Vol. III - Bachir Gemayel 'HNWar'

Harsh noise wall, a wall of sound, a wall of pure static, and a sound formed as a boundary. Boundaries are a form of limitations that involve two various parties that clash. When they clash, we have what we call war.

War is also a wall, a punishing, merciless wall that leaves no room for grey space. You cannot sit in between the two; you must join a side or fight both. War however is not a motionless entity, instead it is one that shifts and bends, like the battle for a city block, or a large building that would be considered a highly militaristic advantage.

Urban warfare in general is not consisted of great battles, but often short outbursts that occur and last somewhere between 10-30 minutes. This is the reasoning for the length of this release. In twenty minutes a team of armed soldiers can take on the enemy, destroy them, and then claim the territory for themselves.

These are the ideas behind Bachir Gemayel. As a tribute to my people who continue to fight, what seems to be the case today, an endless wall of enemies. It is their resistance as a wall that keeps the others out.

The quick pace and quick changes show the fierceness of war. Bullets flying past you, making nicks in the wall. There are car bombs tearing the concrete from underneath them and spraying bystanders. Screaming families hiding in stairwells, listening to the sound of RPGs hit their home. Slitting the throat of your enemies or intruders, leaving their world and their families in ruins.

The walls constructed are made of nothing more then misbaha beads and bullet casings, standard items either held or scattered around war torn areas of Lebanon. This is HNW on a realistic level. Inspired by life and the world around me, in the name of my people, I produce Walls of War.

***Bachir Gemayel presents a twenty-minute textural assault. This wall continuously moves, methodically and mercilessly, down textural avenues and alleyways of ruptured concrete and contorted steel. Throughout the piece, there is a tremendous sense of friction and violent tension between the frequencies, causing different lines of texture to, at times, meld into one another and, at others, to violently repel each other, giving birth to a multitude of textural contractions and expansions. The use of misbaha beads and bullet casings as source material, along with the absence of distortion effects, gives this material an organic tangibility that is often the backbone of quality noise. Comes in shatter-proof jewel-case, with uniform Order of the HNW cover design and with Order of the HNW emblem sticker. Each booklet contains a written piece penned by the artist (see above).***

Prices, including postage, are:

Single Volume: £4.00 (UK), £5.00 (EU), £5.50 (USA, RoW)
Two Volumes: £7.00 (UK), £9.00 (EU), £9.50 (US, RoW)

Send payment in GBP to: orderofthehnw@gmail.com

Vomir, A View From Nihil, Unearthed, London Gig

This will be the first AVFN live event.

Forthcoming Releases 2011

Two further volumes of the Order of the Harsh Noise Wall CDR series will be released this year. When I began this series, it was my intention to value quality over quantity. As a result, it has taken me two years to find material of a high enough standard with which to continue the series. It may take me another two years to find further contributions, or I may never find any at all. Either way, I am unconcerned, as long as this series maintains its integrity and that of the genre.

Volume Three will be by the Lebanese-North American act Bachir Gemayel. Volume Four will be by the German project Die Reitenden Leichen. Both are atypical, yet well conceived and meticulously composed, works of HNW.

HNW Archive Blog

A new archival blog of out-of-print HNW releases has been started by the HNW producer Gluttoness. Lucas (of the afforementioned Gluttoness project) briefly outlined his reasons for doing so thus:

1. [to] Give a website for labels and artists to promote themselves by making free versions of their old works available.

2. [to] Provide an archive of out-of-print material (which is the vast majority of it, due to the small runs generally associated with HNW) for fans who missed out on a release and would just like to hear it.

3. [to] Have a resource for those curious about HNW sound to be able to hear complete works without having to spend $$ on something they're not sure they'll like.

The more important concern, of whether this will indeed promote HNW development and creativity or lead to grindcore/suicidal-black-metal levels of stagnation and over-saturation via internet downloads, remains to be seen. Either way this much is certain, I will be using my membership to post important and/or interesting releases exclusively. The first of which is Vomir's Claustration. Although, given that the blog requires, quite rightly, permission from the artist before posting, posts may be few and far between.

Sam McKinlay's 'The Politics of HNW'

For those of you who do not know, 'The Politics of HNW' is an article authored by the HN/HNW mastermind Sam McKinlay (The Rita, etc.) and published in the first issue of the noise magazine As Loud As Possible. The title of the article is somewhat misleading as there is little to nothing about the politics or philosophy of HNW considered within. Instead the article focuses on an examination of the artistic aesthetics of the sub-genre with particular emphasis placed on its evolution from harsh noise and interpretations of the its contemporary form. This is achieved via a brief history lesson by McKinlay himself and through some brief but insightful interviews with leading North American HN/HNW composers. At the heart of these is a rather complicated and layered question (not unlike McKinlay's compositions) which each of the interviewees do well to unpack with fruitful answers.

The question posed by McKinlay is this,

'When you work with a static tone, or an unmoving or even swelling/moving textural line of noise, how do you contemplate the spaces and dynamics that lay within the bits and pieces that are concentrated to achieve the so-called white noise? Along with your work with the different movements and breaks in your tracks what, to you, is the driving quality and endearment of the static or crunch that you strive for and appreciate?'

I couldn't resist the temptation to attempt to answer this question myself.

For A View From Nihil I usually focus on the interactions of the heavier, broader and more air-filled low-frequency waves with the lighter, more narrow and less air-filled mid-to-high-frequency waves. I enjoy observing their competition for supremacy and for dominance of the overall sound/object. Often I like to start with one and introduce another gradually and listen how this process plays out. In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of making and listening to HNW is how a strange order emerges from this process. Quite often when a track begins it sounds chaotic or disorderly but after a minute or so the mind begins to perceive a pattern and, depending on the quality of the composition, continues to perceive more patterns as the track progresses. When in the role of composer I find it immensely satisfying to observe a previously non-existent order/pattern come into being within the boundaries of the sound-world which I have set. Like observing the formation of a universe in microcosm. A similar process can be observed in tonal drone/ambient music but for me this process is much more interesting and rewarding when observed in a harsh/static based sound because the sound is more dramatic and more abstract and therefore seems more exciting and mysterious. For one thing, often as a listener, and sometimes as a composer, it can sometimes be difficult to tell if a new pattern in the composition is the product of an intervention by the composer, a natural development due to wave interactions or merely a product of the listener's brain in its ceaseless attempt to make sense of the chaos of the world around it. This ambiguity appears more apparent and more profound in HN/HNW than in drone/ambient, perhaps due to differences in the brain's ability to digest different forms of sound. Whatever the reason, I personally find this level of ambiguity between composer, composition and listener infinitely fascinating and I believe it invests the sound with transcendental qualities that other forms of music cannot achieve.

In closing I'd like to suggest some parallels between what I have said here and the answers given by McKinlay's interviewees in his article. They too express an awareness of and appreciation for both the permeable line between composer and composition, and the innate sense of order that will form naturally in a composition when given a decent set of parameters in which to develop by the composer.

'A lot of the reason why most of Skin Crime material is recorded live is that it gives the sounds a lot more freedom to take on a life of their own... Most of the time we don't plan anything out ... things just come together on their own'

- Patrick O'Neil (Skin Crime).

Although O'Neil mainly has the process of recording live in mind here, his contemplation of the relationship between sound, sound-creator and listener is very close to what I have said. The observations of Pat Yankee (Paranoid Time) and Eric Stonefelt (Hum of the Druid), however, are immensely close to my own contemplation of the patterns and order which form within the HNW composition.

'I find that the spaces and dynamics lurking about the crunch pile will often take care of themselves without a lot of pre-planning on my part. I put trust in, and lay responsibility upon, the Process'

- Pat Yankee (Paranoid Time).

'Effective crunch and cracking is suggestive of some sort of organic movement or acoustic presence. Even if the source is entirely electronic ... I'd hope to hear some natural space, or at least some form of soundscape'

- Eric Stonefelt (Hum of the Druid).

As Loud As Possible.

AVFN - 'Triumph...' Review

A man named Raymond Cummings has writtena a nice review of A View From Nihil - Triumph of the Broken Will, which you can read here. It is a positive review but, more importantly, it is incredibly well written. This makes it a very interesting read because we get a nice glimpse of an HNW outsider actually 'getting' both the transcendent nature of the genre and purpose of the release. Thank you Raymond Cummings.

A View From Nihil on Bandcamp

So, Soundcloud isn't bad but a number of people have noticed that the tracks don't play back too well, furthermore its ugly as fuck with a limit on the number of tracks one can upload.

AVFN is now on Bandcamp which so far seems to be both the best looking music site and the easiest for both artists and fans to interact with. Unfortunately its not currently possible to upload any tracks longer than around thirty minutes but, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of albums or tracks one can upload. AVFN is most likely to use Bandcamp over and above Soundcloud or Last in future so keep checking back. Here are some HNW bandcamp sites:

A View From Nihil
Anarcho Freaks Production
Die Reitenden Leichen
Finality
Griz+zlor
Shah/Hash