The French artist who reduced harsh noise to a single unchanging slab and built a complete refusenik philosophy around holding it.
Vomir is the harsh-noise-wall project of Romain Perrot, born in Paris in 1973 and active under the name from 1996. The Bureau files him at Tier II as a founder of the form. Where harsh noise still carries gesture and incident, Perrot strips both away: a Vomir piece is a static, monolithic mass of sound held without dynamics, development or event for its full length. It is, by design, the opposite of music, and the most reductive position the noise idiom has reached.
The reduction is a philosophy, not only a sound. On the Noise Wall manifesto posted to his label Decimation Sociale, Perrot sets out a position of total withdrawal: No Act, No Play, No Point, No Result, No Strategy, No Compromise, No Social Lubricant. He frames noise as a non-violent anarchy and as an opportunity for complete isolation and complete immersion at once, a refusal of contemporary life as it is promoted and sold. The militancy is the work's centre of gravity.
The performance follows the same logic. Perrot stands motionless while the machines run, and hands the audience plastic bags to place over their heads, the better to seal each listener inside the wall and away from everything else. As he puts it, the action does not happen on stage but inside the bag. The result is an endurance piece without spectacle, the saturation made private and individual.
The catalogue is vast, over three hundred releases by 2020, carried mostly on Decimation Sociale across cassette, vinyl and digital. Alongside Vomir, Perrot records raw, chordless folk as Roro Perrot and works in photography, film and drawing. With The Rita and Werewolf Jerusalem, he is named among the pioneers of the international harsh-noise-wall scene, and his manifesto remains its clearest written statement.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene