Roughly 90 percent of noise musicians are dudes—through and through, it’s a man’s underground—and while the genre is home to some formidable female artists (Marcia Barrett, Maya Miller, Valet, Carly Ptak, Khate, Tovah Olson, Leslie Kiefer, Penny Royale, Lexie Mountain, and I.U.D., among others), none of them are speaking truth to power as forcibly, unsparingly, and voluminously through cracked megaphones as Elizabeth Veldon is right now. Cobbling together a steady stream of albums, EPs, singles, and collaborations via PC in direct response to media happenings and governmental injustices—she’s not a big fan of Paul McCartney, Rick Perry, or authority—Veldon mashes sampled bits, distortion, obscure songs, and honed techniques into what might be thought of as noise’s own “feminist CNN.” In the first part of our interview with this United Kingdom artist, Splice Today asked her about her approach to noise, her label, Black Circle, and last year’s Can You Please Stop Raping Me? EP.
Splice Today: What does noise represent for you personally?
Elizabeth Veldon: Noise to me means creative freedom, the chance to use music the way I would love to use paint if I could do anything more than just cover a sleeve with a little bit of paint.
ST: What led you to music as a creative outlet, and what were your earliest experiences creating music like?
ET: I decided to make music basically to see if I could. I wanted to know how sound was used by the artists I enjoyed, not really to produce my own work. Part of the initial idea was also to democratize music, to show people that you could make it without equipment and a studio.
My first experiments used much more concrete methods than I use now. I initially had two projects: the first of these was to use multiple media players to create layered playbacks and record these direct to tape without listening to them, and then using the recording as part of another set of layered playbacks—this resulted in my Loops CDr—and the second project was to use a nylon-stringed guitar to produce the raw material for manipulation in audacity.
Both these proved to be far more visceral than I expected, very physical. I suppose this was the first revelation for me namely that music was a physical rather than intellectual pursuit, or rather, than traditional music was physical. I think this has been something I've been reacting against ever since—the idea of brute physical force as a part of music—and possibly why I make more abstract forms. I also found making music profoundly liberating.
ST: Do you feel that so far you've been able to create or approach a language of noise music that's more intellectual than physical?
EV: I hope so. I've written in my blog about the problems inherent in an approach to music that treasures “the real” and enforces this by an insistence on using “real” instruments, on the physical at the expense of the intellectual or the emotional. I know labels that refuse to publish any music made on computers, and I've had arguments time and time again with people who think “real” noise cannot be made on a computer—that noise made on a computer is automatically “shit” or “Hipster noise.”
This argument comes out most clearly in the “no input/zero input” movement in noise: I've been making very strict no input music for a while, and first approached this two years ago with Towards An Abstract Music, long before there were one million no input comps and long before everyone thought this was the ultimate in posh noise. I've revisited the use of feedback loops in fourteen subsequent albums, and many of those are no input, but even still I cannot contribute to no input compilations because they insist on the use of a physical rather than virtual set up. I've came a very long way round in answering this question—it is, I think, one of the central ones we must approach if we wish to keep noise vital and fresh—so I'll try to keep the rest of my answer short.
The treasuring of physicality over intellectualism in noise has resulted in many problems for the form including the intrusion of incredibly dodgy politics, the exclusion of women, and the wholesale desire to jump on the latest bandwagon rather than to treasure innovation. These are all things I stand in opposition to.
ST: Part of what's appealing about your releases is that often there's a sense that you're responding to what outrages you culturally and politically with noise ripostes—this is in stark contrast to most noise, which is just sort of vaguely annoyed and throttlingly intense, bomb blasts without any interest in changing anything or calling bullshit on established, entrenched atrocities and systems.
EV: Listening to music is an intensely personal, direct experience. That other artists don't use this to get a point across puzzles me; I can only think that they do not have an opinion on these issues or, a more troubling idea, they feel there is no place in noise for discussions of politics or culture. I grew up with parents who listened to folk and siblings who listened to punk, both overtly political forms. Indeed, my brother—who I dedicated a piece on anti-Semitism to—used to play “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” on a loop, and my sister played the Specials’ “Ghost Town” constantly, which is itself a directly political song detailing what happens to communities when money stops coming in. Politics is in my blood and in my understanding of what music is, and though I have lost faith in traditional political stances such as socialism, I've not lost my interest in politics or my belief that art can be used to political ends.
The great thing about noise—and particularly, noise generated using computers—is that it can be done quickly in response to something and gives this sense of outrage and the thing that causes it some permanence; a response, in a way, to the need to steal a march on revisionism, an attempt to address the call from Galas to stop the “retreat into and old folk's home of catatonia.” The need for a political consciousness in music is vitally important just now as there is a disturbing tendency to mask outright fascism with a mask of anti-Islam – and this is being swallowed hook, line, and sinker, leaving us open to something very dark happening.
ST: Who were some of your initial influences, or artists whose work you admired?
EV: When I first started making music, I was so concerned with getting the basics right that I hadn't time to think of influences. But as I began to get more confident around my “loops” work, I began to think of it as being like re-imagining John Cage's Fontana Mix without a score. To be honest, it has always been Cage who has been an influence since I began; he is still an influence. His idea that anything that could he theorized could be called music reminded me of the idea that art is what the artist calls art, and without this I would never have made my first loop—which I later reworked for a mail-art project as Fontana (re)mix')—or anything since then.
ST: When you're writing, do you begin first with an idea or a sound?
EV: Almost always I begin with an idea and find the samples and approach to match it.
ST: You're extremely prolific in terms of recorded output. What do you do for a living, and how often are you able to write and record?
EV: I work as a manager in an outsourced HR company, and most of my work is done from home. As there can be periods of inactivity in my job, most days I can give some time over if not to actually recording then to finding samples or thinking about how to approach a topic.
ST: Samples are integral to your work. What are some of the tools you use in making music?
EV: In terms of capturing samples, this is often from my own music collection or I record directly to my computer. Recently I have bought an external soundcard which has made the recording of samples from vinyl, DVDs, the Internet and so on much easier.
ST: Tell me a bit about your label, Black Circle. It's the only label I can think of that seems to be devoted to the idea of split releases, and has been the primary outlet for your noise since the end of 2011.
EV: Black Circle began its life as a place to put the increasing number of splits I was being asked to do, so that the work of other people was not lost amongst the solo releases on my own Bandcamp page. The character of the label changed within a short space of time as Ars Sonor offered the Heavy Drone EP. By this point it was beginning to be a place to put unusual albums and EPs that I liked, including the Marax album I hosted and the album I did with Jeff Gburek. These records examined quite obtuse topics or simply consisted of remixes and would have been lost on other net labels where they would not have had time to grow.
For me, what separates Black Circle from other labels is not the number of collaborations, but my willingness to host unusual material such as the releases I've already mentioned and the series of “audio conversations” I have had with the various projects of Neil Morrison. I cannot think of another label that has given so much time over to the discussion of philosophical and political issues in such a detailed and open way or which would tolerate an artist providing essays to accompany their work. This, and the ability to give a space for strong working relationships to develop is, for me, what typifies Black Circle.
The complex languages I have been able to develop with artists such as Neil Morrison, the Implicit Order, Ars Sonor, and Sean Derrik Cooper Marquart and the relationships these people have formed with each other have made the label highly unusual as have the choices of topics I and other artists working on the label have been able to explore such as secret languages, racism in popular culture, evolutionary theory, cosmology and so on. Black Circle has become the sort of place I always wanted the noise scene to be. This, of course, is not even to begin to discuss the massive success of the Russia's Full of Queers album, which is a topic all its own.
ST: So in a sense it's almost less a label then a forum, or an ongoing conversation.
EV: I think it's both. There are ongoing projects and development on those projects—such as the Ars Sonor remix projects that resulted in three releases, the four “audio conversation” releases or the ongoing “abstract music” project that's had a compilation and two EPs published so far and an EP and a single on the way—but it also publishes individual tracks and albums such as The Deep Chill, Bleeding Putin, Funeral Liturgy, and so on. Rather than “forum” in the sense of an Internet forum I'd see it as a magazine or journal offering discussion of often inter-related issues and theories.
With the Some Notes Towards True Abstraction album, the label has shifted towards an at least temporary discussion of working methods and ways of producing music, almost of enquiring what music is. This hasn't proved popular—there have only been a few downloads of the releases on this subject—but I'm happy to host something that pushes our understanding of what constitutes music forward.
ST: Can you tell me about the making of Can You Please Stop Raping Me?, in terms of its genesis and provocation? Harsh wall noisers are notorious for degrading and sickening pornographic imagery—Whitehouse is especially known for this—but it was refreshing to see them taken to account, and as the bonus, the EP' scrapings made for some of last year's best noise.
EV: The provocation for that piece is everywhere. Look, for instance, at Genetic Trance who hosted a noise record featuring the image of a woman being anally penetrated with a gun, Satan Noise who had a Christmas comp out featuring a photograph of a near-naked woman bound and screaming in the middle of a snowfield, and so on and so on.
As I said in the blog post I made about this, BDSM is a part of Noise and it would be a shame if this form of eroticism was lost—but this is not BDSM, it's the destruction of women.
As to what may have at that particular time caused an overspill of outrage I think it was the praise for a certain 80s cassette which included derogatory terms about women's genitalia in its title. As a woman making noise, this was the last straw for me and I had to react. The sample used on the EP is a song by a Norah Blaney and Gwen Farrar, a lesbian couple who were a popular music hall act. I wanted to mimic the disfiguring of women in noise by presenting ever more disfigured versions of the song which are resolved by the return of the female, this time armed and angry. I am proud of this EP and even more proud to say that it was played at a protest against rape in Portugal.
One thing I would have to say about your question, however, is that I do not consider Whitehouse to be part of this problem, though they undoubtedly started the ball rolling. There's a sense of irony and outrage in Whitehouse's music, an overblown cartoonish puncturing of the attitudes it seems to be expressing. This irony was, however, lost on a lot of people. Oh and I'm glad you liked it.
