Inspirations: Masonna
Alice Scarlet Death
I had been making some variant or another of noise music since freshman year in high school. In fact, I didn’t know what noise music even was until someone explained to me the type of music I made. After that, I began seeking out noise artists and various experimental philosophies of music. I learned about Masonna in 2006 along with other classical Japanese noise artists like Merzbow, Boredoms, Violent Onsen Geisha, and C.C.C.C.
I was infatuated with their overly expressive types of noise music. Most of the house shows I attended in suburban middle Tennessee were relatively boring. Not for lack of trying, but having been inspired by noise bands that were a bit more theatrical, I was less than impress. You had the likes of Yamataka Eye in Hantarash coming in to the condemned building with a backhoe bulldozer. C.C.C.C.’s vocalist on stage and pour candle wax on herself. And my favourite, is that you had Masonna jumping around and thrashing on stage; it was out of control, wild, and dangerous. And this was all pre-internet in Japan. A real noise community on the internet didn’t start until 2002 after most of these artists had quit putting out new material.
But most of all it was expressive. angry, and everything I wanted to be. When I make art, I want it to be a tangible offering of what I feel. Masonna showed me how to do that, and his aesthetics still inspire me to this day.
He was known to put a contact mic in a jar full of pennies and shook it around. For my first noise show at a popular venue, The End, in Nashville, TN I too put a bunch of pennies in a peanut jar and smashed it round. In fact, I smashed it around so much the bar own had to bust out the first aid kit to clean up the blood on my arm. And for the first time ever, I sold a CD to a one-armed veteran hanging in the back who said, “That was the craziest shit, I’ve ever seen.”
