Eight founding texts, from Russolo's 1913 letter through to Vomir's harsh-noise-wall refusal · how the genre stated its position: in print, in performance and in occasional silence
The genre this archive covers was preceded, accompanied and ended by manifestos. Russolo wrote one in 1913 to argue that noise was music. Industrial Records issued one in 1976 to argue that music could be a label. Throbbing Gristle issued one in 1981 to argue, by being a single sentence, for stopping. The Gerogerigegege issued one in 1985 to argue, by being five lines, that none of it had ever been art.
The Bureau treats the form generously: a manifesto, here, is anything that announces what the work is doing and why. The shortest entry below is five lines long. The longest is twelve pages. Both are filed.
The Founding Texts
Luigi Russolo
A letter from the Futurist painter Russolo to the composer Balilla Pratella, arguing that the modern ear has expanded beyond the limits of musical sound and that composers must follow it into noise. Classifies the noise-world into six families and proposes a new orchestra of intonarumori, the noise-instruments Russolo would build over the following two years. Foundational to every page on this site, whether the page knows it or not.
approx. 4,200 words · published Lacerba 1913 · public domain · Bureau translation
COUM Transmissions · the exhibition that catalysed the genre
Not a manifesto in the conventional sense; a manifesto by force of being staged. Photographs from Cosey Fanni Tutti's modelling work in adult magazines were displayed as gallery objects alongside used tampons sealed in glass. The opening-night performance was the first public appearance of Throbbing Gristle. Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn, addressing the press, called the participants "wreckers of civilisation." The phrase was on the front of the Daily Mail by the following morning and on the spine of Simon Ford's standard biography twenty-three years later. The exhibition is filed as the genre's catalysing public statement.
opening night attended by Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter, Monte Cazazza, others · documented in Tutti, Art Sex Music (Faber 2017) · standard reference Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation (Black Dog 1999)
Industrial Records · Throbbing Gristle
The four-page prospectus that Industrial Records issued to introduce the label. The slogan on the spine became the motto of the project and, eventually, the name of the genre. The prospectus was typed on a Selectric, photocopied at a job that had not authorised it, stapled and sent to roughly three hundred journalists, distributors and friends. The Bureau holds the original document at Box 17 / Section 02. The phrase Monte Cazazza coined to describe the band, which the band put on the prospectus, is the most efficient genre-naming in popular-music history.
approx. 900 words · uncredited authorship, attributed to Genesis P-Orridge with design work by Peter Christopherson · folded once, side-stapled
John Cage
A talk to a small Seattle arts society, barely heard at the time and unpublished for two decades, in which the young Cage took Russolo's proposition and aimed it at the electrical century: noise is musical material, the coming quarrel is between noise and so-called musical sounds, and centres of experimental music must be built to use it.
approx. 1,100 words · spoken 1937 · printed 1958 · collected in Silence 1961
Throbbing Gristle · Carter, Tutti, Christopherson, P-Orridge
The dissolution announcement. The postcard's recto carries the phrase The Mission Is Terminated in funereal black-letter script; the verso carries a four-signatory band statement, signed by all four members, ending in Italian (Cari Saluti). Mailed by Industrial Records to the IR mail-order subscriber list on 23 June 1981, twenty-five days after the band's final concert of their first phase at Kezar Pavilion on 29 May 1981. The Bureau holds M·05 as the genre's first anti-manifesto and the closing document of the first-wave era.
signed Carter · Tutti · Christopherson · P-Orridge · the only four-signatory entry in the M-series · cited in the genre's history more often than any document apart from M·03 · primary source: postcard reproductions held by Donlon Books and Beat Books · file complete
Whitehouse · William Bennett, Kevin Tomkins, Peter Sotos
The most contested document in the catalogue. Whitehouse's eighth studio album, dedicated on the sleeve to Dennis Andrew Nilsen, pressed in about three hundred copies, never reissued on compact disc by deliberate label policy. The Bureau files it because the album was made, distributed and influenced; the editorial position on its content runs at length on the entry page. Readers should treat this entry as a Difficult Legacy entry in advance: the page will not glamourise its subject, and the catalogue note attached to it is longer than the document itself. Filed as power electronics' founding statement, even where the foundation is one the genre has spent forty years arguing with.
approx. 400 words across the sleeve · 11 tracks · 28:50 duration · the most thoroughly written-about Whitehouse record in the secondary literature · Peter Sotos prosecuted Chicago 1986 (documented at length on entry page)
The Gerogerigegege · Juntaro Yamanouchi
The end-state anti-manifesto. Five lines, declarative, total. Printed on the insert of the Art Is Over concept cassette (Vis a Vis Audio Arts, edition of 50, octopus tentacle in lieu of tape) and on the sleeve of the 1994 Instruments Disorder (170 Songs) cassette, with reissues on later Gerogerigegege releases through 2001. The Bureau treats this entry as the closing position statement of the M-series's main line, which started with Russolo arguing for noise as music in 1913 and ended with Yamanouchi arguing that none of it had ever been art. The seventy-two-year arc closes here; M·08 (Vomir, c. 2007) is filed alongside as a structurally analogous late-wave entry twenty-two years later.
attributed to Yamanouchi · Vis A Vis Audio Arts insert · cited extensively in Hegarty, Noise/Music (Continuum 2007) and Novak, Japanoise (Duke UP 2013) · file complete
Vomir · Romain Perrot
The closing manifesto of the M-series. Posted to the Decimation Sociale label website by Romain Perrot, the sole figure of the Vomir project, in about 2007 and revised in later printings: five negations (no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse) and a longer paragraph setting out the political mode beneath them. The Bureau files this entry as the form filed at F·20 · Harsh Noise Wall's position and as the M-series' ninety-fourth-year extension of the line Russolo opened in 1913.
about 9 words in the canonical five-negation core · longer paragraph approx. 60 words · standard reference Russell Williams, The Quietus, August 2014 · academic engagement Sorbonne ACTE 2014, UCC 2017, Paris 8 2018