Bastard Noise is one of the distinctive American noise projects of the last three decades, and the Bureau files Eric Wood's band at Tier II for its singular approach and its connector role. Founded in 1991 as a side project of the Claremont powerviolence group Man Is the Bastard, it became Wood's main vehicle after that band ended in 1997, and it has pursued a noise rooted in American hardcore rather than European industrial ever since. It meets the centrality test as a defining act of the American hardcore-to-noise lineage and the documentary test as a name that scene routes through. It re-files from the old Tier I marking to Tier II.
The hardcore root is what sets Bastard Noise apart. Where European power electronics grew out of industrial and the avant-garde, Bastard Noise grew out of powerviolence, the fast, brutal hardcore that Man Is the Bastard helped define. That lineage shows in everything: the political and apocalyptic themes, the confrontational stance, and the sheer physicality of the sound. The project carries the energy and ethics of hardcore into pure electronic noise, which gives it a character quite different from the European scene.
The signature is what the project calls bass terror. Rather than the high-frequency feedback assault of power electronics, Bastard Noise builds its noise on heavy sub-bass electronics and vocals, often using custom-built instruments, producing a low-end, physical sound that is felt as much as heard. This emphasis on the bottom of the spectrum is the project's most recognisable trait and its main contribution to the noise vocabulary, a deliberate alternative to the treble-heavy norm.
Bastard Noise is also a hub. Wood frequently recruits collaborators for live performances, and the list of those who have played with him, Merzbow, Keiji Haino, Justin Pearson and others, ties the project across the American hardcore-noise scene and into the international noise world. Through that web and an extensive, mostly self-released and underground-label catalogue, the project connects scenes that might otherwise stay separate, which is part of why it reads as central rather than isolated.
The Bureau's reading. Bastard Noise is filed at Tier II as a defining act of the American hardcore-to-noise lineage and a connector across the noise world. Its contribution is the bass-terror approach, a low-end, physical noise rooted in powerviolence rather than European industrial, and a hub role through Eric Wood's wide collaborations. It is cross-referenced to the noise acts it shares a world with, and read here as the American hardcore wing of the noise tradition.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Edwardian era · last revised c. the Holocene