isn't my first noise album, nor is it my first attempt of noise music. My first try came in two songs from a more melodic album of mine: Pavor's Songs. The seventh and ninth tracks, Darkstalker and Thorn, were tracks I attend to diversify the album and also experimenting with both Audacity and LMMS softwares. I really enjoyed both songs as Darkstalker felt like something was approaching you from the dark and there was nothing to stop or even slow it, while Thorn was also a fun experiment of making a melody noisy (or, at the very least, weird). These two songs made way for a noise EP I made afterwards (called Gakken) which was made with an analog synthesizer and a radio. Then came the first noise album of my discography: Instarved Lag Tunes. The album was told to be less harsh then a lot of other noise albums and had more of a musical sound than noise (I tend to nickname it "Melodic Noise"). These projects were fun to make but I didn't plan to just do noise music; I wanted to do electronic music instead. So how did this album come to fruition always? By a Youtube comment session.
Two months after Instarved Lag Tunes was released, I was listening to one of Lauren Bousfield's older songs on Youtube; I've read some old comments from the video when I saw one that says that a certain sound from that song (and another song from the From Rotting Fantasylands album) was raw data of Microsoft Paint converted to an MP3 file on Audacity. I was curious. I opened Audacity and gave it a shot; it didn't make the same sound from the song - suppose it was from an older version of MS Paint or something - but nevertheless, it made a pretty cool sound. And that was just the one file. It lasted around a minute or so, so I forage through the other files where I used MS Paint and used them to lengthen the song to what I wanted. Three minutes and five seconds was the result of this. It then gave me an idea for a new album.
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