Noise Annoys

The purification of Boyd Rice

By Skylaire Alfvegren - LA Weekly: Wednesday, April 29, 1998 - 12:00 am

In the mid-'70s, the din of Merzbow's fluorescent feedback, Scandinavian Black Metal and your mother's Cuisinart had yet to exist as viable forms of musical terrorism; even if they had, chances are people wouldn't have known what to make of them. Times, they have changed. The masses now clamor for noise, and Boyd Rice (a.k.a. NON), an expert in the field, has produced God and Beast (Mute), his most assaultive work in a decade.

In recent years, the raw minimalism of NON has found its niche. "Mainstream bands have incorporated elements of rep-etition and ambient sound into their music, and audiences have become acclimated to them," says Rice. It's taken time for people to catch up to the idea of noise in general, and noise like his in particular. "People just didn't know how to respond. Twenty years ago, if you had told me that someday people would be dancing to my music, I never would've believed it."

Growing up near San Diego, Rice was one of the Southland's only proponents of noise-as-music back in the '70s. "I got into noise when I was a child," he says. "When I was left in the car in a parking lot, I'd honk the horn as long as I could, because I liked the sound . . . When I got older, my favorite music was the Shangri-La's. I tried to figure out what aspect of the Shangri-La's fascinated me, and I realized it was the edge in the girl's voice." Rice used a portable tape recorder to butcher the bubblegum. "I figured if you could strip away the unessential and isolate that edge," he says, "you could create something totally harsh and visceral, which for me would be the ultimate form of music."

Settling on the moniker NON ("It implies everything and nothing"), he relocated to San Francisco, where, in the thick of disco, he created environments for himself with elemental noise loops. Few people knew how to place NON in the scheme of things. "I was compared to Kraftwerk simply because people didn't know what else to compare me to," he says. The Throbbing Gristle comparison, while more suitable, was still inaccurate: "The difference was they were using real instruments to make music that was noisy, whereas I was creating noise that was trying to be music."

In 1976, Mute released NON's first full-length recording, known as "The Black Album," which was followed by the equally pernicious and decompositional Physical Evidence and Blood and Flame LPs. A collection of NON's most venomous tracks is found on Music for Iron Youth: The Best of NON, which could be described as mood music for summoning demons - pure evil pressed into vinyl. Rice moved away from unadulterated noise in the late '80s.

"When I first started, there was nothing out there like NON," he says. "Then it became a trend, and I got away from it - it's hard to make minimalism more minimal." Music, Martinis and Misanthropy (1989) found him waxing malevolently on mass destruction and the little things that make life difficult, while In the Shadow of the Sword (1992) and Might! (1995) were based on Social Darwinist themes and Ragnar Redbeard's controversial book Might Is Right.

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