"I don't give two splats of an old negro junkie's vomit for your politico-philosophical treatises, kiddies. I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We're so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix."
(Steve Albini, Forced Exposure fanzine, sometime in 1986)

"Yeah, I'm a journalist. It even says so on my degree."
(Steve Albini, first visit to Britain, August 1986)

NOISE ANNOYS sure, and as we all well know, noise is also art because The Art Of Noise tells us so. Now the noise of art is hardly a new thesis; the politics of noise--to unsettle, upset, unleash and annoy--have been extensively documented and tagged, from the steamroller of HM to the seismic jackhammer of punk and hardcore to the hammer-and-anvil deconstructions of the Neubatens and Test Departments. Everybody needs noise, it seems, at some point in their routine day, if only to break up the silence of continual thought swilling around inside the head. Also, there's noise as frustration, noise as rebellion; as protest, as release and as anger.

Steve Albini, more than ably partnered by the carthartic might of Dave Riley and Santiago Durango, not forgetting Roland the drum machine, craves this noise; he sleeps it, quaffs it up, writes it and writes about it for a couple of fanzines, and chucks it back at the world that forced him to depend on it like a gutted junkie--and this noise is called Big Black and it bellows out of Chicago, USA, a mean, twisted stroppy, angry, blistered hardcore noise and it is without a big, black shadow of a queasy doubt, the best noise in town.

Naturally Big Black wouldn't hit this town to play anything as simple as a gig--something to do with the change in electrical current between there and here and the enormous lengths Albini would have to go to in order to reprogramme the drumbox in too short a space of time--but rather to snap up big black Doc Martens at sane prices--the boots of Noise, anybody?--and carry home unavailable/rare/pricey export Brit-punk singles like they were miniature Van Goghs; the Rudimentary Peni EP, the Discharge "Why?" EP, the first Blitz single, records you and I probably forgot the instant the Sounds ad disappeared. "Third wave hard-core punk" as Steve Albini defines them, relishing the thought of stocking up more bottled-up noise for this collection.

Big Black's own 'Core noise can be traced back to DAF, Killing Joke, Wire, the aforementioned Brit-core records, and New York loft guitar experimenting (Sonic Youth, The Swans), with Led Zeppelin and disco-funk as warping elements. "In England, there's sort of an approach a band takes where they decide how they're going to present themselves," Albini says with a mild disgust, "and what the style and content of their music is going to be before it's actually done. We basically play the music and then if we do any talking about it at all, then we talk about what is involved. Doing it is an inspiration." Dave: "The lyrics usually stem from the feeling of the music which we're all involved in, so Steve is more or less articulating what all three of us are dealing with."

Which is, going by the latest "Atomiser" LP on Homestead, child-molesting ("Jordan, Minnesota"), wife-beating ("Fists Of Love"), pyromania ("Kerosene"), animal slaughterhouses ("Cables"), plus More Songs About Police Brutality And Mussolini. For me, Big Black are the closest to a definitive sound of hate and war, punk brutality winched up by Albini and Santiago's love of guitar potential--white noise, pencil-sharpened, ripped to shreds. The group joyride their drumbox with these splinters and squeals, imaginatively labelled their "train" and "rocket" guitars, their "horizontal" and "vertical" guitars (Durango and Albini respectively)--real boys with their toys stuff, sure, but it's bloody priceless aural terror, the sound of real-life violence. As one American writer put it, "Kiev has it's Chemobyl, Harrisburg it's 3 Mile Island and Chicago, totally unaware, has Big Black." Actually, I wouldn't say Chicago was totally unaware of Big Black; mainly because of Albini's take-no-prisoners fanzine-gabble more than the group's noise-annoys bowl, the odd record store now won't stock BB discs and the fanzines that 'employ' the man because of his 'attitude'. The last real punk in town?

"People in Chicago tend to zero in on the fact that there are a lot of people who specifically hate me for specific reasons. News travels fast, and if you say to somebody that you thought this other band were very foolish then before long, there's this story circulating of how I threatened to kill somebody or how I raped some women on the steps of a nightclub. I get threatened a lot and confronted, loud, drunk people spitting in my face, screaming. Santiago gets nasty calls and hang-ups. "There was this one pathetic character who followed me around for a night or two and put cigarettes out on my neck. One guy, an associate of somebody else, heard one of these travel stories about something I'd written, and told me that I was a dead man if I ever went to San Francisco. I didn't bother telling him I have no interest in going to San Francisco."

San Francisco is all West-Coast soft-soap-suds, mildew mothers-boys types according to the world of Steve Albini, but Big Black's hardcore credentials don't necessarily mean solidarity within the movement.

"Most of the bands operating in hardcore are pretty bankrupt" Albini frowns. "Most of the interesting bands are those operating outside of the safe community, bands like The Butthole Surfcrs, Sonic Youth or Scratch Acid, bands that aren't obviously anything. You can't say 'this is what they're trying to do' whereas with 99% of all hardcore bands you can say 'well they're obviously trying to be like this'."

Is there any shared attitude between Big Black and these bands you mention? Albini: "Guitars are part of it...violence is part of it too."

Surely not the 'guitars as weapons of war' angle?

"No, just playing guitars...the sound of an electric guitar, when attacked, is really invigorating."

Is there anything else which matches it?

Albini: "Drums are close."

Santiago: "It's hard to be aggressive with a Wurlitzer."

Dave: "Violence is probably a bad word because it implies a victim or something. We just happen to be aggressive, that's the way it happens. It's not something we sat down with and consciously thought about the violence and the physcological effects. It's mainly due to the way that we play."

Albini: "It's just power, single-mindedness. intensity."

Intensity. Big Black stay as true to their name as, say, Queen do to theirs with their mass of scary-monster visions from Smalltown, Mid-America under recession, reciting "the stuff that people really do to each other"; a fear-and-loathing mission from the heart of darkness that doesn't let in one shard of light or momentary release from the frenzied blast. Not so, say the three bears.

Dave: "It sounds like you're getting the impression that we're all depressing people. These things are just the things that influence us to play. I'm getting the impression that a lot of the perverse-like humour involved, although it's very dry and really inflicted, is getting misconstrued."

They cite the fact that the album cover and title was stolen from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and the reproduction of Dave's Midnight Funk Association ID Card and letter of introduction from crazed Detroit DJ, Electrifying Mojo.

Steve: "There's Clockwork Orange humour, and there's Three Stooges humour. I like to see a balance between the two. I don't think we exploit it. Are you familiar with Geen humour? Ed Geen was a cannibal killer. After the story broke, there were a lot of jokes in America about Ed Geen. Geen is now a generic term for morbid humour. We tend to throw an element of Geen humour into Big Black. If you think about it, would I ever do anything so terrible, of that calibre? No, of course not, but the fact that it happens shows that it is not entirely true. So there's an incongruity there, and that's funny. Or just the fact that something is so ludicrous that it's unbelievable, which makes it funny."

"The violence is so sickening," Dave continues, "and so senseless and the whole thing disgusts you, and it's not funny at all, and it gets so extreme and sick that there's a certain humour in that too. It's funny in its excess. Nervous laughter, like in a slash movie."

Nervous laughter from a legal assistant, a photographic retoucher and a collegeboy/record store worker; it figures. Big Black "is what we do to relieve the strain, the strain of having to make ends meet with a day job. Having to deal with the fact that we're human beings and imperfect and everyone we deal with are the same."

"Being in a band is almost the only thing that really makes it worth putting off suicide," Steve says with no trace of Geen-ness. "The enjoyment of playing in a band is so extreme that it makes whatever you have to go through to get there, worth it."

Dave: "That's with a lot of hindsight. It's just that we like playing guitars! Like, shall I go to a space-time relaxation tank, or should I play guitar to relieve the tension, or should I take a valium?"

Steve reckons that if Ed Geen had been in a band, he wouldn't have dismembered an unsuspecting coachload--form a rock group and purge thyself. Brillo-pad away the scummy fact that you're as human as the butchers, the rapists, the racists, the muggers and the fascists (because Big Black dedicate "II Duce" to Mussolini doesn't make them fascists, as some American dupes have deduced. Fear and irony, I think).

But it seems to work for Big Black--the fury of their noise and the fearsome death-rattle of Albini's written and lyrical scything is touchingly underwritten in turn by the three bear's mild, passive demeanour. "We're all wimps," Steve confesses, "touching, sensitive people. We want to create an air of pleasant acceptance."

But don't forget; Big Black are still the sound of metal against bone, of a nation facing it's sick quotient. Above all, "Atomiser" (and three EPs before it) makes you think hard, and measures your rage. Steve?

"Big Black is smart people in a car-crash. The car is crashing, crumpling all around and it's scary and it's horrifying and it makes a lot of noise and there's a lot of bright lights and things exposed, and if you remove yourself from it and look at it as entertainment, it's also pretty interesting."

So noise doesn't just annoy, does it?

Article and laughable spelling of "Gein" by Martin Aston. Photos by Meir Gal Originally appeared in Zig Zag, October 1986