Richard Ramirez's Texas harsh-noise collective, running since 1989: a vocal-less wall of junk feedback, an openly queer presence in the underground, and the backbone of one of the foundational American noise catalogues.
Black Leather Jesus is the harsh-noise group founded in Houston, Texas, in 1989 by Richard Ramirez, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as a seminal and unusually durable act of American noise. It began issuing records in 1990 and has run ever since, now from south-western Pennsylvania, fronted throughout by Ramirez and his husband Sean E. Matzus with a rotating cast of other players. It is a collective, not a solo project, and the membership has at times run to well over a dozen.
The sound is harsh and chaotic, built from feedback and junk electronics with a minimal set-up and no vocals. Much of it is assembled through mail collaboration, the scattered members trading material, which gives the catalogue its loose, accreted quality. Across its run the work has leaned toward the wall, a dense, static mass of distortion, and Ramirez is among the figures cited in the early development of the harsh noise wall form, chiefly through his static-only project Werewolf Jerusalem.
What marks Black Leather Jesus apart from its peers is its identity. It is an openly queer noise project, and its imagery draws on gay leather subculture and erotica. That material has brought the group both notice and hostility over the years, and it is precisely the point: where much of the noise underground trades in a generalised transgression, Black Leather Jesus made a specific, sexual, queer one, and carried it into a scene that rarely named such things. The Bureau files that openness as part of the documentary case for the act.
A clarification belongs here, since the name causes confusion. The noise maker Richard Ramirez is unrelated to the American criminal who shares the name. The project's provocations are aesthetic, drawn from horror, transgressive and erotic imagery, and the coincidence of names is no more than that.
For all its outsider stance, Black Leather Jesus has been thoroughly networked. It has shared releases and splits with Merzbow, Incapacitants, MSBR, The Haters, Smegma, Smell & Quim and Andrew Liles, tying the American underground to the Japanese and European scenes. In 2007 the group was invited by Sonic Youth to open a free concert in Marfa, Texas, a rare crossing beyond the noise scene, and it has toured both the US and Europe. Beyond the group, Ramirez has run a long line of further projects, Priest in Shit, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Last Rape and others, and the labels Deadline Recordings and Next Halloween, making him one of the more foundational figures of US noise.
The Bureau files Black Leather Jesus at Artists · Tier II as a seminal American harsh-noise group, a queer presence in a form that had few, and, through Ramirez, one of the connective figures of the noise underground this archive documents.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene