AMK came to the music packaging business by way of being a noisician himself. His work consists mostly of taking floppy vinyl records -- the kind that used to come inside magazines -- snipping them up with scissors, and gluing them back together in a reassembled pie. He then plays the hodgepodge record, recording it onto a compact disc. His latest CD is adorned with the phrase "only the finest in Flexi-disc Montages."
Imagine, if you will, forcing yourself to listen to an oddly skipping record without getting up to move the needle. You know it's skipping, and you know it will keep skipping unless you do something. But you don't. You just sit there, enjoying the sound: "Bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp, bzazkphmp, bzzzkphmp ...."
"I go into restaurants, and they sometimes have jukeboxes. I find it great if the record starts skipping. I don't like digital skipping as much as I like analog skipping," AMK explains. "Most people don't want to hear scratches on a record, or tape hiss, but I do. Part of this is taking what is negative and making it positive."
And so it goes. A philosophical, intellectual, aural abstract expressionist soul train is rolling unnoticed through San Francisco. But its unique throbs, howls, and unidentifiable walls of sound will inevitably make their way into the language of more popular music.
Some more traditional musicians have been hitching a ride for years.
Jaiyoung Kim, for example, is mixing jazz, rock, and other genres into an intriguing noise-music blend that he's been playing with his band, Job, at local clubs -- and successfully passing it off as music.
Portending what may be the attitude of noise-influenced musicians to come, Kim shamelessly rejects noise's anti-establishment conceits: He even refers to his individual musical compositions as "songs." He uses some traditional instruments such as guitars, drums, and keyboard. He keeps things like music theory, rhythm, and artistry in mind while composing and playing his work.
"I'm not completely enthusiastic about saying, 'Fuck you,' to all the structural rules. I'd like to use that to my advantage," says Kim, who began playing piano at age 5, violin at 8.
Accordingly, Jaiyoung Kim's compositions drift through woozy versions of avant-garde harmonics; bent conceptual rock music; and other, more familiar genres. It's even approachable as a sort of real music, with bass lines meandering through some of the pieces, cymbal beats punctuating others. As if to debunk Kim's musical charade, however, the songs often disintegrate into a modulated, metallic roar. In one case, a lilting, jazzy mishmash segues into sounds of breaking glass, a repeated sob, a baby's shriek.
But until more interlopers like Kim arrive, noise will remain the stuff of San Francisco cafe conversations, back-alley warehouse concerts, and late-night experimental sessions. It will continue to be composed of the incomprehensible obsessions of a few people who are either pioneers or eccentrics, depending on your point of view.
But what is it, exactly, that they are trying to do?
Dan Burke, who plays throbbing, electronically generated whines while scratching rocks across a miked metal table, puts it this way:
"If we're trying to do anything more than therapy, we're trying to create a gateway, a space to allow for the creation of a mood."
Scott Arford, who hosts friends' noise concerts in his three-story-high Illinois Street warehouse while making his own noise by distorting and redistorting radio static, explains thusly:
"It's all about listening. It really requires closer listening. At first you hear a single sound, but there is a lot going on on another level. With your eyes, at a minimalist level, looking at a post in the distance, you might just see a shape, but as you get closer, you see the post itself. With my noise, it's the same. My mixer is feeding back on itself, and it creates a lot of rhythms and patterns -- it becomes its own organic system."
Scot Jenerik has built an amplified flamethrower into a playable instrument. Some of his concerts consist of banging on inflamed, gas-soaked metal plates with his hands until they are too burnt for him to continue. And he, too, has an explanation:
"It's like a glacier. It has intricate fractural patterns. You can see it as a mass of ice, but the fractural patterns might be just as interesting. It's the same way with noise. I'm really interested in the physicality of sound."
Thuggish, raucous, brutish, appalling, intolerably wonderful sound.
