dusted

One of the best and most interesting things about Michael Tau’s new overview/catalog/traveller’s guide Extreme Music: From Silence to Noise and Everything in Between is that you would be equally justified in calling it Extreme Musics. As that subtitle tries to sum up, Tau isn’t playing favourites with one particular kind of extremity, but instead trying to give the reader a tour through the various ways many people over the years and decades have gone outside what is usually considered pleasurable or worthwhile music, or even music at all. Often works like this are put together either by the already hopelessly devoted (which risks stranding all but fellow travellers) or those approaching the exercise with a kind of patrician disdain. Tau succeeds by adopting neither pose; he’s not afraid to ask “who, exactly, likes this stuff?” but crucially he’s actually invested in figuring out the answer to that question.

Extreme Music is divided into seven sections: Extreme Scenes (devoted to extremity of sound and content), Extreme Durations (in either direction), Extreme Records (interesting LP and, let’s say, LP-aping formats), Technological Quirks (various other formats and technologies), Extreme Packaging (including packaging taken to the extent it changes or hampers the music itself), Recordings? (going even further in that direction, with silent, damaged, and unplayable records), and The Digital Age (which considers some more recent/innovative formats and scenes, and includes a series of profiles of recent outsider artists). As you might expect from that breadth, the book is more interested in seeking out exemplars, histories, and boundaries than in going too deep in any area, but one of Tau’s other strengths is that he’s quite good at giving brief but surprisingly deep readings of particular scenes and sounds. There might only be around ten pages devoted to, say, harsh noise wall records or music on floppy discs or disgusting packaging, but each section sticks with you. Throughout there are occasional sidebars listing Tau’s picks (sometimes sourced by genre artists and experts) for introductory canons to some of the types of music discussed wherein. 

Almost by definition, most people who will wind up reading Extreme Music will be more interested in reading about these types of music than in getting deeply into all of the various types Tau covers. But as mentioned, Tau takes the devotion small groups of people have to each type he covers here seriously, conducting plenty of interviews with artists, label heads, etc. and when he doesn’t himself feel visceral attraction to a type of extreme music giving a good faith effort to represent the reasonings and experiences of those who do. Especially once Extreme Music starts getting into less… hearable forms of music (a vinyl LP you play by rubbing dirt on it, conceptual pieces that exist in both the experimental music and fine art spaces, deliberately damaged media, and so on) the book also does a solid job of explicating the reasons one might want to make music that isn’t “really” music, for any readers who don’t already feel the pull. 

Ultimately Extreme Music is an impressive and fascinating work of documentation and compilation, one where even relatively seasoned (or jaded) music fans are likely to come away with some new fascinating bits of information and music to check out (and/or avoid). The most endearing aspect, of both the book and the music it covers, is the way even the most “extreme” of these musics are ultimately made by people for plenty of ordinary human reasons - to try and make a quick buck, to see if something can even work, to outdo a friend or rival, or just because we all have things we think sound good that make most others wince. Extreme Music doesn’t at all softpedal just how extreme in various directions these forms are (including, sometimes, in ways that range towards the unethical), but it also commendably demystifies these sometimes exoticized forms as what they ultimately are: human forms of artistic and creative expression. 

Ian Mathers