Guide Where to Start With Noise
Noise doesn't hold still long enough to have one history. Here's a working map of the branches anyway — Japanoise, power electronics, wall noise, cut-up, drone, and the rest — with a place to start in each.
There is no clean history of noise, and there probably can't be. The genre is built from feedback, static, and the stuff every other kind of music tries to filter out — which means it comes from everywhere at once, made by people who mostly weren't listening to each other when they started. Any map of it is going to leave things out. This is ours, organised by approach rather than by year, with one place to start in each branch.
Japanoise: dynamics pushed until they break
The Japanese noise scene of the late 1980s and early '90s didn't start as a scene at all — musicians were scattered across the country with little contact between them, and what they shared was an approach rather than a plan: dissonance, extreme volume swings, electronics pushed past their intended use. Merzbow became the name most people learn first, mostly because there's so much of it — hundreds of releases across four decades, none of them quite the same record twice. Hanatarash took the same instinct into the performance itself, most famously driving construction equipment into a venue. Masonna went the other way, building sets under a minute long that still counted as extreme on their own terms.
Power electronics: the same extremity, a different target
Power electronics started in the UK around the same moment, and it shares Japanoise's appetite for extremity without sharing its method. Where Japanoise piles up distortion and lets the dynamics swing wildly, power electronics strips down to a single unmoving synth line and puts a screamed, confrontational vocal on top of it — Whitehouse is the reference point most people start from. The thematic territory the early groups worked in — serial killers, state violence, fascist imagery used ambiguously rather than critically — has aged into one of the genre's most argued-over legacies, and it's worth knowing that going in rather than discovering it by accident.
That territory has also shifted. A newer generation of artists working in the same sonic vocabulary — Puce Mary among them — have pointed it inward instead, toward mental health, self-destruction, and interiority rather than shock aimed outward. Same tools, a genuinely different question being asked of them.
Content note. This branch of noise has historically used serial-killer references and fascist imagery as provocation. This guide names that history without reproducing the imagery itself.
American harsh noise: the middle ground
Noise reached the US after both of the above were already established, and what developed there sits between them — power electronics' minimalism fed through Japanoise's wall of distortion. The instrumentation stayed deliberately basic: a couple of distortion pedals, a contact mic, whatever object was on hand to run through them. The Haters, Daniel Menche and Richard Ramirez did the early defining work here; Macronympha's catalogue is a good place to hear how far that minimal setup can be pushed without ever sounding thin.
Cut-up: noise that won't sit still
Most harsh noise commits to a texture and stays there for a while. Cut-up refuses to. Sound slams in and out of the mix in fractions of a second — a synth burst for a quarter second, silence, a wall of static for half a second, silence, scrap metal for a third of a second, on and on. Sickness is the reference point most people reach for; Developer folds musique concrète's tape-splice logic into the same fast-cut approach, working from pre-recorded sound on cassette rather than pure synthesis.
Harsh noise wall: the opposite bet
If cut-up is one extreme, harsh noise wall is the other. One unbroken, unchanging block of static, start to end, with none of cut-up's movement and none of Japanoise's dynamic swing. The Rita and Vomir are usually named as the genre's twin founders, and they make an almost perfect argument with each other about what a wall is for — one loads it with thematic obsession, the other empties it out entirely. The best HNW work rewards close listening despite sounding static on first pass: real pieces shift in barely audible ways, a frequency surfacing and receding over the length of a side.
Drone, noise rock, and death industrial
Three more branches worth knowing, each a step away from pure harsh noise rather than a variation on it.
Drone shares wall noise's patience with slow-moving sound but gets there through lush, quiet texture instead of static — Kevin Drumm's slower synth work and Lea Bertucci's saxophone-and-electronics pieces sit closer to ambient composition than to assault.
Noise rock keeps a band's actual instrumentation — drums, guitar, bass — and runs it through the same distortion instinct; the early-2000s Load Records roster, Lightning Bolt especially, is the usual entry point.
Death industrial picks up first-wave industrial's bleaker, more machine-oriented side rather than power electronics' vocal confrontation — Brighter Death Now and Control favour synth and sparse, buried vocals over anything shouted.
None of this holds still
The branches above are a starting map, not a set of walls. Plenty of the best noise being made right now sits across two or three of them at once, or refuses all of them on purpose — an artist committed to wall noise one release and cut-up the next, a noise-rock band that spends half an album in drone territory. That's not the genre failing to organise itself. It's more or less the whole point: noise gets its material from everything already in circulation, which means the map keeps needing redrawn.
Further reading
Peter J. Woods' own guide to the genre — written from deep inside the American scene, with his own picks throughout — put it plainly: "noise comes from all circulation and from every direction." Read it at The Hard Times.
