Vomir

Romain Perrot was born in Paris in 1973 and has been active in noise music since 1996. Under the name Vomir he is recognised internationally as one of the pioneers of harsh noise wall, alongside The Rita and Werewolf Jerusalem. Between 1996 and 2020 he took part in more than three hundred recordings across improvisation, electro-acoustic and harsh noise projects, most of them released through his own label.

Harsh noise wall sets out to build static, monotone, overwhelming blocks of sound. Perrot's definition is strict: a wall exists when the noise stays complete, continuous and constant from beginning to end, with no alteration and no fluctuation.

That strictness is the point. Stripping away variation removes every conventional handhold a listener uses — no development, no arc, no resolution — and leaves them inside a single frequency with nothing to track. The wall is built from the bare minimum, and Perrot accepts that each listener will hear something different inside it.

He describes noise music as a form of non-violent anarchism, and Vomir as an attempt to make isolation and confinement something you can experience through sound rather than read about.

Perrot has had no musical training — no theory, no instrumental study — and has no intention of acquiring any. The absence of technique isn't an apology in his work; it's the stated method. He calls himself an anti-artist, and says it is in the instrument and the noise that he genuinely finds release.

He buys guitars, amplifiers and synthesizers and uses them instinctively to generate raw sound. Every one of his noise projects takes this anti-music approach, which he uses to set down his disillusionment and his rejection of an established order.

He founded his own label in 2012 to release his own projects and collaborations. Its manifesto carries the same position without softening it.

Pink Floyd at eleven taught him to listen closely and to treat an album as one whole entity — a way of hearing he later found again in Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, which he calls an exemplary record. From there came the SST catalogue with Black Flag and Sonic Youth, repetitive music through La Monte Young, and industrial music through Throbbing Gristle.

Through the 1990s he moved closer to the experimental scene around Bimbo Tower, U-Bahn and Instants Chavirés. He listened to Songs of Praise on Aligre FM every Monday, attended the live broadcasts, and eventually joined the programme from 1999 to 2005.

Free noise and harsh noise arrived through Japanoise — Merzbow, and Keiji Haino in particular. The wall itself came from The Rita and the Militant Walls label, where the term harsh noise wall originated.

Vomir shows work as anti-concerts, and they extend the same reasoning into the room.

Perrot stands surrounded by electronics that play his recordings for anywhere between one and eight hours. As the wall fills the space he faces away from the audience and stays motionless throughout. His explanation is that the action isn't happening on stage at all — it is happening inside a plastic bag.

The bags are offered to everyone at the start, with a note: place it over your head for complete immersion in the harsh noise wall, to separate yourself from everything except the sound. Anyone who wants to can spend the set in the dark, alone, inside the noise.

The bag is also doing a second job. It asks the audience about their relationship to consumption, which is not unrelated to what the name Vomir means.

Harsh noise wall remains an underground subgenre, but it has its own events, including a dedicated festival at Instants Chavirés in Montreuil.

Under the Vomir name he has recorded with Marc Hurtado, Rotted Brain, Écoute la Merde, Werewolf Jerusalem, Government Alpha and Torturing Nurse, among others.

Since 2011 he has worked under the name Roro Perrot, where he invented the concept of folk à chier — roughly, shit folk.

The reference points are Jean Dubuffet's sound experiments and, more broadly, art brut and the refusal of dominant culture set out in Asphyxiante culture. Perrot describes it as an improvised, broken, inarticulate substitute for folk, and on his label's site as raw acoustic punk: no chords, no musical knowledge, raw singing made of despair and rage.

Unlike his HNW work, this project follows no rules. The wall has a manifesto he holds himself to; Roro Perrot has none, which lets the work run in a far more dadaist direction. He has recorded as an acoustic duo with Yves Botz, and has invited, in his own words, a friend who sings like a saucepan.

Alongside the recordings, Perrot has built a wide knowledge of noise music and become a regular participant in academic work on it — running a theoretical line on how noise music has shaped experimental music aesthetically. The full list of appearances is under TALKS & RESEARCH at the end of this page.

He also works in film. He made an experimental horror short, Free as Dead, with Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture, produces video pieces for some of his recordings, and publishes a limited-edition graphic fanzine called Absurdum.