The percussion-and-rhythm-centric noise tradition; founded across three near-simultaneous European poles in 1980–1981 with a genealogy running back to Russolo's intonarumori; the rhythm-side sibling to power electronics, and the precursor to the 1990s club form later called power noise.
Rhythmic noise is the percussion-and-rhythm-centric form of the noise tradition. Where power electronics (F·07) strips music down to feedback and vocal extremity, rhythmic noise keeps the pulse: it builds from metal percussion, found objects, self-made machines and mechanical electronic rhythm. The Bureau files it at Tier 2 Internal as the rhythm-side sibling to F·07, closing Tier 2 numerically at F·10. Its founding is distributed, like Japanoise's, across more than one pole; but where Japanoise doubles across two Japanese cities, rhythmic noise triples across three European ones.
The Berlin pole is Einstürzende Neubauten, formed on 1 April 1980. Their method, scrap-metal percussion, power tools, found objects and the construction of sound, is the form's most recognised image, fixed on Kollaps (1981, ZickZack). The Madrid pole is Esplendor Geométrico, formed in 1980 by Arturo Lanz, Gabriel Riaza and Juan-Carlos Sastre after they left the techno-pop group El Aviador Dro; their early work, shaped by Kraftwerk, DAF, Neu! and Can, established a stripped, mechanical rhythmic electronics that, in the words of the standard accounts, foreshadowed the power-noise descendant by over a decade. The London pole is Test Dept, formed in 1981, whose metal-percussion method was collective, physical and built from industrial salvage, fixed on Beating the Retreat.
The form's deepest genealogical anchor sits not in 1980 but in 1913, at F·03 Italian Futurism. Russolo's L'Arte dei Rumori and his intonarumori orchestra proposed rhythm and noise as compositional material, and the rhythmic-noise tradition's self-conception runs back to that point more directly than any other form in the department. Esplendor Geométrico made the inheritance explicit by taking their name from Marinetti's phrase "lo splendore geometrico e meccanico", the geometric and mechanical splendour, naming the futurist machine-aesthetic in their own title. The form is, in this sense, the futurist noise-orchestra realised with the materials of the late twentieth century.
lo splendore geometrico e meccanico F.T. Marinetti, the phrase Esplendor Geométrico took their name from; the futurist machine-aesthetic the form descends from
The three poles share a method but not a lineage of contact. None of the founding acts references the others in 1980–1981; they emerge independently from a shared European post-punk and post-industrial moment. What unites them is the decision to make rhythm itself the noise, to treat percussion (whether literal scrap metal or mechanical electronic pulse) as the form's organising principle rather than the feedback-and-voice extremity of power electronics or the static density of harsh noise wall. The form's coherence is methodological, established retrospectively as the three poles' shared approach became legible.
The term "power noise" is a later and narrower thing. It was coined by Raoul Roucka of Noisex in 1997, on the track "United (Power Noise Movement)", and it names the club-facing descendant that emerged at the end of the century, distorted, beat-driven, danceable, taking inspiration from Esplendor Geométrico and anticipated by the Belgian project Dive. The Bureau keeps the distinction firmly: the form proper is the 1980–1981 industrial-percussion founding, and power noise is its 1990s descendant, separated by some seventeen years. To call Einstürzende Neubauten "power noise" would be an anachronism; the founding wave precedes the word.
The form is filed at F·10 in this archive's classification as a Tier 2 Internal form: internal to the post-1976 noise tradition the archive treats as its territory proper, and parallel to F·07 power electronics as the rhythm-side counterpart to power electronics' feedback-side extremity. Its founding acts are filed individually in the Audio department; this page files the form itself, the shared percussion-and-rhythm method that the three concurrent European foundings established and that the 1990s club scene later inherited under a new name.