The New Blockaders are filed in this archive as the 1982 Newcastle articulation of the anti-art and anti-music position the Dada and Fluxus traditions cultivated, routed through Russolo's 1913 Art of Noises, and as one of the moments of sustained European noise practice.
The New Blockaders were founded in 1982 in Newcastle upon Tyne by the brothers Richard Rupenus and Philip D. Rupenus, both previously involved in several music and art projects through the late 1970s. The founding act is the self-released LP Changez les Blockeurs (1982, 100 copies, plain white sleeve with die-cut centre hole, double-sided A4 manifesto insert), originally titled simply The New Blockaders with the French title decided shortly before release. The first live offensive followed in July 1983 at Morden Tower, Newcastle · the venue that has remained the catalogue's early-period live space.
The 1982 manifesto, reprinted in later reissues and anthologies, sets the catalogue's position: Blockade is resistance. It is our duty to blockade and induce others to blockade: anti-music, anti-art, anti-books, anti-films, anti-communications. We will make anti-statements about anything and everything. The statement extends the Dada anti-art position into a post-punk Newcastle articulation. The method holds that even anti-art is art, and the only consistent position is therefore the refusal of all production. The catalogue paradoxically continues to produce; the Bureau reads the contradiction as the project's generative tension and the source of the catalogue's sustained life across forty years.
The method is junk noise at the level of materials · scrap metal, broken objects, contact-microphone amplification of scraping, dragging, thumping and scratching · with no traditional instrumentation and, in the early release, no effects boxes. The compositional principle is the rejection of musical syntax: not the Whitehouse / Sutcliffe Jugend power-electronics compressed electronic violence, not Throbbing Gristle's tape-collage post-rock-band method, but a sustained refusal of the musical event in favour of the workshop sound. Reviewers have likened the result to a baby elephant trying to escape a room full of bicycles, a warehouse symphony of metalworkers, the ghost of Tristan Tzara in a garden shed. The earlier compositions are dryer; the post-2000 method (visible in Gesamtnichtswerk and History of Nothing) admits more texture and processing while holding the core position.
Live performance is called offensive rather than concert across the catalogue's mode. The live partner-collective is the Nihilist Assault Group, a TNB-adjacent configuration serving as the live performance vehicle. The catalogue's masked-mythology stage vein (the Rupenus brothers' hood and ritual-costume position) extends the anti-personality position the manifesto stakes: not the rock-band performer-as-protagonist position, but the masked anti-figure operating against the audience. The live offensives across the 1983-onward period (Morden Tower, later venues across the UK and continental Europe, the late-period Cafe OTO London and Audio Foundation Auckland positions) hold the same compositional principles as the recorded catalogue.
The catalogue runs from Changez les Blockeurs (1982) through Epater les Bourgeois (1984, Frux), the Vortex Campaign collaboration The New Vortex Blockaders Compaign (1984 tape, bootlegged on LP in 1998 and officially reissued later), Simphonie in X Major (1989, Hypnagogia), Simphonie in O Minor (1991, Hypnagogia), History of Nothing (2001, Siren · the Japanese label), and culminates in the 4CD anthology Gesamtnichtswerk: 20th Antiversary Antiology (1982–2002) (2003, Hypnagogia). The post-2003 catalogue has continued through Raymond Dijkstra collaborations (from 2010 onward), the Knurl collaboration Pulchrum Metallum, the LSD collaboration La Puissance du Vide (Wepwawet Editions), and a live-recordings catalogue. The Bureau notes the distribution structure as small-edition vinyl and CD across collector-noise imprints.
The collaborative catalogue is considerable. The long-term partner is David Jackman through Organum · the L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords project running parallel to TNB across the early-to-mid 1980s, with later collaborations routing through the Pulp (Aeroplane) position. Andrew Chalk's Ferial Confine sits adjacent and contributes to Gesamtnichtswerk. The Coil collaboration The Melancholy Mad Tenant (with Vortex Campaign) is the cross-tradition position. The Merzbow (Masami Akita) collaboration routes the catalogue into the early-period Japanese noise inheritance. Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Asmus Tietchens, Ralf Wehowsky and Nurse With Wound have each contributed to TNB reworkings (the 3CD set reissuing Changez les Blockeurs through guest reworkings). The Haters (G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, NYC and Los Angeles) sit as the American counterpart · a 1979 moment running parallel to TNB's 1982 founding, with a structurally adjacent project relative to the conventional noise and industrial tradition.
The visual component is central rather than ancillary. Richard Rupenus's collage work · the Changez les Blockeurs A4 insert, the later booklet artwork, the Gesamtnichtswerk 4-colour booklets · operates as the catalogue's visual manifesto: demons torturing souls with ringing bells and hammered anvils; hammers driven through musical scores; X's crossing out musical notation; Max Ernst-derived collage structure. The Raymond Dijkstra collaborations (from 2010 onward) extend the visual idiom into the post-2010 position with original collage artwork in limited art-edition releases. The masked-mythology live position is itself a visual statement: the hood, ritual costume manner the Rupenus brothers cultivate operates the same anti-personality position as the recorded catalogue's anti-musical method.
Citation. The New Blockaders' position is the 1982 moment of European non-music and anti-music as a sustained tradition. The Bureau routes the catalogue's lineage through Russolo and Italian Futurism, through Dada and Fluxus at the level of tradition, through Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse at the level of scene-precedent, and forward through the Anglo-American noise inheritance that the Viva Negativa! tribute project (2006 Vinyl On Demand 4LP boxes, later At War With False Noise CD reissues) documents. The American noise tradition · Emil Beaulieau, Aaron Dilloway and Hanson Records, the RRRecords catalogue · has consistently cited TNB as influence. The Bureau holds TNB's position as one of the catalogue centres of gravity for the 1982-onward European and American noise traditions.