Noise is generally defined as unwanted sound. So why is there a genre called noise music? Who wants to hear the unwanted? Maybe noise isn’t unwanted but undefinable. A conventional song might express some viewpoint or emotion through verses and a chorus. Usually one melody–either a voice singing or rapping or an instrument soloing–soars over a recurring sequence of chords and notes. Most music has a steady pulse you can tap your feet or even dance to. Noise music has neither of these traits. The musicians throw convention out the window and rebuild music from the basic elements of sound.

Imagine you’re waiting for the train in a subway station late at night. The air conditioning is making a constant hum over your head, and the occasional footsteps of other passengers create inconsistent rhythms. A leak in the ceiling is dripping nearby, and somewhere you can hear a rat scurrying across the tracks. All that gets masked and then reappears each time a train clatters by. Noise music takes a sonic landscape like this as its starting point and turns it into a jam, modulating speed, volume, pitch and clarity to bring different sounds to the forefront of an aural abstract painting. 

Rather than trying to move the listener, noise music suspends time and envelops the listener in atmosphere. It bypasses reason and emotion to speak directly to the nervous system. Whatever feelings and associations flow from there are particular to the listener.

Raven Chacon, Che Chen and C. Spencer Yeh brought their brand of noise to The Stone in NYC last Saturday. Chacon received a MacArthur genius grant in 2023 and the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022. He began the performance by breathing and groaning into what looked like an old walkman which distorted and echoed the sound. The other two joined in, slowly drawing the listener into a cloud of air puffs as electronic ringing sounds seeped out of the speakers.

Saturday’s show was part of Chacon’s week-long residence at The Stone. Each night the Diné-American composer led a different combination of avant garde musicians. Che Chen is one half of the guitar & percussion duo 75 Dollar Bill, and C. Spencer Yeh is known for his project Burning Star Core. This Instagram announcement made no promises about what instruments any of them would play:

Chen acted primarily as percussionist. Because static and feedback were a near constant, each time he switched from one acoustic device to another marked a transition to a new section of music. He also ran the sounds of his own percussion through a pair of tape reels. The reals were of different sizes, either slowing, speeding or alternating the pitch of what he’d just played. I was reminded of the Frippertronics tape reel technique pioneered by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in the 1970s.

Chacon’s two acoustic instruments were a recorder and a floor tom tucked between two tables of electronics. Sometimes he used them in combination: dropping the recorder from a few inches over the tom and letting it bounce back into his hand to capture the knocking sound. Otherwise, he and Yeh spent most of the evening twisting various knobs to unleash feedback, fuzz, screeches, whirs and every kind of sound in between.

Chen breathed and pushed buttons for the first five minutes, then turned to an instrument that looked like two rubber belts laid across the board of a xylophone. His mallet strikes produced a deep gong-like boom as the other swirling noises receded into the background. I imagined reaching a remote mountaintop monastery in the middle of a storm, being let in for shelter and still hearing raging winds outside the door. The buzzes and howls eventually took back over, and Chen began clanging a repeating pattern on five metal bowls of descending size. It felt like we’d stepped outside the monastery to hear wind chimes being battered by the storm.

During another couple of the quieter minutes, Chen was left to pluck his amplified juice harp a capella. Yeh joined in with unintelligible vocalizations growing in volume as the juice harp continued. The vocalizations reminded me of hearing muffled talking and footsteps from a nearby hallway outside the room you’re in, or (credit to my friend) sitting next to someone loudly chewing their food. You can hear an example of Yeh’s vocalizations on this Burning Star Core album.

The music was not devoid of emotion. Yeh rocked back and forth passionately and even stood up to growl into the microphone. He could’ve been reacting to a painful relationship, a frustrating call with customer service that morning, or the general state of the universe, but he was definitely feeling something. There was a touch of humor too as his vocal sounds ranged from the sacred to the flatulent.

Yeh picked up his violin a few times, but it was never to play conventional notes from scales. He approached the instrument without preconceived ideas of how it should be played: as a resonant object of different materials and shapes, and microphones ensured anywhere the instrument was touched would be audible. When not scratching high on the neck, he was hitting the wooden body itself with the back of his bow, or bouncing his bow on the neck rest to yield an echoing bass tone, like plucking a thick tightened rubber band.

The closest-sounding recording I could find to this evening’s one-off performance was this album. Chacon’s music often has a visual component, as in this performance where a man chopping wood becomes a source of percussion around 3:00 and 12:00, or in “For Four (Caldera)” described on Brian Abelson’s blog. The sheer number of instruments and devices used in Saturday’s performance was a feast for the crowd’s eyes.

Other than one man in the front row who threw his hands up and walked out after about 20 minutes, the audience was transfixed and didn’t make a peep even in the quietest parts. The Stone’s venue is actually a classroom near Greenwich Village with a floor-to-ceiling window facing the street. Passersby occasionally stopped to look in at the three men twisting knobs and hyperventilating into walkmans, probably wondering what the captive audience was hearing.

The music stalled on one electric loop as the second of two long jams was winding down. Chacon had lost electricity for his knobs! The musicians exchanged grins and shrugs trying to figure out who was making the lingering noise, then stood up to signal a reluctant end to the performance. After an evening of sounds verging on the edge of chaos, it seems fitting that an accident got the last word.