A Los Angeles noise and concrète artist working since the late 1990s: cut-up sound collage scaled from grindcore bursts to multi-channel diffusion, and one of the most prolific figures of American noise.
John Wiese is the American noise and sound artist who has worked out of Los Angeles since the late 1990s, and the Bureau files him at Tier II as one of the central figures of the form, alongside Aaron Dilloway and his generation. Born in 1977, he moved west to study graphic design at CalArts, graduating in 2001, and has stayed in the city since, building a catalogue whose scale, well over a hundred records, is matched by an unusual range.
His method is cut-up collage. Wiese takes live and demo recordings and splices and layers them into intricate constructions, working by rapid editing and textural abrasion so that sirens, electronic debris and fragments of voice cohere into pieces that often read like deconstructed radio plays. It is noise built by composition rather than by sustained assault, closer in spirit to musique concrète than to the wall, and that compositional bent is what carries his work out of the basement and into the concert hall.
The best-known vehicle is Sissy Spacek, the group he founded at CalArts in 1999 and still leads with Charlie Mumma. It is a shape-shifting concrète-grindcore ensemble with a rotating cast, past players have included Kevin Drumm and members of Smegma, and its records move from punk-length bursts to long abstract collages without settling. Around it runs his own Helicopter label, founded to put out his own work and then opened to other West Coast artists he felt were under-documented, the base for much of the catalogue.
What sets Wiese apart from the noise mainstream is the breadth. He has held a residency at the GRM in Paris, the historic home of concrète, composed for multi-channel diffusion and large ensembles, and shown video work at Anthology Film Archives. He has collaborated widely, with Sunn O))), Bastard Noise, Merzbow, Aaron Dilloway, Daniel Menche, C. Spencer Yeh, Carlos Giffoni and the free-improviser Evan Parker among many others, in formats from intimate duo to twenty-strong group.
The sound is only part of the practice. Wiese is a trained graphic designer, typographer and publisher of books and records, and the visual and editorial work runs alongside the music rather than serving it, shaping his records as designed objects. The two halves are of a piece: the same attention to structure and surface governs a noise collage and a printed page.
The Bureau files John Wiese at Artists · Tier II as a prolific and self-directed figure of American noise, and as the clearest case in the archive of a practice that runs the full distance from grindcore to the concert-hall concrète tradition without losing its edge at either end.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene