Vomir

The HNW Manifesto.

Vomir · Romain Perrot · Decimation Sociale, Paris · c. 2007 · Five negations on a label website. A longer paragraph beneath them setting out the political mode. The closing manifesto of the M-series and the document that has, in the eighteen years since its first posting, served as the form at the Harsh Noise Wall form's position. I keep it as the ninety-fourth-year extension of the arc Russolo opened in 1913.

§ 01

Editorial.

The closing entry · approx. 3,400 words · 17 min

Closing the M-series with the form that exists to close everything.

I keep Vomir as the closing entry of the Manifestos section. The choice is editorial rather than structural: the curated index that has stood in place across my cataloguing ran Russolo through Gerogerigegege, with the arc closing at Gerogerigegege (Gerogerigegege, 1985) and a seventy-two-year arc from Russolo. I have now added Vomir, posting the manifesto's date at about 2007, the year following Vomir's first dedicated harsh noise wall release and extending the arc to ninety-four years. The decision rests on a simple operational position: the catalogue has kept Harsh Noise Wall as a Tier 2 form with a method, a vein and a documented succession of practitioners and the form has a single, widely-cited, author-attributed manifesto that articulates its position. The form has a manifesto. I keep the manifesto. The arc extends as far as the artefacts require.

The author is Romain Perrot, born 1973 in the Paris suburbs, currently based in Montpellier. The project name Vomir is French for the infinitive to vomit or to regurgitate, which I note as a position statement in the project's title rather than an aesthetic gesture. Perrot's musical biography, in my reconstruction from the available interview material (mainly the 2014 Russell Williams interview in the Quietus, and Perrot's contributions to academic noise-music conferences at the Sorbonne, University College Cork and the University of Paris 8 across 2014–2018), runs as follows: a childhood listening to Pink Floyd, a teenage interest in industrial-and-experimental records discovered through specialist Paris shops (I note Bimbo Tower on rue de Charonne and U-Bahn on rue Quincampoix as the specific stops on the standard documented account), an introduction to Japanese noise through Merzbow and Keiji Haino in the mid-1990s and a long apprenticeship as a noise guitarist under several pseudonyms (Under Your Come Hand, others) before the Vomir project's founding in about 2006.

The Vomir project's catalysing artefact is the split CDR Adoration of the Faceless Woman, issued in 2006 by The Rita's Militant Walls label, with Vomir on one side and Paranoid Time on the other. I note The Rita (Sam McKinlay, Vancouver) as the project that had, by 2006, established the harsh noise wall method most explicitly (the form's harsh noise purity position, as Perrot later acknowledged on the record, was developed by The Rita first), and the Vomir-Paranoid Time split as the Vomir project's first dedicated harsh noise wall release. The method ran forward from the split: monolithic static-noise slabs of consistent texture and intensity, without dynamic variation, without compositional development, without the structural devices of conventional music or even of conventional noise. The form is the form at Harsh Noise Wall. The artefacts that establish it run from 2006 onward and now number, by Perrot's own later count in interview, about 380 across cassette, CDR, vinyl and digital editions.

The manifesto itself, the document I keep as Vomir, was posted to the website of Perrot's record label Decimation Sociale (founded 2012, the year after Vomir's first label-curated programme had stabilised) and has been the long-form statement of the form's position since. The manifesto exists in two modes: a five-line aphoristic core, which I reproduce in below and which is the document's most-cited element and a longer paragraph of political argument beneath, which sets out the position the five lines are an abbreviation of. I note that the longer paragraph is the manifesto's structural argument; the five lines are the manifesto's working summary. The form is articulated at two scales and the catalogue records both.

The performance practice the manifesto generates is documented at length in below. The most-photographed element of the practice is the plastic-bag-over-head stance that Perrot adopted in the early Vomir sets and that became, in later reception, the project's most recognisable visual signature; I note Perrot's own later ambivalence about the gimmick (the 2014 Quietus interview is explicit that the bag is not, in Perrot's view, "a successful marketing gimmick" and that face-covering at noise performances predates Vomir by about three decades) while keeping the practice as part of the documented record. The plastic bags were also offered to audience members with an explanatory note. I find the audience-offering gesture more editorially interesting than the on-stage gesture and note the distinction.

The academic interlocution the manifesto has generated is the element of the entry I find most editorially distinctive. Perrot has participated, across 2014–2018, in three documented university programmes: the 2014 international conference Bruit at the ACTE Institute (Sorbonne Paris 1 / CNRS / ENS Louis-Lumière), the 2017 Paul Hegarty research seminar at University College Cork on Blanchot and the performance of harsh noise wall and the 2018 exhibition The Constraints of the Place at the University of Paris 8. I note the academic interlocution as a distinguishing feature of the Vomir entry relative to the earlier M-series entries: where Russolo-Gerogerigegege generated their secondary literature retrospectively, Vomir has generated it concurrently and the manifesto has been read in seminar rooms by people who have also read it on Decimation Sociale's homepage. The form is, in the academic idiom, the form at Harsh Noise Wall. I hold this concurrent reception as one of the entry's distinguishing features.

I note, before closing the editorial section, the question that the 2014 Quietus interview puts to Perrot directly and that I wish to put on the record at the head of the M-series's closing entry. The interviewer, Russell Williams, asked Perrot whether the rejection-of-society manner of the manifesto risked being read as a reactionary or radical-right political position. Perrot's response was explicit: the rules in the manifesto were initially designed to apply to himself and his own approach to making noise; the political position the manifesto articulates is an extreme one but is "neither totalitarian nor aggressive in any way." I keep Perrot's answer on the record at the head of the M-series's closing entry because the M-series contains one Difficult Legacy entry (Whitehouse) and I note Perrot's distinction from that palette as deliberate, articulated and on the public record. The closing manifesto is not a Difficult Legacy entry. I keep it as such.

VAGO · c. the Carolingian era

§ 03

The Manifesto, Reproduced.

Two modes · aphoristic core + longer paragraph Decimation Sociale website · c. 2007

The HNW Manifesto · five negations · as posted
No
ideas.·01·
No
change.·02·
No
development.·03·
No
entertainment.·04·
No
remorse.·05·
The longer paragraph · my paraphrase

The longer text beneath the five-line core sets out the position the five lines are an abbreviation of. I reproduce the argument in paraphrase, noting that Perrot's wording on the Decimation Sociale website remains the primary source and that the paraphrase below preserves the argument while editing the cadence into my voice.

The argument runs as follows. Contemporary life as it is promoted and preached leaves the individual with no remaining alternative; the conventional modes of contemporary life (entertainment, socialisation, the implicit ideological commitments that come with both) are continuous with the manipulation they are presented as relief from; the only available free behaviour, given this condition, is the behaviour of refusal. Refusal takes the form of noise; refusal takes the form of withdrawal; refusal takes the form of declining to participate in the structures of entertainment, socialisation and ideological coercion that the contemporary world offers as if they were neutral. The position is articulated as personal rather than universal: the rules apply, in the manifesto's own framing, to Perrot's own approach to making noise. The position is held with the caveat that the political extremity it amounts to is non-violent and non-totalitarian.

The manifesto's most-cited adjectival construction, additional to the five-line core, is the claim that the harsh noise wall is militantly pure in its non-representation. I hold this construction as the genre's working aesthetic claim and note it as the editorial mode that has carried it forward through the eighteen years since the manifesto's first posting.

Decimation Sociale · Paris · c. 2007 · revised 2012 & 2014 · still hosted

§ 04

The Performance Practice.

The plastic bag · the set length · the anti-concert the audience offering

The bag.

Perrot performs Vomir sets with his head covered. The covering, across the 2006–2021 period, was a plain black plastic bag of household-rubbish-sack dimensions, drawn down over the head and held in place by the noise emerging from below it. The bag is the project's most-photographed element and is, on Perrot's own later account, not the element he is most editorially attached to. I note Perrot's 2014 Quietus interview position that face-covering at noise performances has a long pre-Vomir history (Hijokaidan, Incapacitants and various Japanese-scene precedents from the 1980s onward) and that the bag is not, in Perrot's view, the project's contribution.

From 2022 onward Perrot has performed with a black leather bag rather than plastic, citing wear, environmental considerations and a preference for the heavier object's relationship to the head. The leather bag is the same gesture in a different material vein.

Plastic bags were placed at the front of the audience at the start of each Vomir set, accompanied by an explanatory note inviting audience members to place the bag over their own heads for the duration of the performance, to separate themselves from anything other than the noise. Source: Vomir live-set documentation, c. 2008–2014 · widely photographed

The anti-concert.

Set lengths run from one hour minimum to eight hours maximum, with the practice settling, by Perrot's stated preference, at three to four hours. The position is that the listener's experience of the form is constituted by duration: the wall must be inhabited rather than encountered, and the inhabiting requires time the conventional concert format does not offer.

The setting Perrot has cited most consistently as the appropriate context for Vomir performance is Les Instants Chavirés in Montreuil (a suburb in eastern Paris), a venue programmed by Quentin Rollet and his colleagues for experimental and noise-adjacent practice since the early 1990s. The HNW Festival has been periodically programmed at Les Instants Chavirés since the late 2000s and has functioned, in Perrot's account, as the form's gathering.

Vomir performances are described in the project's own promotional material as anti-concerts. I hold the term as a working description rather than a marketing position: the form refuses the structural conventions (intro, build, peak, resolution) that the concert format generates, and a Vomir set is, by deliberate design, the form's negation of those conventions. Source: Decimation Sociale promotional material · 2012-onward

§ 05

Cross-references.

Connected entries in this archive

Cross-Reference.

Manifestos · Index · Vomir stands as the closing entry · extends the M-series arc to ninety-four years Russolo → Perrot
◆ Harsh Noise Wall · direct attribution · the form the manifesto reads · the Vomir document articulates the position the Harsh Noise Wall form held in the catalogue operates within
Japanoise · Perrot's documented entry point to noise music · Merzbow and Keiji Haino cited as the touchstones across the project's interview corpus
Power Electronics · adjacent upstream form · Harsh Noise Wall inherits idiom from power electronics while stripping out the shouted vocal and the explicit textual-political content
Drone Minimalism · structural cousin · the Harsh Noise Wall form's stasis-as-composition manner has clear formal resonance with the locked-groove drone tradition
Gerogerigegege · Art Is Over · the predecessor closing-manifesto · The Gerogerigegege 1985 · twenty-two years prior · the five-line refusal that Vomir echoes structurally and extends temporally
Whitehouse · Right to Kill · Difficult Legacy adjacent · the Harsh Noise Wall form as HNW reads its own position as a deliberate stripping-out of the power electronics palette Whitehouse codified
COUM · Prostitution at the ICA 1976 · the catalysing first-wave manifesto · COUM's gallery-as-provocation mode reads forward, through the form's arc, into the academy-as-interlocutor vein the Vomir manifesto inhabits
Russolo · L'Arte dei Rumori · the M-series opening · ninety-four years prior · the arc's origin point · Russolo's six families of noise stripped, over the intervening period, to a single undifferentiated band
ART The Rita · Sam McKinlay, Vancouver · the harsh-noise-wall practitioner Perrot has cited as the form's primary developer · Militant Walls label · the 2006 split CDR that catalysed Vomir
The Long Prelude · the prehistory essay frames the Vomir five-negation manifesto as the Fluxus event-score tradition's asymptotic limit; the genealogy runs Maciunas 1963 → Yamanouchi Gerogerigegege 1985 → Perrot Vomir c. 2007
Lexicon · harsh noise wall · wall · anti-concert · Decimation Sociale · five negations

A Coda · on closing
the M-series at ninety-four years.

I have now kept all eight manifesto entries. The arc runs from Russolo at Russolo in 1913 to Perrot at Vomir in 2007, across ninety-four years, six countries (Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States in two locations, Japan, France), and three language groups (Italian, English, French). The catalogue's view is that the eight entries together constitute, by intentional selection rather than by exhaustive survey, the form's documentary idiom of itself: the moments at which the genre articulated, on the record, a stated position. I do not claim the eight entries are the only manifestos the form has produced. I claim that the eight entries are the eight I hold as the genre's stated positions, and that the arc through them traces its working argument with itself across the period.

The shape of the arc is worth noting in closing. Russolo at Russolo wrote a long manifesto in 1913 advocating six families of noise. COUM at COUM staged a retrospective at the ICA in 1976. The Industrial Records prospectus at IR Prospectus typed up a corporate parody in late 1976. The Throbbing Gristle communiqué at The Mission Is Terminated in 1981 was a single sentence on a postcard. Whitehouse at Whitehouse in 1983 pressed an album dedicated to a serial killer in three hundred copies. The Gerogerigegege at Gerogerigegege in 1985 wrote five lines and stopped. Vomir at Vomir in 2007 wrote five different lines and continues, after eighteen years, to write them. The arc is one of progressive compression and progressive refusal and the compression has not finished compressing. Gerogerigegege and Vomir are both five-line statements; the twenty-two-year gap between them is the gap during which the form at Harsh Noise Wall emerged and required a manifesto of its own.

I close the section with the following observation. Of the eight manifestos, one is under a Difficult Legacy notice (Whitehouse). One is a deliberately-confrontational provocation that the cultural moment later rewarded (COUM Prostitution). One is a document the form's primary movement produced for itself (IR Prospectus). One is a single-sentence dissolution-and-renewal communiqué (The Mission Is Terminated). Two are closing manifestos at twenty-two years' distance from each other (Gerogerigegege Art Is Over; HNW Manifesto). One is the arc's foundational origin point (Russolo). I hold the eight together as the form's documentary self-account and note, in closing, that the catalogue's coverage of them is now complete. Later additions will be kept in supplementary modes; the M-series itself, as the arc, is closed at eight.

I also note, finally, that the catalogue's Corrections welcomed; arguments ignored position on the colophon is operational across the closing of the M-series as it is operational elsewhere. I have kept what I hold. Readers who hold the arc differently are invited to write in. I will read what is sent. I will not, on the standard form of the response, change the placement on the basis of the response unless the response carries documentation I did not previously have. That is the standard. The standard applies to this entry as it applies to the others.

↑