The Pittsburgh harsh-noise group of Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella, formed 1990: scrap-metal and tape-cut noise born of the city's deindustrialisation, a defining act of 1990s Americanoise and an antecedent of the wall.
Macronympha is the Pittsburgh harsh-noise group formed in 1990 by Joseph Roemer and Rodger Stella, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as a defining act of 1990s American noise and an antecedent of the harsh noise wall. Roemer has been its central, continuing figure; Stella co-founded the classic period; most releases came through Roemer's own Mother Savage Noise Productions.
The method was rooted in place. The group built its noise from looted scrap metal, junk percussion, tape editing, turntables and overdriven four-track recorders, recording in a basement studio packed with over a ton of steel salvaged from Pittsburgh's abandoned mills and miked for resonance. The result was dense, bass-heavy, rhythmic harsh noise, and the 1995 album Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania made the link between the sound and the city's deindustrialisation explicit.
Across a prolific 1990s run, tapes such as Grind, White Music and Crack circulated through the international cassette network and have since been widely reissued. The records sit at the raunchiest end of what the scene later called Americanoise, a sound distinct from both the European power-electronics tradition and the Japanese one, even as it drew on both.
Macronympha also sits just upstream of the wall. Roemer and Stella's related project O.V.M.N. moved toward the single, constant, crunching textures often recognised as prototypical of harsh noise wall, and the group's orbit touched figures filed elsewhere in this archive: Dominick Fernow and Stimbox's Tim Oliveira both appeared on recordings and at performances. The project's name and some of its imagery were deliberately provocative in the confrontational manner of 1990s noise; the Bureau files the work and records this as fact.
The Bureau files Macronympha at Artists · Tier II as a defining Americanoise act: the Pittsburgh group that turned a dead steel economy into harsh noise, circulated it through the tape underground, and helped lay the ground from which the wall would form.