Guide / Scene Report France Beyond Vomir
Harsh noise wall gave France its most exported figure, but the country was making noise with guitars and gutted record players a decade before the wall. A map of what else is there.
Ask anyone outside France to name a French noise artist and you will get one answer. Vomir is the country's most exported figure by a distance, and harsh noise wall is the form most people now associate with the place. But the wall arrived late. France had been making noise for the better part of two decades before Romain Perrot stood still in front of an amplifier, and the earlier work sounds nothing like it.
Before the wall: guitars and gutted record players
The two names that come first are Dustbreeders in Metz and Sister Iodine in Paris. Both worked with rock instrumentation rather than electronics — guitars, amplifiers, the physical apparatus of a band — pushed until the rock part stopped functioning.
Dustbreeders, built around Yves Botz, Thierry Delles and Michel Henritzi, are the stranger proposition of the two. Alongside guitars they play mange-disques, the cheap French portable record players of the 1960s and 70s, used as instruments rather than as playback. A machine designed to reproduce a record becomes a machine for wrecking one.
Sister Iodine — Lionel Fernandez, Erik Minkkinen and Nicolas Mazet — came out of the wreckage of no wave, and the New York lineage is audible. Their first album ADN115 landed in 1994.
Dating this is not settled. Sarah Benhaïm places both groups as pioneers from the late 1980s. Other accounts put Sister Iodine's formation in the early 1990s. The gap is a few years and nobody in the scene appears to have minded enough to fix it — but a guide should say so rather than pick.
Then the wall
Romain Perrot had been active since the mid-1990s, moving through the Paris experimental circuit — Bimbo Tower, U-Bahn, Instants Chavirés — before Japanese noise redirected him. It was The Rita's self-described "militant walls" that gave him the form, and the name he coined for it stuck to the whole genre: harsh noise wall. Vomir as a project dates from 2006, and has since passed three hundred releases.
What makes Vomir a French story rather than simply a noise story is the refusal at the centre of it. One wall, unchanging, for the length of the set. No build, no event, nothing to reward attention. It is closer to a position than a performance, and it is the single French idea in this music that the rest of the world adopted wholesale.
What is actually there now
The present scene is scattered and does not organise around one method. Evil Moisture works in Paris with circuit-bending — short-circuiting low-voltage electronics into sounds they were never built to make. France Sauvage, in the west, improvises across free noise, industrial and krautrock. Terrine makes rhythmic electronics in Amiens. Fusiller builds loops from DIY synthesisers in Nancy.
Four projects, four cities, four unrelated approaches. That is the honest shape of it: France has no single noise sound, and any list like this one is a snapshot of projects that happen to still be running.
The room that made it possible
Scenes need somewhere to happen. In France that has substantially been Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, running since 1991, which did more than any label to make improvised and noise music legible in the country and beyond. Perrot passed through it before Vomir existed. Most of the names above have played there.
Most noise infrastructure is informal — self-financed DIY promoters putting on nights and absorbing the losses. A room that lasts three decades is the exception, and it is worth naming as a reason France produced what it did.
Sources
The backbone of this piece is Sarah Benhaïm's "Petite histoire de la noise" for Festival Musica — a musicology researcher's overview, and the only account here written from study rather than reporting. Dates and the release count for Vomir come from its Wikipedia entry; line-ups from the groups' own pages. Where those disagreed, both readings are given above.
