Back in 1983, V. Vale of RE/Search Publications stated, “Boyd Rice has systematically set out to destroy every assumption held sacred in the recording and performance of music.” To date, twenty-odd years later, this doesn’t seem to have changed…
Boyd Rice first began recording his sonic experimentations in the early 1970s, initially releasing them himself, simply as Boyd Rice, and shortly thereafter, on England’s MUTE Records, under the moniker NON. Often questioned as to the nature of the name, Rice’s most common answer has usually been something along the lines of, “The name implied everything and nothing. It was a time when they were throwing the term ‘anti-’ onto everything. It seemed to be so reactionary, they seemed so tied to what they were against. I wanted to have something that implied the opposite of that.”
Rice’s early work was as much an exploration of the medium of transmitted sound, as it was an inquiry into the possibilities of noise. Indebted more to the Dada and Surrealist Art movements, than to any musical precursors, Rice’s early manipulations of sound were part experiment, and partly a means toward an end. Rather than beginning with an instrument and then seeking to arrange notes into melodies and harmonies, Rice began looking at tones in and of themselves, and at all objects as potential ‘instruments.’ In the process of making his recordings, Rice has employed “treated” tapes, altered records, shoe polishers, broken tape-decks, subliminal messages, and other assorted, unnamed sources –– he’s even fashioned his own instruments for the purposes of creating new and strange tones, such as his famous “roto-guitar” (a guitar with a metal fan attached above the pickups).
Some of Boyd Rice’s early compositions also consisted of piecing together broken records and recording the result of their playback; “I have done everything to vinyl that you can do. I have put records in the oven, I have used sandpaper on them, I have cut them up and put them back together again in different ways…” He even went so far as to experiment with the very nature of the vinyl medium itself, releasing the first ever record consisting entirely of locked / looped grooves (for endless playback), as well as the first record with multiple axis holes (for additional playback possibilities). “I guess I got [inspiration] when I read some interview with John Cage. He said he didn’t want to make records, because the format was too fixed. Well, I immediately thought, that’s ridiculous, nothing is too fixed. You can set something on the table and look at it from four different angles and it will look like four different things. And it is the same with records, you can play them at any different speed, you can put a second hole in them, play them off center… Since I was doing minimalist stuff that I just wanted people to be able to listen to all day, it seemed logical to make a record with looped groves.”
Unlike the vast majority of musicians, Boyd Rice placed as much emphasis on process as he did on product. For example, his track “Make Red” functions as a sort of audio Rorschach test; it consists of the words “make” and “red” played simultaneously in repetition. Listeners have reported hearing everything from “great” and “rake,” to “rape, rape, rape.” His track “Dark Shadows” was created by placing a microphone inside a grand piano and then playing tapes through a large speaker underneath the piano, with the volume turned up so high that piano began shaking before any sound had even started –– thus producing a unique result, both conceptually and sonically.
None of this is to say, however, that Boyd Rice’s work as NON is the slightest bit accidental. Rice has compared his compositional technique of manipulating rhythms to that of a moiré pattern (a printmaking term used to describe the result produced when one prints a halftone image over another, resulting in a third, often unexpected image or pattern). In similar fashion, Rice has often employed a technique of overlapping two or more rhythms to produce a third pseudo-rhythm, which doesn’t actually “exist” but is heard by the listener. Other strange byproducts of Rice’s layered sound collages often include the sensation of “voices” within the fabric of tones –– voices which, as Rice himself has attested, are not actually there, but which nonetheless are partly heard, partly imagined by the listener.
Being all but totally unconcerned with melody, harmony –– and in some cases, rhythm –– Rice has always stressed that his emphasis has been on affecting the listener as a whole, thus his manipulations of sound in many ways operate on a more visceral level than traditional music. “I’m not interested in arguing the boundaries of music or pushing back its horizons. Because basically I don’t feel as though what I’m doing is music or has much in common with music. I’m not a musician and my motivations aren’t particularly musical. I can’t read music and I can’t play any instruments. It would be easy to relate what I do to music, since they involve both sound and some degree of structuring, although that [too] would be misleading…”
Many ‘musicians’ would, of course, concur. Snakefinger, guitarist of San Francisco’s art-rock darlings, The Residents, was known to occasionally show up at NON concerts and shout from the back of the audience, “This isn’t music!”
Hardly an insult, considering Rice’s intentions…
Speaking of his first release, “The Black Album,” Rice once said: “I think I created something that blanks out your brain, leaving a vacuum and allowing new thoughts to form… I wanted to create something that would run all the thought out of people’s heads… I wanted to create a form of stimulus that would bypass the mind, a form not rooted in the mind that would hopefully give rise to an experience more primal in nature. I wanted to do something directed toward the organism as a whole.”
What is particularly noteworthy about all of this, is that Boyd Rice began exploring the sonic possibilities of noise at a time when almost nobody was exploring the serious possibilities of noise in and of itself. In major metropolitan cities like London and Berlin, more conventional “bands” like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten were working with similar techniques and themes, but Rice, isolated in the small southern California town of Lemon Grove, conceived and executed his works entirely on his own. He was in fact, so isolated, that he even believed for a short time that he was the first person to conceive of the concept of using tape loops (until later discovering otherwise).
In light of all of this, to undervalue Boyd Rice’s work, saying simply, “This isn’t music,” is to ignore the far-reaching implications of many of Rice’s unprecedented innovations, not to mention the sonic complexities of his numerous recordings. Likewise, to say that Rice simply started making “noise music” in the mid nineteen-seventies, is more than an understatement; Rice approached not only the process of making music –– of generating sound –– but the very medium through which sound was being transmitted, in an entirely new light. The relevance of all of this, and its effect on contemporary manifestations of music cannot be overstated.
For all the posthumous credit given the early manifestations of punk rock in the US and UK –– for all its supposed liberation and anti-establishment values –– punk did very little to change music itself. For a supposedly “revolutionary” music movement, punk rock was surprisingly conventional in its approach to the music-making process. Punk rock songs were simply louder, more distorted rock n’ roll songs, with slightly more embittered lyrics –– no more ‘rebellious’ in its time than the blues had been in its heyday. Punk rock may have changed hairstyles and fashion, but it did little to change music itself. On the other hand, the forerunners of what would become known as the early ‘industrial’ movement (namely, Throbbing Gristle, NON and Monte Cazzaza), brought both an artistic sensibility to rethinking of the entire music-making process, and a sharp nihilism that punk’s stunted angst could never possibly hope to match.
“I think that what me and Throbbing Gristle did that had an impact, was to take this sort of [avant garde] material to a mainstream audience –– into pop culture. In the Art world at the time everybody was talking about blurring the boundaries between Art and life, and this usually amounted to little more than making audience members participate in a performance – in an Art gallery. People like myself, Genesis P-Orridge, Monte Cazzaza and Z’ev took that idea more seriously, and when the pop landscape changed with the advent of punk, we were poised and waiting in the wings. We saw an opening, and we went for it!”
Of course, pundits are quick to point out that Boyd Rice couldn’t have ‘invented’ noise music, as Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” was released in 1975 (before Rice’s recordings had actually been put to vinyl), and some would even go so far as to reference Italian artist Luigi Russolo as ‘inventing’ the genre, (though any objective analysis of Russolo’s supposed “noise music” reveals it to be anything but). However, references to Reed’s art-statement-esque gesture of 1975, while understandable, are irrelevant when one considers the fact that Rice had in fact already begun making and recording his own noise music at the time “Metal Machine Music” was released, except that unlike Reed, he lacked both the fame and funds to properly release his recordings until 1977. Regardless, such comparisons ignore the larger fact that NON was really the first “noise band,” ever. Unlike one-time noise dabblers operating in the mid 1970s, Boyd Rice pursued noise music as a serious discipline, thus creating the genre as it is now understood.
Naturally, in later years, artists in Europe, Asia and the United States, would bring their own sensibilities and aesthetics to what would become the genres of ‘industrial,’ ‘noise’ and later, ‘power electronics,’ but the paradigm had already long been established –– by Boyd Rice and his contemporaries.
When questioned about his intentions with NON, Rice has most often related his work to what filmmaker Hershell Gordon Lewis referred to as “force communication” –– causing the rats to go through the maze the way you want them to. As Rice once put it, “I always had the idea that I wanted music to bridge the gap in man’s divided soul. I always felt that I could create a path between the frontal lobes of the brain and reptilian part of the brain, the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain.” The success of such intentions is of course, impossible to measure, however, the effects of Boyd Rice’s work as NON (as well as that of other pioneering Industrial musicians) are now so commonplace that they almost go without notice. Noise, loops and samples are a regular feature of modern popular music, vinyl-mimicking pops and fizzes are inserted into Trip Hop recordings, and the hypnotic elements of Trance would be hard-pressed to deny their debt to pioneers of the early Industrial scene such as Rice. And of course, Rap and Hip Hop’s claims of being the first genre to use the medium of vinyl as an instrument are entirely baseless.
In roughly thirty years, NON has gone from vinyl experiments, to tape loops, to handmade and modified instruments, to multi-layered rhythm patterns, to militarist kettle drumming, to Social Darwinist spoken word, to digital samplers, and well into the realms of minimalist and ambient music. Boyd Rice’s body of work encompasses a wide variety of sonic exploration: undulating waves of sound and rhythm, subsonic lows and brain-splitting highs, loops of raw sound, tones that fade into and out of audibility without ever having a clear beginning or end –– at once distorted and melodic, it runs the entire gamut of the sonic spectrum. As Adam Parfrey once described it, “This swirling vortex of sound is mood music, pure and simple; like some soundtrack to a frenzied blood-letting at the foot of the Mongol steppes.”
This retrospective collection, Terra Incognita, contains a cross-section of some of Boyd Rice’s more ambient, minimalist works from 1975 to the present, and it too runs the gamut of sonic possibility. It is a collection which is as varied and complex, as it is lengthy: from the melancholically harmonious “Solitude,” to the hypnotic delirium of “Fathers Day,” to the woozy, hazy swirling of “Immolation of Man,” to the ambient surrealism of “Arka,” to the melodic coaxing of “A Taste For Blood,” and on to the terse, jarring tension produced by “Extract 5” –– we are here offered a wide array of sonic delicacies. “Sunset” evokes images of some sort of possessed, tribal ritualism; and “Fountain of Fortune” could very well be a requiem or funerary dirge, while “Embers,” which begins as a raw wall of noise, fades into a confoundingly consonant, seesawing melody. To dismiss any of these recordings as mere “noise” is beyond philistinism –– they are much, much more.
– Brian M. Clark
April, 2004
complete non discography here
