Articles
Since 1982 TNB have been undermining the foundations of bourgeoisie art
and culture with their own unique brand of destroyed music. In contrast to many
other Noise and Industrial units, they have never compromised or corrupted their
work. The ferocious nature of their anti-music is even more hostile and
staggering, over 25 years later. Far beyond all mundane attempts at creating
‘noise,’ TNB remain unchallenged in their destructive crusade. Nothing
remains when the alarm of their extremely physical cacophonous bruitist offensive
has silenced. TNB was formed in 1982 and thereby drastically changed the outcome of
anti-art and anti-music for years to come. No public appearances and a strict
anti-everything approach only contributed to the aura of impenetrable obscurity
surrounding them. TNB set the standards for generations to come and still today
continue as undisputed masters of wrecking aural havoc. The Executioners of
Tonality, the Assassins of Culture, the Murderers of the Past.
The mutilated corpse of Tristan Tzara is left in the gutter for the vultures and
maggots to feast upon. All ‘isms’ are nothing but a prison that holds you
back from exploring the true potential of destructive force. The old Dada and
Futurist manifestos are being used as toilet paper – taken
notice of only in order to be avoided. They are The Modern Alchemists, but in
no way bearing resemblance to Paracelsus other than the transformation from shit
to gold. TNB are alchemic in the sense that they destroy to create. The sound of
manifestos torn to pieces, statues of leaders transformed to
dust, the sound of burning flesh and civilization falling apart. Nothing was
meant to last. In 1983, TNB performed live for
the first time at Morden Tower in Newcastle, UK. A tape of this disconcert was
released in ’83 and later came out as a bootleg LP called Seinsart. The
Gesamtnichtswerk ('Totalnothingwork') 4CD boxset features three early ‘80s performances, as well as one from ’94.
Gesamtnichtswerk is a massive affair comprising 20 years of endless blockade. Here the
legendary debut album, Changez Les Blockeurs (from ’82), is presented, side by side with
'Reductio Ad Absurdum' – a
meeting between TNB 1982 and 2002. Witnesses of their live offensives claim it
to be an uttermost nauseating experience that weakens even the most fanatic
harsh head. Wearing black hoods and bandages they look like something between
Rudolf Schwarzkogler and a Catholic procession, removing all traces of personality. One
thing is clear, Luigi Russolo would cream in his pants by the sheer ecstatic
excitement if he heard TNB live! My first encounter with TNB was on the Ohrenschrauben
comp. LP (Dom, '85.) Here TNB teamed up with Organum and managed to conjure forth some of
the most annihilating and infernal sound I have ever heard. They have remained
allies ever since the Pulp 7” in '84. Clearly the two are sharing a common
vision when it comes to their minimalist approach to anti-music. David Jackman
told Unsound about his relation to TNB, ‘I just liked the noise they made and they
liked the noise that Organum made, so we did some work together. Probably the
major difference is that Organum has never had any strong Dadaist inclinations.
But I like their music because it doesn’t really register as music at all.’ The influence TNB has had over the current
Noise scene can’t be
denied. Even today they stand unchallenged in all their hostile glory.
While many other early Industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse employ traditional
instruments and Rock Star attitudes, TNB hold onto their anonymity and continue
to vomit all over the corpse of Industrial music.
Excerpt from an article by Kristian Olsson which will appear in the Shocktilt book
to be published this year by Vinyl On Demand
The
New Blockaders combine the use of non-musical instruments, art inspiration, and
a critique of musicality that is designed to renew. They released their first
album Changez Les Blockeurs in 1982. The 'instrumentation' is made up of
objects and bits of rooms being scraped, dragged, thumped, scratched, etc. The
soundworld that emerges is something that continues throughout their work,
albeit sometimes featuring more processed elements, especially if in
collaboration with others. What marks this first album out is its refusal to go
beyond what is actually a very limited set of sound possibilities - whilst there
is continual clatter, it does not aspire to variety. Unlike other of their
releases, there is a dynamic, with changes in emphasis, mainly in the percussive
elements – 'Part One,' for example, calms down toward the end, dissipating any
momentum it might have acquired and in place of what could have been construed
as rhythms are staccato metallic scrapes. Throughout, the percussiveness is
jerky, but also insistent, as if trying to create an object that is both
resistant, massive, and also something that exists only to be pummelled away.
'Part Two' ends with quiet creaks (having taken in a dog yapping and something
like elephantine trumpeting.) Clatters give way to bumps and finally, a hiss
like dust. On the face of it, this is very similar to the recordings and
performance of Einsturzende Neubauten, who use electrical tools, metals, bits of
buildings, and so on at about the same time. But the German group are using
destruction, where TNB are destructive of instrumentation. TNB refuse the
evocations that characterise 'Industrial music,' and collapse signification into
material. Initially, unlike Pierre Schaeffer or Nurse With Wound, the sound
seems to maintain its ‘dramatic context’ – i.e. we know, and are
encouraged to notice, what is being played, however unusual it is in the context
of music (recording, performance, artwork.) But TNB refuse a virtuosity of the
newly musicalised object. If a chair or wall is to be used ‘as percussion’
it will not be salvaged as a musical instrument, but will retain its flatness,
its essential unmusicality. Later recordings and performances even lose the
residual possibility of ‘properly playing’ objects in an indistinction of
sound. Refusal is a key part of their strategy.
Also in 1982 came the 'TNB Manifesto,' which lays out a strong rejection of all
art, the past and meaning. In being 'anti-music, anti-art, anti-magazines,
anti-books, anti-films, anti-clubs, anti-communications' they aim for new
thoughts, new actions etc. Their rejection is purposeful, but also contains the
same seeds of contradiction propagated by the multiple Dada manifestos: 'we
will make a point of being pointless.' Their philosophical nihilism (as opposed
to the use of that word as an accusation of hypocrisy, cynicism or violence) is
complete: everything is to be refused, even the meaning of the refusal. They are
genuinely rehearsing and re-presenting the purpose of Dada – a continual
questioning and destruction being in its own right creative, and not just a way
of clearing a path, or effecting a cleansing (as some parts of Futurist
manifestos suggest.) The manifesto does announce ‘we must destroy in order to
go forward!,’ but the important thing is how this is achieved – the going
forward of TNB music is always a dwelling in the destruction of musicality.
They recall the era of high modernism as a refusal of all that came before or at
the same time. The manifesto summons a moment where the artistic avant
garde imagined they could change society through art and exclamation marks. This
manifesto doesn’t quite work in the way it seems to at first: it is much more
of a commentary on writing manifestos: a meta-manifesto, which, because it takes
'the manifesto' idea seriously, ends up being less than a manifesto (and this in
a good way.) It both means what it says and realises the impossibility of this
working, replaying Nietzsche’s dictum 'Nothing is true! Everything is
possible!' The sounds that we get are in place of music, and this writing is in
place of a real programme for change. Above all, what characterises the attitude
and the sound is refusal – hence the 'blockade,' but how to keep this fresh
without changing is a dilemma.
One of the ways out has been collaboration, and ultimately the outward contagion
that bears fruit on Viva Negativa! (2005/06), two four-album sets of
'versions' of TNB works. But before we get there, it is worth tracking TNB a bit
further in their own right. The 'Live Offensives' of Gesamtnichtswerk
(2003) continue the harsh, often jerky percussiveness, with pipe rolling and
bashing to the fore on Live at Morden Tower (10/83.) All four
performances establish a mass of sound that avoids light and shade in favour of
a randomly phased strobing of sounds. There is no attempt to make high-quality
recordings, so tape hiss and loss of sharpness also become part of the block of
sound that is set up. Noise music is always an attempt to re-assert the material
over the musical, and this means not hiding the process of production as digital
sound attempts/claims to do. Loss of quality is not inherently something to do
with Noise music, as mp3 sound compression and selective heightening of vocals
over other elements demonstrate, but the boundary between means of reproduction
and material to be reproduced in TNB's material blurs, as does the line between
what is acceptable and unacceptable on a recording, as does the distinction
between music and non-music (where, in this case, music would just mean the
sounds purposely created or replayed by 'musicians.') Everything about TNB
entails refusal, and yet this refusal to even be anti-art is potentially
problematic, because firstly, it is a common gesture, and secondly, it had in
this case produced a large body of 'not-even-anti-art.'
The title of their collection, Gesamtnichtswerk, is important here. It
reminds us of Wagner’s dream of the 'total art work' – the Gesamtkunstwerk,
but the art is replaced by nothing, a nothing that is emphasised in the sleeve
notes, as being outside of everything, an emptiness that becomes total rather
than being a contained space of nothingness, or some sort of nothing reserve. In
place of art then, is nothing – no renewal, no radicality to inspire. As it is
a collection, it is not about a total single moment of nothing but the sprawl of
nothing where there should be something, which means the 'total' part refers to
the entirety of music and art (scraps of which litter the booklets.) Clearly,
though, creation has occurred in this nothingness, just as many currently
suspect of black holes, but creation based on refusal is not the same as
affirmative art, art that believes itself, and this because, not despite, of the
'manifest.' The gesture is backed up by a material working-through of 'nothing'
where art/music is supposed to be, and where a space has been cleared, there
will be no building, only more clearing. The third CD of Gesamtnichtswerk
offers two 'symphonies': Simphonie in X Major and Simphonie in O Minor
(1991): neither of which are recognised keys for composition … Simphonie
in X Major begins with huge industrial blasts, and moves through phases o
machinery destroying itself – there are rhythms, made up of booming and
howling. After 7.10 in the 'First Movement,'
the noisier part stops and gives way to scraping and thumping, building back up
to more overwhelming blasts. The 'Second Movement' is crashier. Simphonie in
O Minor is mostly quiet hiss, fizzing, and, gradually rising in volume from
virtual inaudibility, a background throbs within it. The symphony is of course
the privileged mode of 'classical' music at its height as an elitist art
(culturally as well as in terms of class reception and production.) Like the
realist novel, its steady narrative and teleology reassures the higher classes
of European society. Its structure makes it easy to construct a linear history
of aesthetic beauty around it, suggesting a sense of order at all levels.
Modernist experiments moved away from the symphony and/or sonata form, and in
the case of Noise music, attempted to leave form behind (somewhat optimistically
and didactically.) TNB take the symphony into the woods and pound it until it
stops speaking its language of reconciliation and resolution. Narrative is
specifically undone through the nonlinear trudge through 'nonmusic' in the first
'simphonie' and through absence in the second (without being the smug silence of
John Cage’s 4'33".) This
rejection of narrative is crucial in returning us to the question of influence
– which can no longer be heard in terms of inheritance but must be seen as
agonistic and retrospective. Not only this, but it is undone – not refused,
the spurious belief in individual genius unconnected to history stripped back.
This rejection of the notion of the creative genius (as seen in Dada) extends to
TNB collaborations, which range from Organum through The Haters to Merzbow, to
the 'versions' or 'tributes' on Viva Negativa! The working methods are
kept obscure, but it mostly seems as if material is being shared and altered,
rather than the Jazz model of the individual player finding a like-minded spirit
and realising some sort of meeting of musical minds through presence. Similarly,
TNB collaboration is not like remixing, where one self-present individual brings
their style to another, in a mutual reinforcement of supposed greatness.
Instead, individuality is swamped as the material gets more isolated from any
controlling 'artistic' force, and aims for the selfgeneration and
self-maintenance of living organisms. From the descriptions here, it might seem
this is a very dry 'music' but it breathes, albeit slightly toxically. Its self-containedness,
its removal from individual fingerprints being the key to its uncontrollability
for listener and performer alike. This is not to say there is no recognisable
style, or that a TNB/Organum recording (such as Pulp (1984) doesn’t
suggest elements of individual styles combining. But once the 'music' is
essentially made of noises, structured noisily and disruptively, without
offering a welcoming form, any recombination takes it further from artistically
recognisable modes of talent, skill, etc. even if a certain audience would
'appreciate' this music as if it had those attributes.
The manifesto too exists as if it were a manifesto, as if it returned us to
Dada, but without being merely a knowing reference or something in a 'retro'
style. It is there again at the opening of the Viva Negativa!, both
written and recorded on seven-inch single. Underneath it lies several hours of
material, where TNB material has been ingested by others and 'tributes' made:
the manifesto’s seriousness (it is not ironic, in the sense of smugly deriding
those early twentieth-century manifestos, but
it is a humorous take on the idea, I think) is essential for its own failure,
and therefore its capacity to set up a tortuous, 'aporetic' path through the
material. Its contradiction through eight albums of 'covers,' four of them
literally coming after the manifesto, in box 1, is part of the noise not being
simply within TNB 'music,' as it establishes an effect that stretches out
of the record itself, between records, between TNB and others, between TNB and
listeners, and so on. Like Dada, the manifesto cannot but does succeed. It
becomes impossible to fail, but to succeed as 'not-even-anti-art' is failure.
This 'failure' is what defines noise in its encounter with music, for noise must
fail to be noise if it is accepted, and of course it fails if not heard as well.
This failure is where noise resides, the fate it selects for itself, or has
selected for it.
Noise must be only as if it were music, not as a new
musicality, and all this is signalled in the relations set up the TNB manifesto
and their actual musical practice, something akin to Bataille’s 'formless,'
which travels between and undermines both form and formlessness. No assessment
of influence and the way it plays out in art could ignore Harold Bloom’s
influential The Anxiety of Influence, originally published in 1973. Bloom
argues that a later poet is in a continual struggle with precursors, and
realises their work as if free of influence, but all the while making that
influence come to be, in the new poem. Many have misunderstood the 'anxiety' of
the title, as Bloom is not shy of pointing out in his preface to the second
edition. The anxiety is not separate or prior to new creation: 'what writers may
experience as anxiety and what their works are compelled to manifest, are the
consequence of poetic misprision, rather than the cause of it. The
strongmisreading comes first.' (Bloom 1997.) The later poet develops as artist
through six stages or 'ratios,' beginning with a misreading that is never
excised ('clinamen') and continuing through various reworkings until ultimately,
the later poet becomes the precursor, thereby belatedly making the earlier poet
into precursor ('apophrades.') Influence becomes unavoidable, and something that
'cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning
of images.' (ibid.: 7.) Anxiety and influence come late, not early, such that 'a
poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety' (ibid.: 94.) Bearing
in mind the seeming absence of worry in TNB with regard to their artistic
precursors, they offer good examples of Bloom’s idea of 'anxiety': the
presence of Dada or Surrealism, for example, represent a creative
misinterpretation rather than a happy wallowing in older, better forms. That
those movements are thought to belong to the past (chased away by a succession
of other avant-garde movements) heightens the possibility of 'misreading,'
without becoming cosy irony or nostalgia, but an awareness of the influence as
an inevitable connector. TNB’s collaborations represent a way of incorporating
influence, of annulling it respectfully. The collaboration is away of realizing
equality, but what is produced heightens Bloom’s idea of anxiety in that
influence cannot be surmounted and all attempts to do so only emphasize its
lurking (creative) force. Influence is no longer linear, in this view, and nor
is it capable of being clearly delineated: 'misreading does not simply occur
between two texts, but spans and in fact constitutes the history of the poetic
tradition' (Allen, 1994.) Again, it is worth
noting that 'misreading' is not the implication of an error by Bloom, by the
process of reading itself, which is always removed from the source (and we could
extend this, to the author.) The field of poetry, of creative writing in
general, even art in general, is composed of misreadings. So when the influence
of influence is raised, as it is by TNB, to become something problematic, rather
than hidden, this is a playing out of Bloom’s theory. In fact, they can tell
us something about its reach, can display its functioning. This is in large part
because the actual precursor, for TNB (seen from a Bloomian perspective) is not
a movement, or an artist, but music. It is music that must be re-read (misread),
re-appropriated, denied, destroyed and so on, and finally music is brought back
to an origin through its denial (i.e. the beginning of all music is its
emergence from other sounds, which then become thought of as noise.)
TNB’s Gesamtnichtswerk even undoes the idea of a historical
compilation, not just through conceptual framing, but also through closing on
the twenty-minute silence of ‘Null Bei Ohr' ('Nil By Ear.') This is not a
reference to, or repetition of Cage (but in being silent, it makes itself the
anxiety of such a repetition.) At the end is nothing, in place of Noise music.
As it occupies time, the listener awaits, attentive – is it going to burst
into sound? Is it made of frequencies beyond hearing? Is it about the machinery
of recordings? All of this was never about listening, it almost says.
Excerpt from an article by Paul Hegarty which appeared in Organised Sound
in 2008