Closing the M-series with the form that exists to close everything.
The Bureau files M·08 as the closing entry of the Manifestos department. The choice is editorial rather than structural: the curated index that has stood in place across the Bureau's career of the catalogue ran M·01 through M·07, with the arc closing at M·07 (Gerogerigegege, 1985) and a seventy-two-year arc from Russolo. The Bureau has now added M·08, 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 filed F·20 Harsh Noise Wall as a Tier 2 form with a method, an 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. The Bureau files 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 the Bureau notes as a position statement in the project's title rather than an aesthetic gesture. Perrot's musical biography, in the Bureau's 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 (the Bureau notes 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. The Bureau notes 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 filed at F·20. 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 the Bureau files as M·08, 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 the Bureau reproduces in §03 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. The Bureau notes 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 files both.
The performance practice the manifesto generates is documented at length in §04 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; the Bureau notes 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 filing the practice as part of the documented record. The plastic bags were also offered to audience members with an explanatory note. The Bureau finds the audience-offering gesture more editorially interesting than the on-stage gesture and notes the distinction.
The academic interlocution the manifesto has generated is the element of the file the Bureau finds 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. The Bureau notes the academic interlocution as a distinguishing feature of the M·08 file relative to the earlier M-series files: where M·01-M·07 generated their secondary literature retrospectively, M·08 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 filed at F·20. The Bureau holds this concurrent reception as one of the file's distinguishing features.
The Bureau notes, before closing the editorial section, the question that the 2014 Quietus interview puts to Perrot directly and that the Bureau wishes 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." The Bureau files 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 (M·06 Whitehouse) and the Bureau notes Perrot's distinction from that palette as deliberate, articulated and on the public record. The closing manifesto is not a Difficult Legacy entry. The Bureau files it as such.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Carolingian era · last revised c. the Carolingian era