top 5 songs for getting noisy with fertilizer/xacklebox
what actually is your name, btw? you’ve got several.
I'm Forrest McCuller. I got other first and middle names but they ain't for using at computer time. Sometimes I gotta use them to get square jobs or get into square countries. Best to keep all that less searchable. My noise project is called Fertilizer though. And I have a band called XackleboX (pronounced “tacklebox”) where I write and record all the songs. Xacklebox has a tape out on Kitchen Leg Records in Berlin, and Fertilizer one on Dour Records in Columbus, Ohio.
we went to a noise show last summer. i brought two friends: one had a life-changing experience and the other uhh… shut down. idk the question i am trying to ask here exactly, but i am thinking about your motto of “make something good from something bad.” what would you tell people who don’t “like” noise music? could you explain the appeal of noise in a way that makes people not so, err… freaked?
The benefit of noise is it is direct. You can see a hundred guitar solos and go into a thousand galleries and never learn anything about those artists. If you see a noise act, you know something about the artist every time: if they are angry, sad, boring, repressed, happy, funny, whatever. If they are lying you, can see through it.
But also, you're asking the wrong person in a way, because I'm a pretty big curmudgeon when it comes to noise. I've been playing it for 19 years at this point. I did synth punk when I was a teenager, and started playing noise when I was 19 years old, and now I'm 38. So I'm pretty selective.
One problem when people first encounter noise is that there are no standards of success in this genre. If a normal band plays in time, and on key, and their lyrics are clever, and their instruments sound good, they can be labeled as a baseline successful band. They can be like, technically unimpeachable, even if they are awful. But when somebody shows up with a box-fan, and a contact microphone, and puts it all through a chorus pedal on a card table, and then screams and falls through the table... there are a lot of ways of interpreting that. There is no way of knowing if it was successful. So a lot of bad stuff gets booked and waters down the small amount of good stuff.
I've seen so much noise now, I want to see either imagination, personality, or technical/musical acumen, and I often feel that audiences are too generous in encouraging performers that are either entirely derivative or just went to an expensive music school (and learned to name-drop French philosophers like Deleuze, instead of improving as musicians) or both.
Most people don't bother to learn the history of noise – which, that's fine, I understand not caring – but then you applaud for people that are just doing other people's acts with nothing added. Again, fine.
I think there is a children's talent show aspect to underground music that is basically good: you show up and see your friend dressed in a little outfit, and they sing, and do all of their parts, and it's cute, or grotesque, or whatever, and then you applaud. That is good. It is good to have this form of low-bar, presently-non-embarrassing pop community theater we can all participate in.
Honestly, good. Brings us together. Facilitates connection in atomized societies (and I think it's no accident that America invented it). Everyone should have a dumb band.
But again, I'm a curmudgeon, and I don't tell people in person, because there is no point, and it would be mean, and I don't like to be mean to people, but I don't really enjoy much of it. I'm sort of selective about shows I attend anymore, and I want to see something where people learned the history of their art form and approached it in a thoughtful way.
Noise is having a moment right now. This year I met a few rich people that said they “love noise.” That is a sign, like smelling rain before it falls. Some shit is about to get way over-exposed. It'll probably be stuff that isn't spectacular. And new demographics are going to show up at shows.
Also, there's the whole free jazz thing. You'll encounter that a lot. I've got a note on that:
Around 2010 – we were coming out of an era in the US with lots of really carefully, painstakingly composed, carefully performed, often mathy, technical harsh music – the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis hit average consumers in the US, and working people couldn’t afford the capital to have underground venues and bands anymore. Suddenly in the US it was just rich people holding all of the show houses, tour vehicles, nice gear, etc., and rich people love novelty in their art. It doesn’t matter if it is good as long as it is novel. Bourgeois culture needs constant novelty the way an organization needs liquidity. So all the working-class people – who were perfectly happy seeing minor variations on the same punk music from 40 years ago forever – are all forced out of the curatorial process. And, plus, because everything is suddenly so expensive it’s increasingly tricky to get three people together in a room long enough to write and practice music. Improvisation is an automatic way of generating new music forever.
So, rich kids all have classical instruments lying around their parents' houses. What kind of improvised music do you make on classical instruments? Jazz. Suddenly there are 1000 new free-jazz bands, mostly started by people with no jazz training. Some were very serious, and some were very good, but lots were just doing random notes. Rich people also prize jazz and (neo)classical music because it is more institutionally acknowledged. You can get gallery shows, grants, and retire in teaching positions or whatever. But anyway, you can also ignore everything I just said. If a noise performer creates a palpable atmosphere, they are successful. Doesn't matter if you hate it. That's my standard; their personality should fill the space. You should know a lot about them after they play. You can like them or hate them, and I'd still say they succeeded if they do that. And if you want to enjoy noise you gotta find the people you like and go see them. It's a social thing.
I always think punk is like collecting comic books, where noise is like collecting stamps. Punks are niche people that secretly love pop-culture. Noise people just want to show up at a small convention and have a lot of trouble talking to the people they have the most in common with out of anyone else in the world.
It doesn't matter if the stamps on the table are valuable. It's all about perceived value. Sometimes it's like an inside joke or a secret. Sometimes it's interesting, or pretty, or really cathartic. But it doesn't necessarily matter as long as people come together for it. It’s ritual.
I’ll show you! I’ll show all of you! is cool. wanna talk about that project?
Yeah, that's my first tape for my project XackleboX, which is my songwriting project where I use normal instruments. {In Fertilizer I use homemade electronics}
In XackleboX I'm using the techniques I used to write no-wave music in high school to write more-or-less pop music: improvise freely till it sounds good, record that little bit, and then stitch the recorded bits together to make these weird jagged songs that you would never get if you thought in terms of chords and scales. Then you learn to play it live later. It's also basically how Trout Mask Replica was written, except they transcribed it all selecting from improv on piano.
XackleboX and Fertilizer are both storytelling projects too. All of the songs I've published so far are about people that aren't me. Fertilizer is going in this whole science fiction post-industrial direction, but XackleboX is more about people I've encountered, and then fictionalized, or made-up entirely. But, stories basically set in this world.
oh! and you have a bunch of films. do you work on one thing at a time or a bunch of stuff at once?
In the past, I did a bunch at once, but now I focus on one at a time, and do music when I have free time.
what’s next?
I am producing a short film I wrote called He That Digs a Pit. I don't want to direct it this time, so we are finding an appropriate person. It will be an international co-production. It's a very dark story that I won't spoil. I'm writing other screenplays too. I'll direct future ones. I'm also doing more XackleboX.
I'm slowly working on the next real album, but I'm also making a bunch of b-sides out of the failure tracks in the process. I'll keep putting those online in the meantime. The next real album will be a concept album about a junkie abandoning his life and driving from Texas to California right before a nuclear war.
I don't want to put the title out before I use it, because someone might like it. But if you watch @xacklebox you'll know when it's the real album.
Also, I'm trying to take @Fffertilizerrr on tour next year to Asia and then through Western Europe. So I'm writing those sci-fi songs in this serialized story based on this Butterfly Summoner concept I came up with years ago. It isn't really noise anymore.