I'm in a Noise Band

It’s just me and my partner Joe and our friend Chris, and I’m not a “real” musician, but I don't believe that fact delegitimizes the project in any way. Chris will come over and we’ll set up in our living room, plug in our many cables, and start making sounds just to see where that leads us. And it always, always leads us somewhere new.

When we were first making this kind of music, Joe and I would meet up with three other friends at one of their apartments in West Philly and make the most unholy racket you've ever heard. We used:

• a harmonium

• a bass guitar

• synthesizers of varying sophistication (including a really great phone application I used called Ethereal DialPad)

• drumsticks for use on any surface (the radiator was my favorite)

• a contact microphone

• a regular one

• books to open at random and read from aloud

• looping instruments that make short recordings and play them back over and over again

• a huge electronic keyboard

• and probably other things I'm forgetting.

These other people and I would go into a spare bedroom dubbed "the music room," reach for one or more of these items, and start bashing away—not playing anything that anyone had written or planned, but creating noise that we liked the sound of or that felt good to make. Two of the people in the group could play a couple of the instruments properly, and when they did so it provided a kind of backbone to the noise, a target for the rest of us to aim at, like a conversation we were having. This had the interesting effect of creating something that sometimes sounded musical, though it wasn't a composition and we'd never be able to recreate it. That's one really beautiful thing about spontaneous music creation: It's totally unique. To put it another way: It only happens once.

There's a band from Philly that’s been around forever called Radio Eris, fronted by Lora Bloom, a sweet art scene pal of ours. The group is named after the Greek goddess of discord, strife, and confusion. I once saw them play a noise show at their former headquarters, a house they called the Eris Temple, and it was intense: good natured and scary at the same time. The music felt like it was always about to fly into a thousand pieces, but because the people making it all agreed that the sounds belonged together, the center held.

Through Radio Eris I learned about Discordianism, the absurdist philosophy/parody religion created in the ‘60s that inspired their project. I dig weirdo ‘60s ideas in general and parody religions in particular, so when I found out about this one I bought a copy of the Principia Discordia, the group's holy book, to try to understand it better. The book is very weird—rollicking but serious, oddly illustrated, decidedly rousing. It explains their philosophy, which is that both order and disorder are illusions, man-made concepts that are "artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper than is the level of distinction making.” This idea is beautiful to me, and it has provided me with many hours of contemplation. I like to try to imagine the deeper level, to feel it inside myself. I’ve reached the conclusion that any time I create something, I dip a ladle into that layer, draw out a measure of PURE CHAOS, and shape it into something new.

I can admit that, though I was drawn to the band’s energy, I was freaked out at the time by the thought of celebrating chaos. It seemed like asking for trouble. Several years later, after having lived through a global pandemic and a political climate that grows more dangerous by the day, in addition to going through many painful incidents as well as beautiful, connected experiences in my own small life—and after integrating all of this into my essence as best I can—I feel differently. The chaos of life was already there, whether I liked it or not. Trying to resist it never got me too far. May as well embrace it, even learn to channel it. There might be something in there I can use.

Musical chaos, by comparison, is much more easily recognizable as something wonderful: a messy, sexy, natural catharsis that you do with and for other people as much as for yourself. It feels so good to step away from my exhausting self for a moment and enter that shared space. To disappear into it. It’s an opportunity to accept the unpredictability of reality, to go with the flow. An exercise in nonresistance that feels like a surprise and a relief—like realizing, the moment you stop thrashing around in the water, that you can float.

I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.
—Principia Discordia

Joe and I have turned this essay of mine, along with these beautiful illustrations by our friend, the artist Alison Lee Chapman, into a pretty art book. I’ll debut it at the American Library Association Conference next week, and after that it will be available for purchase online.