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95-519: Sólstafir is an Icelandic post-metal band formed in 1995 and currently signed to Century Media . Originally a black metal band, they transitioned to a post-metal-influenced style with slight traces of their earlier black metal. Sólstafir was formed in 1995 by guitarist/singer Aðalbjörn Tryggvason, bassist Halldór Einarsson, and drummer Guðmundur Óli Pálmason. The band's name is the Icelandic word for sun beams ( crepuscular rays ). They soon recorded

190-683: A Quadrophonic version of the Metal Machine Music recording that was produced by playing the master tape back both forward and backward, and by flipping the tape over. Reed was well aware of the drone music of La Monte Young and cites him as a major influence on Metal Machine Music . Young's Theatre of Eternal Music was a proto- minimal music noise group in the mid-60s with John Cale , Marian Zazeela , Henry Flynt , Angus Maclise , Tony Conrad , and others. The Theatre of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced Cale's subsequent contribution to

285-498: A "continuous flowing curve" of sound that he could not achieve with acoustic instruments. In 1931, Varese's Ionisation for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lion's roar , and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise. In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage stated that Varese had "established

380-527: A "heavy-lidded yet eye-opening" effect. The New York Times associated the term with a "wave of bands using metal as a jumping-off point for a range of experimental styles, dabbling in free jazz , minimalist post-rock, noise and even modern classical music ." Contemporary post-metal bands incorporate influences ranging through doom metal , black metal , shoegaze , progressive rock , folk music , and classical music . Writing for Slate in 2009, Simon Reynolds reflected: Post-rock doesn't have

475-552: A City) and Convegno d'aeroplani e d'automobili (The Meeting of Aeroplanes and Automobiles) were both performed for the first time in 1914. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to contemporary noise music such as Japanoise , his efforts helped to introduce noise as

570-454: A band which became central to an increasingly recognizable post-metal movement. In particular, their 2002 album Oceanic – which showcased "buzzing washes of multilayered sound that ebbed and flowed in intensity", combining the "barbed guitars" and " shouted vocals " of post-hardcore with "meandering, psychedelic progressions" – has become regarded as a classic of the genre. At the same time, Hydra Head signed further prominent bands, releasing

665-1022: A close connection with. I feel we're part of a community with some bands – Mono are good friends of ours, but I don't feel that we're that similar musically. Their music is more similar to classical music, whereas I feel ours has more in common with punk and hardcore . Noise music Noise music can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques , physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings, field recording , computer-generated noise, stochastic process , and other randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion , feedback , static , hiss and hum. There may also be emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy, continuous pieces. More generally noise music may contain aspects such as improvisation , extended technique , cacophony and indeterminacy . In many instances, conventional use of melody, harmony, rhythm or pulse

760-407: A communicative signal, and a third definition based in subjectivity (what is noise to one person can be meaningful to another; what was considered unpleasant sound yesterday is not today). According to Murray Schafer there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, and a disturbance in any signaling system (such as static on a telephone). Definitions regarding what

855-433: A famous Elvis Presley recording. I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. In 1932, Bauhaus artists László Moholy-Nagy , Oskar Fischinger and Paul Arma experimented with modifying the physical contents of record grooves. Under

950-464: A genre has achieved major critical acclaim. This was reinforced by the "widely publicized" success of California band Deafheaven , whose second album Sunbather became one of the most celebrated releases of 2013. The band's successful fusion of caustic black metal with blissfull shoegaze in the vein of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive , although preceded by the French musician Neige of Alcest ,

1045-417: A genre known as noise music. The album, recorded on a three speed Uher machine and mastered/engineered by Bob Ludwig , is an early, well-known example of commercial studio noise music that the music critic Lester Bangs has sarcastically called the "greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum ". It has also been cited as one of the " worst albums of all time ". In 1975, RCA also released

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1140-437: A half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33" , is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie to NON to Glenn Branca . Writing about Japanese noise music, Hegarty suggests that "it

1235-694: A live acoustic/electronic improvisational group formed in Rome, made a recording titled SpaceCraft using contact microphones on such "non-musical" objects as panes of glass and motor oil cans that was recorded at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. At the end of the sixties, they took part in the collective noise action called Lo Zoo initiated by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto . The art critic Rosalind Krauss argued that by 1968 artists such as Robert Morris , Robert Smithson , and Richard Serra had "entered

1330-462: A major factor in the evolution of post-metal. Many bands employ the "speed and ferocity" of black metal in "contrast to slower, more ethereal compositions". This approach was pioneered by Agalloch , who formed in 1995 and also employed elements of doom metal, progressive rock , folk music , and post-hardcore. Wolves in the Throne Room , who became a significant act for American black metal by

1425-503: A modest musique concrète student piece entitled Etude . Cage's work resulted in his famous work Williams Mix , which was made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching . Cage's early radical phase reached its height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art " happening " at Black Mountain College , and 4'33" , the so-called controversial "silent piece". The premiere of 4'33"

1520-527: A musical aesthetic and broaden the perception of sound as an artistic medium. At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound. Antonio Russolo , Luigi's brother and fellow Italian Futurist composer, produced

1615-425: A piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku in 1922. In 1923, Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231 , a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive. Another example is Ottorino Respighi 's 1924 orchestral piece Pines of Rome , which included the phonographic playback of a nightingale recording. Also in 1924, George Antheil created

1710-466: A recording of two works featuring the original intonarumori . The 1921 made phonograph with works entitled Corale and Serenata , combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines and is the only surviving sound recording. An early Dada -related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp also worked with noise, but in an almost silent way. One of the found object Readymades of Marcel Duchamp , A Bruit Secret (With Hidden Noise),

1805-536: A set of recordings made at the train station Gare des Batignolles in Paris that included six steam locomotives whistling and trains accelerating and moving over the tracks. The piece was derived entirely from recorded noise sounds that were not musical, thus a realization of Russolo's conviction that noise could be an acceptable source of music. Cinq études de bruits premiered via a radio broadcast on October 5, 1948, called Concert de bruits ( Noise Concert ). Later in

1900-456: A single 20-minute sustained chord (followed by a 20-minute silence) — showing how the sound of one drone could make music. Also in 1949, Pierre Boulez befriended John Cage , who was visiting Paris to do research on the music of Erik Satie . John Cage had been pushing music in even more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano, junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry. In 1951, Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4 ,

1995-409: A situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." Sound art found itself in the same condition, but with an added emphasis on distribution . Antiform process art became the terms used to describe this postmodern post-industrial culture and the process by which it is made. Serious art music responded to this conjuncture in terms of intense noise, for example

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2090-594: A vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover, the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the sounds being recorded. Canada's Nihilist Spasm Band , the world's longest-running noise act, was formed in 1965 in London, Ontario, and continues to perform and record to this day, having survived to work with many of the newer generation which they themselves had influenced, such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan . In 1967, Musica Elettronica Viva ,

2185-459: A work for twelve radio receivers, was premiered in New York. Performance of the composition necessitated the use of a score that contained indications for various wavelengths, durations, and dynamic levels, all of which had been determined using chance operations . A year later in 1952, Cage applied his aleatoric methods to tape-based composition. Also in 1952, Karlheinz Stockhausen completed

2280-606: A work titled Ballet Mécanique with instrumentation that included 16 pianos , 3 airplane propellers , and 7 electric bells . The work was originally conceived as music for the Dada film of the same name, by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger , but in 1926 it premiered independently as a concert piece. In 1930 Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varèse experimented with records, playing them backwards, and at varying speeds. Varese had earlier used sirens to create what he called

2375-547: Is Sonic Youth , who took inspiration from the No Wave composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (himself a student of La Monte Young ). Marc Masters, in his book on the No Wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars and DNA drew on punk rock , avant-garde minimalism and performance art . Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest that

2470-701: Is a music genre rooted in heavy metal but exploring approaches beyond metal conventions. It emerged in the 1990s with bands such as Neurosis and Godflesh , who transformed metal texture through experimental composition. In a way similar to the predecessor genres post-rock and post-hardcore , post-metal offsets the darkness and intensity of extreme metal with an emphasis on atmosphere, emotion, and even " revelation ", developing an expansive but introspective sound variously imbued with elements of ambient , noise , psychedelic , progressive , and classical music , and often shoegaze and art rock . Songs are typically long, with loose and layered structures that discard

2565-406: Is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious of society—validating and testing new social and political realities. His disruption of the standard history of music and his inclusion of noise in an attempt to theorize culture cleared the way for many noise music theoretical studies. Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of

2660-427: Is characterized by its use of recorded sound, electronics, tape, animate and inanimate sound sources, and various manipulation techniques. The first of Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits ( Five Noise Etudes ), called Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) consisted of transformed locomotive sounds. The last étude, Étude pathétique (1948), makes use of sounds recorded from sauce pans and canal boats. Cinq études de bruits

2755-466: Is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies. In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by naïve art , some contemporary digital art noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge , and vinyl records . Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example,

2850-539: Is considered noise, relative to music, have changed over time. Ben Watson , in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution , points out that Ludwig van Beethoven 's Grosse Fuge (1825) "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven's publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro . They subsequently published it separately. In attempting to define noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites

2945-617: Is dispensed with. The Futurist art movement (with most notably Luigi Russolo 's Intonarumori and L'Arte dei Rumori ( The Art of Noises ) manifesto) was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada art movement (a prime example being the Antisymphony concert performed on April 30, 1919, in Berlin). In the 1920s, the French composer Edgard Varèse , when New York Dada associated via Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia 's magazine 391 , conceived of

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3040-593: Is generally heavy, aggressive, and dark, but explores a variety of musical approaches alien to conventional heavy metal and extreme metal . It mirrors post-rock and post-hardcore in its emphasis on atmosphere and deep emotion and may be considered abstract, introspective, expansive, hypnotic , progressive , layered, or even apocalyptic . Jon Wiederhorn writes that though some post-metal bands "sought to break away from their raging roots by exploring less bombastic and more dynamic musical techniques" and others "sought to remain raw and corrosive", their music shares

3135-553: Is indebted to Isis' Oceanic ; Amenra from Belgium, who signed to Neurosis' label Neurot Recordings and rival their predecessors in sheer spiritual intensity; and Year of No Light from France, who have transitioned from a sludge-oriented sound to monumental instrumental compositions, "beautifully layered, but still dark and heavy". Back in the US, another instrumental band rose to prominence: Russian Circles , also strongly influenced by Oceanic . By contrast, True Widow , whose sound

3230-477: Is not a genre, but it is also a genre that is multiple, and characterized by this very multiplicity ... Japanese noise music can come in all styles, referring to all other genres ... but crucially asks the question of genre—what does it mean to be categorized, categorizable, definable?" (Hegarty 2007:133). Writer Douglas Kahn , in his work Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999), discusses

3325-413: Is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density . In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise

3420-767: Is often associated with extreme volume and distortion. Notable genres that exploit such techniques include noise rock and no wave , industrial music , Japanoise , and postdigital music such as glitch . In the domain of experimental rock , examples include Lou Reed 's Metal Machine Music and Sonic Youth . Other notable examples of composers and bands that feature noise based materials include works by Iannis Xenakis , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Helmut Lachenmann , Cornelius Cardew , Theatre of Eternal Music , Glenn Branca , Rhys Chatham , Ryoji Ikeda , Survival Research Laboratories , Whitehouse , Coil , Merzbow , Cabaret Voltaire , Psychic TV , Jean Tinguely 's recordings of his sound sculpture (specifically Bascule VII ),

3515-596: Is rooted as much in 1990s indie rock and psychedelic rock as in doom metal, offer a distinctive take, most impactfully on the 2013's Circumambulation , by employing "male/female vocal interplay" and showcasing "vulnerability and restraint". Meanwhile, the Melvins returned to the sound they themselves helped inspire, impacting it with the 2004 album Pigs of the Roman Empire , a collaboration with Welsh dark ambient composer Lustmord . Gradually, post-metal as

3610-630: Is something that has been done and redone, and it seems pointless to adhere to that structure when there are so many other avenues to explore". Noting the divergence from typical metal fashion , The New York Times described a 2005 Pelican show at the Knitting Factory in New York City : "Instead of long hair and all-black outfits, the crowd was displaying the trappings of brainy, slightly nerdy indie rock . Young men wore artistically cropped hair and tight-legged jeans , and there

3705-486: Is the final track of the Beatles ' 1966 studio album Revolver ; credited as a Lennon–McCartney song, it was written primarily by John Lennon with major contributions to the arrangement by Paul McCartney . The track included looped tape effects. For the track, McCartney supplied a bag of 1 ⁄ 4 -inch audio tape loops he had made at home after listening to Stockhausen 's Gesang der Jünglinge . By disabling

3800-542: The C++ software used in creating the viral symphOny by Joseph Nechvatal ). In "Futurism and Musical Notes", Daniele Lombardi discussed the French composer Carol-Bérard; a pupil of Isaac Albéniz , who composed a Symphony of Mechanical Force s in 1910, wrote on the problems of the instrumentation of noise music, and developed a notation system. In 1913 Futurist artist Luigi Russolo wrote his manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori , translated as The Art of Noises , stating that

3895-640: The La Monte Young Fluxus composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42–1:52 AM Paris Encore from Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for amplified percussion and window panes and his Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches, Etc. (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor. AllMusic assessed 1960s English experimental group AMM as originators of electronica , free improvisation and noise music, writing that "noise bands owe it to themselves to check out their primary source." Freak Out! ,

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3990-468: The Roskilde Festival that year. Sólstafir's fourth full-length album, Svartir Sandar , was released by Season of Mist in 2011. The song "Fjara" remained in the 2013 list of Iceland's top 100 songs of 20 years. This album signaled Sólstafir's retreat from black metal and move toward experimental atmospherics of the type practiced by fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós . Their fifth album Ótta

4085-706: The erase head of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète . The Beatles would continue these efforts with " Revolution 9 ", a track produced in 1968 for The White Album . It made sole use of sound collage , credited to Lennon–McCartney , but created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from George Harrison and Yoko Ono . In 1975, Ned Lagin released an album of electronic noise music full of spacey rumblings and atmospherics filled with burps and bleeps entitled Seastones on Round Records . The album

4180-688: The verse–chorus form in favor of crescendos and repeating themes . The sound centres on guitars (subjected to various effects ) and drums, while any vocals are often but not always screamed or growled and resemble an additional instrument. Post-metal is related to other experimental styles of metal: avant-garde metal , drone metal , progressive metal , and industrial metal . It has also been called metalgaze and art metal , highlighting its connection to shoegaze (an indie music style related to post-rock) and art music , respectively. Contemporary post-metal, pioneered by diverse groups such as Isis , Agalloch , Boris , Pelican , Jesu , Wolves in

4275-505: The 'stylus' and small sounds amplified by contact microphones. Also in 1960, Nam June Paik composed Fluxusobjekt for fixed tape and hand-controlled tape playback head. On May 8, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone , formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object . These recordings made use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with

4370-610: The 1960s, the Fluxus art movement played an important role, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones , Yasunao Tone , George Brecht , Robert Watts , Wolf Vostell , Dieter Roth , Yoko Ono , Nam June Paik , Walter De Maria 's Ocean Music , Milan Knížák 's Broken Music Composition , early La Monte Young , Takehisa Kosugi , and the Analog #1 (Noise Study) (1961) by Fluxus-related composer James Tenney . Contemporary noise music

4465-700: The 1966 debut album by the Mothers of Invention made use of avant-garde sound collage —particularly the closing track " The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet ". The same year, art rock group the Velvet Underground made their first recording while produced by Andy Warhol , a track entitled "Noise". AllMusic assessed the Godz as an early noise band: "the three squalling bits of avant-garde noise/junk they recorded from 1966–1968. " Tomorrow Never Knows "

4560-472: The 1970s, combined with the simultaneous influence of punk rock , established the No Wave aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today. Since the early 1980s, Japan has produced a significant output of characteristically harsh artists and bands, sometimes referred to as Japanoise , with names such as Government Alpha , Alienlovers in Amagasaki and Koji Tano, and perhaps

4655-487: The Judgment of God ), an audio piece full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia , and glossolalia . In 1949, Nouveau Réalisme artist Yves Klein wrote The Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony , conceived 1947–1948), a 40-minute orchestral piece that consisted of

4750-529: The Mafia, Coil , Laibach , Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth , Smegma , Nurse with Wound and Einstürzende Neubauten performed industrial noise music mixing loud metal percussion, guitars, and unconventional "instruments" (such as jackhammers and bones) in elaborate stage performances. These industrial artists experimented with varying degrees of noise production techniques. Interest in the use of shortwave radio also developed at this time, particularly evident in

4845-444: The Throne Room , and Russian Circles , typically employs the deep heaviness of doom metal and sludge metal and/or the dark ferocity of black metal . The widespread acclaim of Deafheaven , who succeeded Alcest in combining black metal and shoegaze (a fusion nicknamed blackgaze ), made this global post-metal underground more visible. The groundwork for post-metal was laid in the 1980s and early 1990s by various artists (mostly in

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4940-575: The US) combining heavy metal and punk rock sounds with an " avant-garde sensibility", such as the Melvins (particularly on 1991's Bullhead ), The Flying Luttenbachers , Justin Broadrick of Napalm Death and Godflesh , Swans , Gore , Last Exit , Glenn Branca , Rollins Band , and Fugazi . Helmet 's albums Meantime (1992) and Betty (1994) were also significant, while Tool 's music

5035-891: The Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback. Cale and Conrad have released noise music recordings they made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series ( The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with Young). Krautrock bands such as Neu! and Faust would incorporate noise into their compositions. Roni Sarig, author of The Secret History of Rock called Can's sophomore album Tago Mago "as close as it ever got to avant-garde noise music." The aptly named noise rock fuses rock to noise, usually with recognizable "rock" instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality , improvisation, and white noise . One notable band of this genre

5130-475: The advent of various types of noise produced in Japanese music, and in terms of quantity this is really to do with the 1990s onwards ... with the vast growth of Japanese noise, finally, noise music becomes a genre". Other key Japanese noise artists that contributed to this upsurge of activity include Hijokaidan , Boredoms , C.C.C.C. , Incapacitants , KK Null , Yamazaki Maso 's Masonna , Solmania , K2,

5225-459: The band and made his debut on the 2002 demo Black Death . After shopping around a three-track demo of new songs, Sólstafir signed with Spinefarm Records in 2005. Their second album Masterpiece of Bitterness was released by Spinefarm later that year. The album received positive reviews, with Metal Storm stating "the perfect mix of non-Metal elements with metal ones makes it a necessary album for any Metalhead looking for something that breaks

5320-653: The band's Twitter account, explaining that he had been "stonewalled by ex-bandmates" and forced out of the band by Aðalbjörn Tryggvason. Guðmundur was replaced by Hallgrímur Jón Hallgrímsson. After his departure from the band Guðmundur formed post metal band Katla. Sólstafir released their sixth full-length album, Berdreyminn , in May 2017 on Season of Mist. Upon its release Berdreyminn entered international charts, mostly top 50, across Europe. On 6 November 2020, Sólstafir released their seventh studio album, Endless Twilight of Codependent Love . Post-metal Post-metal

5415-486: The best known being Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters 's Merz art project of psychological collage ). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Akita took Metal Machine Music as a point of departure and further abstracted the noise aesthetic by freeing the sound from guitar based feedback alone. According to Hegarty (2007), "in many ways it only makes sense to talk of noise music since

5510-405: The closing track of their seminal 2001 album Jane Doe . According to Jahdi, the genre emerged as "those young intellectuals decided to slow it down" and labels such as Relapse Records and Hydra Head Records began releasing "slower, more bass-heavy and abstract" music more akin to post-rock. Hydra Head Records had been established in 1993 by Aaron Turner . In 1997, Turner co-founded Isis ,

5605-459: The demos Í Norðri and Til Valhallar . Halldór then left the band, and Aðalbjörn and Guðmundur recorded a promo tape as a duo in 1997. During this period, Svavar Austmann joined as the new bassist and the band began recording their debut full-length album, Í Blóði og Anda . The album was not released until 2002 due to various recording delays and label disputes. Shortly after that album was completed, second guitarist Sæþór Maríus Sæþórsson joined

5700-603: The desire to expand beyond established rock boundaries". As this movement swelled, bands from post-hardcore and experimental backgrounds began to incorporate its tendencies of " ambience , offbeat experimentation, downcast melodies and psychedelia " into metal. The two genres further converged through the influence of post-rock bands such as Mogwai , Godspeed You! Black Emperor , and Lift to Experience who shared metal's emphasis on loudness. Neurosis ' third album Souls at Zero and Godflesh's second album Pure , both released in 1992, are often retrospectively considered

5795-417: The early '90s onward. Sometimes beat-free and ambient , increasingly the work of home-studio loners rather than performing bands, post-metal of the kind released by US labels like Hydra Head often seems to have barely any connection to metal as understood by, say, VH1 Classic doc-makers. The continuity is less sonic but attitudinal: the penchant for morbidity and darkness taken to a sometimes hokey degree;

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5890-403: The early records of Pelican and Jesu . While Pelican are an instrumental quartet inspired as much by Neurosis and Godflesh as by Mogwai, Jesu was formed by Justin Broadrick after the breakup of Godflesh to explore "ambient guitar compositions", embracing shoegaze and slowcore influences. As black metal "spread beyond Scandinavia to infect the global underground", it joined shoegaze as

5985-569: The elements of his music in terms of sound-masses ; writing in the first half of the 1920s, Offrandes , Hyperprism , Octandre , and Intégrales . Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise ", and he posed the question: "what is music but organized noises?" Pierre Schaeffer 's musique concrète 1948 compositions Cinq études de bruits ( Five Noise Studies ), that began with Etude aux Chemins de Fer ( Railway Study ) are key to this history. Etude aux Chemins de Fer consisted of

6080-693: The first post-metal records. Godflesh had already pioneered "sluggish and tortured" industrial metal of their 1989 debut Streetcleaner , but Pure showcased "more expansive structures and long stretches of billowing noise ", inspiring a number of subsequent bands to combine metal with "layered washes of sound". Neurosis on the other hand were a hardcore band who embraced doom metal , post-punk and industrial influences, experimenting with texture and dynamics . They have since become recognized "for their pioneering post-metal efforts and unwavering dedication to expanding their artistic boundaries." In 2010, guitarist Steve Von Till stated: We always knew there

6175-762: The genre cannot be readily distinguished from doom metal, modern black metal, and progressive metal , "taking in all of these elements without being entirely any one of them". Contemporary post-metal is often seen as combining "elements of doom metal, sludge, and/or black metal with elements of post-rock and shoegaze", being more "peaceful" than metal but retaining its dark theming and harsh vocal style . As with post-rock, however, many bands are instrumental and when vocals are used, they often "resemble another accompanying instrument" rather than actual words. Songs are typically long and employ crescendos , gradually building upon repeated themes ; Aaron Turner of Isis stated that "the standard song format of verse-chorus-verse-chorus

6270-403: The industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. Works entitled Risveglio di una città (Awakening of

6365-499: The influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco in the late 1940s, Lou Harrison and John Cage began composing music for junk ( waste ) percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more. In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from

6460-504: The late 1990s US noisecore of bands such as Botch , Kiss It Goodbye , the Dillinger Escape Plan and Coalesce , who merged brutal metallic hardcore with jazz into fast-and-complex compositions, as a fundamental influence on post-metal. Writing for Bandcamp Daily , Jon Wiederhorn also noted the significance of Botch and Cave In , while Converge have been connected to post-metal through their longer songs since

6555-511: The lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that there is no such thing as silence. Noise is always happening that makes musical sound. In 1957, Edgard Varèse created on tape an extended piece of electronic music using noises created by scraping, thumping and blowing titled Poème électronique . In 1960, John Cage completed his noise composition Cartridge Music for phono cartridges with foreign objects replacing

6650-462: The mold of pre-established genres." Their third album Köld was recorded in Sweden and released in 2009. Reviewers compared the band's sound to Enslaved and Neurosis , among others, while noting their unique post-black metal sound. The album was also noted for its addition of atmospheric passages. Sólstafir began to tour Europe regularly in 2010 and made their first of many open-air appearances at

6745-408: The music of Hermann Nitsch 's Orgien Mysterien Theater , and La Monte Young 's bowed gong works from the late 1960s. According to Danish noise and music theorist Torben Sangild, one single definition of noise in music is not possible. Sangild instead provides three basic definitions of noise: a musical acoustics definition, a second communicative definition based on distortion or disturbance of

6840-516: The perceived negative traits of noise mentioned below and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways. In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution . In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as 'snow' on a degraded television or video image. In signal processing or computing it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that

6935-602: The potential to be used creatively. His aim was to capture and control elements of the sonic environment and employ a method of sound organisation, a term borrowed from Varese, to bring meaning to the sound materials. Cage began in 1939 to create a series of works that explored his stated aims, the first being Imaginary Landscape #1 for instruments including two variable speed turntables with frequency recordings. In 1961, James Tenney composed Analogue #1: Noise Study (for tape) using computer synthesized noise and Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (for tape) by sampling and manipulating

7030-504: The present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises". In an essay written in 1937, Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical materials and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called noise, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Essentially, Cage made no distinction, in his view all sounds have

7125-492: The production were referred to as trompe l'oreille sounds by Cocteau and included a dynamo , Morse code machine, sirens, steam engine, airplane motor, and typewriters. Arseny Avraamov 's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for

7220-547: The recordings and live performances of John Duncan . Other postmodern art movements influential to post-industrial noise art are Conceptual Art and the Neo-Dada use of techniques such as assemblage , montage , bricolage , and appropriation . Bands like Test Dept , Clock DVA , Factrix , Autopsia , Nocturnal Emissions , Whitehouse , Severed Heads , Sutcliffe Jügend, and SPK soon followed. The sudden post-industrial affordability of home cassette recording technology in

7315-544: The release of their 2007 album Two Hunters , were also inspired by Neurosis in combining "ambience and violence" to craft deeply melancholic music. While all aforementioned post-metal pioneers are either from the US (Neurosis, Isis, Pelican, Agalloch, and Wolves in the Throne Room) or the UK (Broadrick's Godflesh and Jesu), the genre soon spread internationally. The Japanese band Boris , formed in 1992, "have always embraced

7410-506: The same temporal aspect that post-disco or post-punk have; it's not about the ripples set in motion by a galvanizing "event." Rather, it evokes a sense of "going beyond" the structures of a genre of music without completely abandoning its legacy of attitudes and assumptions. For similar reasons, the term post-metal seems increasingly useful to describe the vast and variegated swath of genres (the thousand flavors of doom/black/ death / grind / drone / sludge /etc., ad infinitum) that emerged from

7505-502: The same time, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise music appeared with the Pop Group, Throbbing Gristle , Cabaret Voltaire , and NON (aka Boyd Rice ). These cassette culture releases often featured zany tape editing, stark percussion and repetitive loops distorted to the point where they may degrade into harsh noise. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial noise groups like Killing Joke , Throbbing Gristle , Mark Stewart &

7600-474: The somber clothing and the long hair; the harrowed, indecipherably growled vocals ; the bombastically verbose lyrics/song titles/band names. It's that aesthetic rather than a way of riffing or a palette of guitar sounds that ties post-metal back to Judas Priest and Black Sabbath . Fact writer Robin Jahdi notes that "the best Neurosis albums don't sound anything like the best offerings from Isis " and that

7695-593: The source that generated them initially. Pierre Schaeffer helped form Studio d'Essai of the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française in Paris during World War II. Initially serving the French Resistance , Studio d'Essai became a hub for musical development centered around implementing electronic devices in compositions. It was from this group that musique concrète was developed. A type of electroacoustic music , musique concrète

7790-442: The spirit and vitality of the vibrant movement" and some of their works, such as the 2005 albums Dronevil and Pink , have become influential to it. Boris often employ elements of drone music and have collaborated with prominent Seattle drone metal band Sunn O))) , who have also been associated with post-metal. Several European bands also gained prominence within the genre, including: Cult of Luna from Sweden, whose sound

7885-587: The use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of Antonin Artaud , George Brecht , William Burroughs , Sergei Eisenstein , Fluxus , Allan Kaprow , Michael McClure , Yoko Ono , Jackson Pollock , Luigi Russolo , and Dziga Vertov . In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society by considering noise music as not merely reflective of, but importantly prefigurative of social transformations. He indicates that noise in music

7980-458: The work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard , Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno and through their work traces the history of "noise". He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted", "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th-century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage 's composition 4'33" , in which an audience sits through four and

8075-621: Was a collaborative work that created a noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg . What rattles inside when A Bruit Secret is shaken remains a mystery. In the same period the utilisation of found sound as a musical resource was starting to be explored. An early example is Parade , a performance produced at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917, that was conceived by Jean Cocteau , with design by Pablo Picasso , choreography by Leonid Massine , and music by Eric Satie . The extra-musical materials used in

8170-599: Was credited by Terrorizer with "effectively invent[ing] the post-metal genre" and named the best post-metal album of all time by Fact . The fluctuating 12-minute song "Purify" has been described as the album's "signature track". Neurosis' work has also contributed the development of doom metal, sludge metal , and drone metal , and these genres have been associated with post-metal since. Similarly, drone metal pioneers Earth have been significant to post-metal ever since their 1991 debut release Extra-Capsular Extraction . Furthermore, Fact writer Robin Jahdi highlights

8265-399: Was described as post-metal as early as 1993. Many of these artists emerged from hardcore punk and post-punk circles but their combination of sonic violence with experimentation and eclecticism made them difficult to categorize under any one genre. The term post-rock was coined in 1994 and soon used to describe a diverse group of bands that shared "a penchant for drifting melodies and

8360-499: Was even a smattering of young women in librarian glasses and worn-out Chuck Taylor sneakers." Jon Wiederhorn describes the post-metal scene as a "global community of artists" positioned on the "fringes of the underground ." Pelican's Trevor de Brauw stated in 2007: I have an affinity [f]or metal, but I don't think of Pelican as a metal band. So when people call us 'instrumetal', or post-metal, or metalcore or whatever, I can see why they say that, but it's not something that I feel

8455-558: Was nicknamed blackgaze and met with controversy among fans of conventional extreme metal . It has also inspired a new wave of bands such as: Ghost Bath from North Dakota, who use undistorted guitar melodies to develop unsettling atmospheres; Austria's Harakiri for the Sky , whose despairing sound melds black metal and post-hardcore; and the recent work of Oathbreaker , who are rooted in the Belgian dark hardcore scene of Amenra. Post-metal

8550-610: Was organized by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columns in June 1981 followed by the Speed Trials noise rock series organized by Live Skull members in May 1983. In the 1970s, the concept of art itself expanded and groups like Survival Research Laboratories , Borbetomagus and Elliott Sharp embraced and extended the most dissonant and least approachable aspects of these musical/spatial concepts. Around

8645-468: Was performed by David Tudor . The audience saw him sit at the piano, and close the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed

8740-504: Was premiered via a radio broadcast on October 5, 1948, titled Concert de bruits . Following musique concrète, other modernist art music composers such as Richard Maxfield , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Gottfried Michael Koenig , Pierre Henry , Iannis Xenakis , La Monte Young , and David Tudor , composed significant electronic, vocal, and instrumental works, sometimes using found sounds. In late 1947, Antonin Artaud recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu ( To Have Done with

8835-581: Was recorded in stereo quadraphonic sound and featured guest performances by members of the Grateful Dead , including Jerry Garcia playing treated guitar and Phil Lesh playing electronic Alembic bass . David Crosby , Grace Slick and other members of the Jefferson Airplane also appear on the album. Lou Reed 's double LP Metal Machine Music (1975) is cited as containing the primary characteristics of what would in time become

8930-401: Was released by Season of Mist in 2014, and was noted for its additional experimental elements like strings and piano. Three official music videos were released and the band performed Iceland's national television channel, RÚV 's Stúdio Á . In January 2015, the band announced that longtime drummer Guðmundur Óli Pálmason had left the band for "personal reasons". Guðmundur replied immediately via

9025-544: Was something deep to Neurosis's music, but ... I think Souls at Zero was when the music became something else. It was taking that material out on the road and losing ourself in the trance states induced by playing hypnotic , super-heavy loud music that we really figured out how to surrender to it. Then we said, OK – this is going to take us to where we wanna go: somewhere deeper, somewhere more emotional, somewhere elemental . The band's 1996 fifth album Through Silver in Blood

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