Music is just organised noise – the degree of organisation is where the arguments start. One person’s migraine-inducing cacophony is another person’s emotional, spirit-touching experience. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the genre of noise music, which eschews traditional musical structures and sounds for extreme distortion, howling feedback and violent volume.
As practiced by artists like Merzbow, Pharmakon and Winterkälte, with a history that includes luminaries like Throbbing Gristle, SPK and Iannis Xenakis, noise music is an often brutal – some may say brutally beautiful – genre.
You don’t have to fully embrace noise as a listening experience to appreciate its sonic power and its applications for experimental sound design – bringing drama and fury to otherwise traditional music productions. Here are a few different ways to wrangle that power into your own music, no matter the genre…
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Let’s start with feedback. Ever since artists in the 1960s started using the sound of a guitar howling through an amp in a musical way (hello, Jimi Hendrix!), feedback has been an indispensable part of experimental music-making. While creating feedback with a guitar or microphone can be a powerful thing, it can be hard to control the feedback itself. For a more contained feedback experience, some have harnessed a mixer as a feedback-sculpting instrument.
Known as no-input mixing, plugging a mixer’s output into its own input can generate waves of feedback that you can then massage and direct with the mixer’s gain, volume and EQ controls. Japanese noise musician Toshimaru Nakamura is a master at this, coaxing all manner of experimental and even beautiful sounds from his ‘instrument’
The beauty of no-input mixing is that you can use the mixer that you already have. It also doesn’t have to be anything fancy. In some cases, something cheap may even be preferable. It’s not about sound quality, after all, but sound power. For greater variety, you can also include instruments and effects in the signal chain if you want – just as long as you’re still working within a closed loop.
If you prefer to work with feedback in the box, you can route audio in a similar within your DAW. Just be careful of sound levels! For an instrument-based approach to working with feedback, the recently-released iOS app WAIL from Anthony Moran uses two feedbacking delay lines to create all manner of banshee screams that sound similar to no-input mixing.
Speaking of feedback, Body Synths is a Berlin-based boutique company that creates instruments for those working in harsher genres than you’ll hear on daytime radio. Debuting at this year’s Superbooth, the company’s Laboratory is a feedback synthesizer and dual-channel effects processor, with four feedback paths, dual delays and no-input self-oscillation capabilities.
“Using feedback, any effect can become an unusual sound source, something that trades precision and control for character and unpredictable results,”Body Synths’ Xavi Badosa tells us, when asked what inspired him to make Laboratory.
“I spent some time experimenting with audio feedback synthesis … with guitar effects placed on the feedback paths. I realised I could distill those ideas to their absolute simplest by creating an instrument that could be used as a stereo feedback synthesizer with the added benefit that the included effects would be exposed so they could be used on their own.”
Unlike most feedback-oriented devices, Laboratory is true stereo, with voltage-controlled delays and filters in its feedback paths. “It lets you create delays, filters, distortions, oscillators and all kinds of weird textures and soundscapes,” says Xavi.
“Things get extra interesting at the intersections between those functions. From there, letting feedback signals take over just spices things up even more.”
Laboratory is currently in the final stages of development with plans to release it later during 2026.
While Laboratory might be experimental on the inside, from the outside it looks like a standard effects unit. That’s not always the case with hardware aimed at noise musicians.
One of the exciting things about working in harsher genres is how much performance and interaction with the device can contribute to results. Many instruments and effects are made to be worked with in real time, sometimes even with no MIDI or CV. It’s all about being hands on and in the moment.
Take Demon Box from Eternal Research, for example. Blurring the line between performance instrument and industrial test equipment, it turns electromagnetic signals from electronic devices into sound, MIDI data and control voltage. You ‘play’ it by placing electric objects on it, then adjusting panning, phasing and effects as it sonifies electromagnetic waves.
Another unusual box is Enigma from SOMA Laboratory, the same team of mad scientists behind Lyra-8 and other unusual instruments. Enigma looks like a Ouija Board combined with a piece of audiophile hi-fi equipment. By placing metal objects on its occult-like surface as if playing a board game, you generate sounds and sequences, with MIDI and CV clock sync plus MIDI note control as well.
“The shape, size and type of object are entirely up to you,” says SOMA. “Coins, screws, fragments, gears, tools and any other metallic artefacts will work.”
With both of these devices, the goal is not to compose a piece of repeatable music, but to work hand in hand with the instrument to generate new sounds and sequences, ones that you might not be able to do on your own.
Perhaps the king of unusual boxes are those crafted by Error Instruments. With a catalog packed with bewilderingly beautiful devices in both standalone and Eurorack format, many limited edition, and fans like Martin Gore and Trent Reznor snapping up their products, Error Instruments is like a cottage industry unto itself.
“My place has always come from an art background, from paintings,” says Paul Tas, the driving force behind Error Instruments and a sometime visual artist. “It was never the idea to sell on Sweetwater or other big companies. It was never for money. I just do what I like.”
What Paul likes is to make unusual instruments and effects processors, ones with names like Sugar Rush FX BX, Radio Sputnik UVB-76, and the popular Indian Resonator, a device with two self-oscillating resonators that can sound both like a synthesizer and an Indian flute.
“Most people know synthesizers,” answers Paul when asked to describe his products to someone who might not be familiar with experimental music-making gear. “They think about a surfboard with black and white keys. They don’t think about Eurorack. They don’t think about experimental boxes that make sounds. I describe it sometimes as noise toys. It’s also somehow a kind of fetish.”
Given Paul’s history with art, it’s no surprise he places a premium for his noise toys on what he refers to as aesthetics. “You can get a lot of out of your iPad these days or from a computer, but they don’t have aesthetics,” he says. “People like aesthetics, like to feel that aesthetics give feedback for ideas.”
Another key element in noise music production is distortion. Cranking up the gain, blowing out the signal with a distortion pedal, leaning into the storm: this is how you turn a plain sound into an extreme one.
“I always loved the distortion of tubes or overdriven analog mixing decks or effects,” says Udo Wiessmann, who records as Winterkälte and runs the label, HANDS. “Today there are so many ways for sound processing that you have to focus on your gear not to get lost.”
Udo’s love for unusual sounds began at an early age. “I learned keyboard instruments as a child,” he says. “Already then, I liked triggering two different sounds on the home organ at the same time. When I discovered and started to make electronic music in the late ‘80s, I always fell in love when it broke out of standard harmony or came to a kind of melody or structure created by filter sweeps or noise manipulations. Noise always made me feel at home.”
To create his unrelenting fusion of noise and rhythm, which smoulders like a burning car crashed at the intersection of industrial and noise, Udo prefers to work with whatever is available. “For my projects Winterkälte and Atrum, there’s no limitation on how to create sounds,” he explains. “I use sounds from manipulated and resampled field recordings, but also effects, filters, drum machines, samplers, and synthesizers. It doesn’t matter if it is modular, analog or digital.”
If the idea of creating rhythmic noise appeals to you, Udo recommends starting by listening to the artist Esplendor Geométrico. “My vision of rhythm ‘n’ noise you can find on the releases of Winterkälte,” he says. “And of course, on my label HANDS there are many noise-inspired artists like Mono No Aware, Orphx, Nullvektor, Monolith, Sonar, Geistform, Greyhound, Maschinenkrieger KR52 and many more.”
Getting started with noise, or incorporating noise music ideas into your own tracks, doesn’t have to be complicated. While you can indeed work with unique instruments like the Laboratory or Demon Box, what you already have in your studio will also get the job done.
“It’s more a question of how you use it,” stresses Udo Wiessmann when asked if you can make noise with traditional music gear. “Of course, it’s easier to create noise with a Korg MS-20 compared to a Korg M1. Also, it might be easier to use an effects processor like the Boss SE-50 for distortion compared to using the tubes of an old multi-track tape machine, but the differences in the process is always exciting, and the results are always worth the travel.”
As for how to bring experimental techniques into non-noise productions, Paul Tas of Error Instruments suggests using experimental gear to process and add texture to elements of your track like drums;
“There are a lot of drum machines and a lot of drum companies, but they’re actually not so (unique) because they’re all cloning each other,” he says. “What we do sometimes is make a drum sound more crunchy or more over the top. If you put it on traditional drums, your rhythm becomes much richer.”
Lastly, Xavi Badosa of Body Synths advises pushing your gear to the limit to see what it can do. “Don’t be scared about misusing audio technology in a way that’s different than the one intended by its designers,” he says. “The chances of breaking something are low while the chances of finding new and interesting sounds are high.”
As for specific techniques, taking his Laboratory as a cue, Xavi recommends exploring effects in new and non-traditional ways. “My main recommendation is to stop thinking about effects as simple end-of-chain devices,” he says. “Use the output of a reverb as a modulation source. Feed the crackle of a cable connection to an infinite delay. Modulate the distortion amount at audio rates. Use EQ to change your sound source into something unrecognisable. Add scary levels of gain. There is no right or wrong technique.”
