Noise is a genre: a history of noise music, from 1913 to Jogja Noise Bombing

Most genre guides file noise as a texture other genres use, or as a fringe of industrial. That undersells it. Noise has its own lineage going back more than a century, its own subgenres with their own names and dates, its own labels and festivals, and scenes on several continents that call what they do noise music.

So on the genre map noise has its own line in the electronic city, dated from 1913, with industrial, the avant-garde and noise pop crossing it. This post is that line told the long way.

The story usually starts in Italy. In 1913 the Futurist painter Luigi Russolo wrote The Art of Noises, a manifesto arguing that the noise of machines and cities should be material for music.[1] He then built the intonarumori, boxes with cranks and levers that produced roars, hisses and scrapes, and gave concerts with them.[2]

Pierre Schaeffer premiered musique concrète in Paris on 5 October 1948: pieces built from recorded sounds, cut and looped on disc and later tape, rather than written notes.[3] It gave noise a technology. Anything a microphone could catch could now be composed.

In 1960 John Cage and the Tokyo collective Group Ongaku pushed further, and noise became part of Fluxus, the art movement of events, chance and anti-art.[1] Group Ongaku's tape pieces from that year are among the earliest Japanese noise recordings.[4]

In 1975 Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music, four sides of guitar feedback, on RCA.[5] A major label had put out an hour of noise, and later noise musicians, Merzbow among them, named it as a starting point.[4]

In 1976 Throbbing Gristle began performing in London and set up Industrial Records. Monte Cazazza's slogan for the label, "Industrial Music for Industrial People", named a whole genre.[6] Industrial and noise have shared a border ever since, which is why industrial crosses the noise line on the map.

In 1979 two Japanese projects started that defined the sound for decades. Hijokaidan formed in Kyoto, and Masami Akita began recording as Merzbow.[4][7] Out of the Kansai no wave scene came Japanoise, at its strongest in the late 1980s and 1990s with Boredoms, C.C.C.C. and Incapacitants.[4]

In Britain, William Bennett formed Whitehouse in 1980.[8] Their records, synthesizers and feedback under shouted vocals, are credited with founding power electronics, and Bennett gave the style its name in the sleeve notes of Psychopathia Sexualis in 1982.[8][9]

Slower and darker than power electronics, death industrial is traced to the Swedish musician Roger Karmanik's tapes of 1985 and his project Brighter Death Now; Karmanik also ran the label Cold Meat Industry.[10][11]

Harsh noise is the name for the extreme end that grew out of Japanoise in the 1980s. In the 1990s American acts such as The Haters and Daniel Menche carried it in the United States.[12] Merzbow's Pulse Demon came out on the metal label Relapse in 1996.[13]

In Germany, Belgium and the UK, power noise turned noise towards the club in the mid-1990s: a distorted kick drum, often a Roland TR-909, in hard 4/4. Raoul Roucka of Noisex coined the name in 1997.[14]

The furthest point so far is harsh noise wall: layers of distortion pressed into one static block that does not change for the length of the piece.[12] Richard Ramirez, Skin Crime and the Rita are named among its early figures.[12] The French artist Vomir, its best known name, dates his unchanging sound from 2005 and describes it as the absence of ideas, change and development.[15]

In the 2000s Brooklyn noise, with Black Dice and Wolf Eyes, brought noise into rock venues and indie labels.[1]

Noise today is less one sound than a set of local scenes. In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Jogja Noise Bombing has staged unpermitted street sets since about 2009 and runs an annual festival; their documentary is called Noise Is Serious Shit!.[16]

Festivals such as Berlin Atonal put noise beside club music. Its 2025 edition had Merzbow playing with Iggor Cavalera and Eraldo Bernocchi, and Puce Mary, on the same bill as dubstep and drum and bass DJs.[17]

None of these scenes needs a new name to be noise. They sit on a line that starts with a man cranking a noise box in 1913, which is why the line on the map starts there too.

Ride the noise line station by station, each with a dated, cited paragraph and records to start with. Or search for a track you think is noise and vote on it.