Heavy on improvisation and full of energetic cosmic bluster, noise art can be compared to birth. An ugly little thing violently squirming in its own filthy ooze, noise art often emerges as a complex orchestra of aural neurotransmitters, body mass, and bloody tissue. In other words, noise takes on shape. 910 Noise is a collective of artists who sculpt with noise and performance. The use of traditional instruments in radically untraditional ways often produces their unique visions of sight and sound. Like with any avant-garde artist, the final piece is not necessarily the elevated importance so much as the action of creating is. It is in this determination that gives noise its artistic value.
Area code noise has been creeping its way into art galleries and small, usually dark, bars since around 2001—according to Alex Murphy of Bootleg Magazine, the original area code noise started in Richmond, Virginia and is known as 804noise. The purpose of most area code noise collectives is to perpetuate and collaborate with artists of similar vision who share a willingness to expand the fundamental noise-properties of musical instruments, sex toys, and anything else that might be used to create sound. Ryan Lewis is the founder of 910 Noise, out of Wilmington, North Carolina, and he places highest power on artistic expression and to demonstrate "creative diversity while melding art and sound."
In its rawest form, noise can be painful or pleasantly absent but live performance is quintessential to the concept (which is why this month's music offering is in the form of a streaming video, rather than an .mp3). Stage presence is like framing the painting. In our correspondence, Ryan said of performance "Some of the artists during live performance report out of body/ mind experiences from the high intense energetic massive walls of sound..." This is a fitting description because on so many levels noise is exploding through the placenta of normalcy into a world where, like it or not, evolution is the only law. —ES
910 Noise's new album, 910 Compilation v.3, has been produced by Ryan Lewis' Obscura Art and Records in conjunction with Ack Recordings. You can buy it through Paypal here:
But immediately before you buy that, check out 910 Noise member The Pony Gropers, presented to you by the miracle of videographic technology, by clicking on the pretty words below:
