The Maine-born noise and performance artist Matt Anderson, who came out of art school with a cardboard fish-head and a fistful of contact microphones, and became one of the most prolific figures in American noise.
Crank Sturgeon is the long-running project of Matt Anderson, a visual and sound artist the Bureau files at Tier ∅ for the scale of the work and his place in the 1990s American underground. The project began around 1992, when Anderson, then studying at the Massachusetts College of Art in its Studio for Interrelated Media, went looking for something noisier than the punk bands he had tired of and found a vocabulary in Japanese noise, John Cage and Kurt Schwitters. He came to sound as a visual artist first, and the work has kept that double character ever since.
The method is simple and physical. Anderson works with bespoke contact microphones rubbed and dragged across whatever surface is to hand, homemade electronics, voice and junk, and stages it as performance: improvisational comedy, a recurring cardboard fish-head, screaming, and a deliberate confusion of art and non-art that he traces back to Dada and Viennese Actionism as much as to noise. The piscine alter-ego itself, he has said, came from splicing the idea of a never-stopping, always-cranking coffee with the plain oddness of a sturgeon.
What sets the project apart, beyond the performances, is sheer volume. Crank Sturgeon is among the most prolific of all American noise artists, with 150 releases by Anderson's own count inside roughly the first twenty-five years, a body of work he treats without preciousness: some research, some epic, some of-the-moment, document and statement and audio diary at once. He is candid that not all of it has aged equally, and untroubled by the fact.
He belongs to a specific moment. Anderson places himself in the 1990s American tape-trading generation alongside Wolf Eyes, Nautical Almanac and Fat Worm of Error, a loose network of roughly the same age who came up exchanging cassettes and meeting through the post, building a scene out of correspondence before it had any settled shape. That cohort is part of why the project is filed here rather than treated as a one-off eccentric.
The Bureau's reading. Crank Sturgeon is filed at Tier ∅ as a distinctive and tireless voice in American noise and performance, an art-school project that turned contact microphones and absurdist staging into a decades-long practice, and a connector across the 1990s tape-trading underground.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene