Andy Ortmann's American noise label, built around Panicsville and an eclectic roster that treats offence and absurdity as raw material rather than ideology.
Nihilist Records is the American noise label the Bureau files at Tier III. Andy Ortmann founded it in 1992, first in St Louis and later from Chicago, to release his own band Panicsville, and it grew into a wide and deliberately eclectic catalogue. Where some noise imprints hold to a single sound, Nihilist spans neo-folk, acoustic pieces, musique concrète, dark disco and pure noise, held together by a sensibility rather than a genre.
That sensibility leans hard into the controversial and the gross-out, but in the absurdist mode of the American art-damage tradition rather than anything political. The roster runs from Costes and the Broken Penis Orchestra to Cock E.S.P., John Wiese, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Wolf Eyes and Thurston Moore, and the label's comic streak is made literal in a trilogy of noise tribute albums to ABBA, Madonna and the B-52's. The offence is the joke, and the shock is conceptual.
The label sits alongside Hanson and Load in the North American noise economy of the 1990s and 2000s, distinguished by its eclecticism and its appetite for the tasteless as a form rather than a belief. Through Ortmann and Panicsville it is a connector as much as a catalogue.
The Bureau's reading. Nihilist Records is filed at Tier III as a long-running American noise label and a connector node, notable for treating offence and absurdity as material.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene