When I was a kid, my father gave me a certain Yamaha keyboard that he’d found at Goodwill. It was the sort whose main appeal was having different instrument voices, like banjo and shakuhachi rendered as loosely as possible by whatever combination of waveforms. It also had a feature where you could sample a tiny snippet of your playing and loop it. I used to amuse myself by using this feature to make the most awful, hellacious sounds that I could, usually by looping some cluster chord played with the “electric guitar” voice and then playing other, worse cluster chords on top of it with very little movement or variation. While I did this, I would kind of act like a mad scientist and hold my free hand up in a “goblet” position. Years later, when I discovered Whitehouse, I realized that the sounds I made back then sounded almost exactly like their early Come Organisation albums, minus the yelling. In live shows (Live Actions, y’know), they would even do the goblet thing. In other, more sound-of-mind people, realizing that the music you were listening to sounded exactly like something stupid you used to annoy your grandmother with at age eight might be a turnoff, but for me it really galvanized my appreciation for the band. It must have been a case of supernatural-temporal influence on my part.
My first exposure to noise music came about early in high school. As mentioned elsewhere, I was fascinated by extreme metal, and part of that fascination was trying to find ever-heavier examples of it. I’m not sure where, but I found some kind of chart online which parodied Mohs Scale of Hardness by relating different musical genres to different minerals. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was talc, NSync were gypsum, the Beatles were muscovite or something, etc. Towards the end of the scale were extreme metal acts - black metal, tech death, grindcore - but at the very top there was just one name: Merzbow. I popped the name into Youtube and played some random song from an album I don’t remember, probably Pulse Demon or whatever came up first. And, you know, I didn’t like it. But something about it stuck with me. When my primary musical obsession moved from black metal to industrial (early stuff, not Nine Inch Nails or Skinny Puppy), I saw more and more references to things like Merzbow, and eventually I gave it another shot. Maybe the gap from industrial to noise was just easier to cross than that from black metal, maybe I was just better-primed to be receptive to that material, or maybe I was just now ready to assume my final form as the ultimate avant-teen. But the point is, I really liked it. Listening to noise expanded the horizons of all my other musical interests, and I began to see the relationships between my impulses a lot more clearly. It’s all a big web, you know, and noise music helped support a lot of the threads.
As a voracious listener, I wanted to learn about and listen to more and more records. The surface level stuff was pretty easy to come across, of course. Back then I think I downloaded most of my music through /rs/ (remember that?) or else by searching through the massive catalogs of Blogspot networks. Eventually I moved on to Soulseek, which I still use today. To get recommendations for more obscure stuff, I’d read /mu/ threads, troll through Discogs and Rateyourmusic, or otherwise just try to find old zines and interviews. I was reading an interview with The Gerogerigegege (at that point my favorite band) which shared the anecdote that the band’s earliest lineups featured two members of a group called Grim, formerly of White Hospital. I’d never heard of neither Grim nor White Hospital, so I plugged the names into Discogs and then into Soulseek and went in pretty much blind besides that - this was before Konagaya’s comeback, so Grim’s discography was just Folk Music, Message, Amaterasu, and the compilations thereof.
I know I listened to Folk Music first, though I’m not sure what I expected it to sound like. I think, given their involvement in the Gerogerigegege, I expected some mix of Tokyo Anal Dynamite, Instruments Disorder, and maybe even Night. Suffice to say, Folk Music has little in common with those. While a lot of the ground covered here is pretty familiar stuff for initiates of 80s Japanese noise tapes, there’s a unique spin, if not just a polish on everything that makes this one of the very best releases of its era. The synthesizers sound awesome - very filthy and suitably “industrial.” The other instruments, including guitar and oil drums, are played with palpable vigor. And the vocals, distorted and grunted as they are, are perfectly mixed. They blend in with the other elements around them in a way where it’s like humanity is being subsumed by this dreadful, rusty machine. It’s awesome. Of course, the most unique feature of the album is the variation in musical styles. Besides pure industrial/power electronics, the album also features a few more traditional songs performed on organ and guitar. These are beautiful compositions, and while they contrast with the other tracks, because of how the album as a whole is composed everything still feels like a cohesive whole. It’s one of the absolute best albums I’ve ever heard, and is a profound statement in the realm of power electronics and noise music. I can think of very few albums that come close.
With that said, if I can be controversial - I think my favorite Grim tracks actually come from Message, their third release. Message is entirely made up of “traditional” songs (some with actual traditional lyrics), performed and recorded beautifully. It’s still not quite “normal” of course - there are samples of Hitler speeches, lyrics about bloodlust and stalking, vocals made inhuman by layers and layers of effects (albeit to gentler ends than on Folk Music) - but that’s just part of the charm. I think my all-time favorite Grim song is “Heaven Knows.” It’s got a Lou Reed chord progression and a Sterling Morrison solo, but it’s Grim. What more could you want?
One last thing - when people discuss Folk Music online, many are inclined to take the title as ironic. You know, you always see these dumb, smarmy Youtube comments to the effect of “ehueheueh WOW that was NOT folk music!1” Frankly, I think that line of thought couldn’t be more wrong, and is just another of many things we can blame on Pete Seeger (God rest his soul). On Folk Music, Konagaya is playing homemade instruments to create primitive - untutored - music, divorced from any mechanical erudite tradition. Like, sure, it doesn’t sound like Mumford and Sons or whatever, but it is folk. Even Jun Konagaya’s industrial songs have more in common with Dock Boggs than they do Merzbow. To me, Folk Music is the very essence of the genre. And as for Seeger - if Rainbow Quest is still running in heaven, I am certain that Konagaya will one day be a featured guest. If we make it there, of course.