Visual and Conceptual Elements
Many noise rock groups have a confrontational performance style which mirrors the aggression of their music. This reaches back to The Who and Jimi Hendrix, who were famous for destroying their instruments on stage, and Iggy Pop, of the Stooges, and Darby Crash, of the Germs, who lacerated their bodies in a spectacle comparable to the performance art of Chris Burden and Vito Acconci. Acconci was also a significant inspiration for no wave. Some performers, such as Black Flag and the Birthday Party, for example, also physically assaulted audience members, on occasion.
1980s noise rock musicians tended to adopt a Spartan, utilitarian mode of dress following the hardcore punk ethos and in partial reaction against the more ostentatious elements of punk fashion. Steve Albini articulated an ethical stance that emphasized restraint, irony, and self-sufficiency. The Butthole Surfers were an exception in their desire to dress as bizarrely as possible. Several bands also made public reference to drug use, particularly LSD (Jimi Hendrix, the Butthole Surfers) and heroin (the Velvet Underground, Royal Trux). Many contemporary noise rock musicians, such as the Locust, Comparative Anatomy, and Lightning Bolt, have a very theatrical mode of presentation and wear costumes. Some bands incorporate visual displays, such as film or video art.
Read more about this topic: Noise Rock
Famous quotes containing the words visual, conceptual and/or elements:
“Nowadays people’s visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.”
—Robert Doisneau (b. 1912)
“We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“There surely is a being who presides over the universe; and who, with infinite wisdom and power, has reduced the jarring elements into just order and proportion. Let speculative reasoners dispute, how far this beneficent being extends his care, and whether he prolongs our existence beyond the grave, in order to bestow on virtue its just reward, and render it fully triumphant.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)