About This Archive
What harshnoise.org is, who keeps it running, and whose name and spirit it carries forward.
harshnoise.org is an archive of harsh noise, harsh noise wall, power electronics and the scenes around them — artist profiles, releases, gear reviews, events, published in English and Indonesian side by side. It's run by one person, kept anonymous by choice, not by necessity.
A name carried forward
This project carries the name and the spirit of Dawid Kowalski — PURGIST — forward. Dawid spent two decades inside the Polish noise underground as a musician, an engineer, and just as much as a curator: booking tours in both directions, bringing international artists into a scene that had been cut off from them, sending Polish artists out the other way. He died in April 2026.
What this site owes him isn't a literal inheritance — this codebase, this specific archive, was built from nothing, by one anonymous person, after his death. What it does owe him is the model: that a scene this size survives on the people willing to do the unglamorous work of documentation and connection, not just the people making the loudest records. Running an archive like this anonymously, for no audience metric that matters, is the closest way I know how to say thank you for that.
Why anonymous
No name attached, on purpose. Noise archives built around one visible curator tend to become about that curator eventually. This one is meant to stay about the artists and the records.
Get in touch
Corrections, submissions, and tips go through the Contact link in the footer. Fact-checking mistakes especially — this archive would rather be corrected than be wrong and stay wrong.