Words

Noise and Music

  • Why Musicians and Labels Should Embrace Filesharing

    Lots of people (mostly labels, but some artists) believe that "piracy" is the same as "theft." They believe that downloading music for free hurts artists, especially independent artists. They're wrong. In this essay, I'll tell you why.

  • How To Be A Noise Artist, Part I: Playing Noise

    The first thing to remember about being a noise musician is this: you are not making music, you are creating a product. Memorize this dictum, as everything else follows.

  • How To Be A Noise Artist, Part II: Recording and Releasing Music

    As I said in Part I, you don't have to be good to be a genius at noise. What - you think your average teenage noise fan knows the difference between a subtly crafted noise symphony recorded in a pro studio in excruciating detail, and a half hour of radio static that you taped on your sister's boombox while you left to take a shower? Do you really? Give me a fucking break.

  • How To Be A Noise Artist, Part III: Playing Live

    Whether you're booking a live show or merely playing one, there is one cardinal rule to remember:

    It's always the venue's fault.

  • How To Be A Noise Artist: Introduction

    This is a satiric essay I first debuted on bostonnoise.org (RIP).

  • The Hidden Agenda of the Noise Music Conspiracy

    The political objective of Noise music is nothing less than a New World Order, with its political structure based on German Fascism, its economic system based on Japanese Imperialism, and its center in a pan-European empire.

Essays

  • Why Morality Is Evil

    For most of my life, I've been thinking about moral codes. What they are, why they exist, and how one can justify having them. I've come to a surprising conclusion: morality is a bad idea. I have ample justification for this conclusion, but in order to explain it, I'll have to steer you through some rough waters. Just bear with me, and I'll ferry you to the other side.

  • The Karlheinz Lexicon

    With apologies to Ambrose Bierce.

  • Christmas and Molech

    This was the text of a flier I handed out when I played at O'Briens on December 27th.

  • Practical Advice for a Fictional Son

    By now it's no secret that masculinity itself is being devalued and eliminated. We now have a generation of males that have never learned how to become men, or even known that they should. And the result is that they've produced nothing of value and probably never will. After all, what do you expect from a generation of wanna-be criminals and overgrown teenagers?

Detritus

  • Karlheinz Bio

    Karlheinz is a one-man powerhouse noise machine. The noise persona of Karl Giesing, the name Karlheinz was adopted as an homage to composer Karlheinz Stockhausen - although Karlheinz has grown into a different beast altogether. A Karlheinz performance is distinguished by its sheer volume and ferocious energy.

  • I Quit

    During the mid-1990's, I wrote music reviews for a local music rag named Lollipop. Since I always use pseudonyms for everything, I wrote under the moniker of "Smak" - if you read the Foetus or Crash Worship reviews, you may remember me. Two years after I started writing, I resigned, and while cleaning out my room I found the never-published resignation letter.

    Not much has changed after all these years.

Reviews

  • My Malady review from Vital Weekly
    Frans de Waard

    I must admit I feared the worst, when I read the press blurb raving about 'a wide range of chaotic sounds together into one sweeping smorgasbord of interpretations of disease and dysfunction'.

  • Heathen Harvest review of The Calm And The Storm
    Sage Weatherford

    Being born in my youth's stomping grounds, Indiana, Karlheinz knows all too well the deranged things that can be brought to mind from being born in the middle of nowhere and subjected to closed minds on a daily basis. 

  • Blood Ties review of The Calm And The Storm
    xdementia

    Here is a solid little release from the less prolific Karlheinz named quite appropriately because The Calm and the Storm features one long self titled track that alternates between near-silence and blasts of harsh noise. Although the concept strikes me as being reflected with little subtlety in the composition it works as an exploration into the contrasting sounds and moods.

News Stories

  • This Noise Festival Was Largely Successful
    Beverly Hames

    Growing up in the Midwest I was acquainted in my younger days with the bleak side of noise music, most of it stemming from mid-90s grindcore side projects and math rock masturbatory vanity endeavors. In other words, I saw and heard a lot of crap and pretty much wrote off noise as a narcissistic and boring genre. After being introduced fairly late in my musical awakening to its brutal sibling, power electronics, I started making sense of things and realized it's not all crap and the stuff that isn't crap can be amazing.

  • The evil deaf
    Matt Parish

    Inside the dusty corner room of a dungeon-like warehouse basement, Karl Giesing dumps out a bag full of pedals, samplers, grimy cables, and homemade synth boxes. Their functionality seems questionable. Giesing, clad in black leather jacket, scratches his goatee, and it starts to come back to him.