Boyd Rice and Non

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Boyd Rice (born 1956, better known as Non) is an avant-garde musician from Los Angeles who, since the 1980s, has been one of the most radical exponents of noise music. Although much of his work is superfluous, he was one of the first to use the turntable as a creative instrument and to record albums that can be played at any speed.

Boyd Rice cut his teeth in electronic avant-garde circles. His notoriety came more from his neo-fascist positions than from his cacophonous symphonies, which were often embarrassingly trivial. Rice is fundamentally a limited musician in terms of expressive means, who has endlessly recycled his few (and not particularly brilliant) ideas. In a milieu (such as punk) where the technical innovations of the classical avant-garde were not widely known, however, he managed to exert a certain influence. In the end, he found himself aligned with the no less prolific and mediocre ex-industrial musicians of Great Britain. Overall, his has been a career marked by ambiguity and approximation.

For some years his work remained confined to intellectual circles, and it is documented only by a few singles (Mode Of Infection/ Knife Ladder from 1977 and the legendary Pagan Muzak from 1981), characterized by their use of non-conventional instruments and by the fact that they can be played at any speed.

His first album, Boyd Rice (1976 - Mute, 1981), also known as Black Album, was released in 1981 but had been recorded in the winter of 1975. It is a radical work of formless electronic noise whose sole aim is to shock the listener. Rice was one of the first musicians to use the turntable as an instrument and is a seasoned expert in “tape loops”: in his pieces he exploits these and other devastating techniques. They are very free experiments in obsessively repeated reverberations to induce trance, in layers of dissonance of almost symphonic density, and in random collages of metallic noise. Far from the seismic shocks of Foetus and the psychoanalytic nightmares of Throbbing Gristle, Rice is simply an amateur of the genre who indulges in sound for its own sake.

Physical Evidence (Mute, 1982), released under the pseudonym Non, essentially collects the tracks that had been left off the first album, from 1976 onward.

In 1981 Rice recorded an album with Frank Tovey (which would only be released three years later), Easy Listening For The Hard Of Hearing (Mute, 1984), which indulges in the use of noise, but one has to wait until 1987 to hear Boyd Rice’s more contemporary sound: Blood & Flame (Mute, 1987), again under the name Non, and probably his best work.

The belated boom of “industrial” music brought renewed attention to the work of this solitary yet radical experimenter, who now also seemed farsighted. Thus, in the early 1990s came Music, Martinis and Misanthropy (Bad, 1991), a collection of previously unreleased material, Easy Listening For Iron Youth (Mute, 1990), a compilation of released material, and the limited-edition live album Sick Tour (Staaltape), documenting performances from 1985.

The sixteen short excerpts on Easy Listening For Iron Youth (five from Blood And Flame and one from the first album) are dedicated to a gallery of sinister figures, from Charles Manson to Vlad the Impaler, from Nero to Jack the Ripper. Rice indulges in an apology of massacre that the music itself does not really support. In general, these are in fact another form of shock therapy, reinforced by terrifying bombardments of ultrasonic frequencies. For the most part, the amateurish principle still applies that a piece is an idea, or even just a fragment of an idea: the dense and anguished sonic cloud of Cruenta Voluptas, the orgasmic crescendo of Fire In The Organism, the turntable-scratch concerto Carnis Vale, the threatening and martial drone of Sunset, the shrill hissing of Defenestration, the chilling screams of Rise, communicate the terror of the irrational through “signs” that are not intelligible in the musical code, not even that of the avant-garde (nothing could be further from a work of art than a Rice “composition”).
The more complex pieces attempt to develop these intuitions, to give them a kind of script: thus Predator/Prey is a dizzying vortex of deafening rustles and metallic thuds; Father's Day is eight minutes of industrial trance; Conflagration is a black mass that gradually takes shape in a tangle of noises, animal sounds, and voiceless murmurs. Rice’s best work is found in Embers, in which loops and assorted noises are placed at the service of a pressing melodic sequence, punctuated by bell tolls and mechanically repeated like an antique music box. Although not very original, Rice’s music (like that of his contemporary, though less recorded, Monte Cazazza) influenced more than one rock musician.

Music, Martinis and Misanthropy, with the collaboration of members of Current 93 and Death In June, is a long Nazi delirium in which he praises white supremacists, mass murderers, and psychopaths. The U.S. Constitution grants everyone the right to make a fool of themselves.

No better are In The Shadow Of The Sword (Mute, 1992), featuring Total War, and Ragnarock Rune (WSB).

In 1994 Rice embarked on a more musical career with Spell, alongside Rose McDowall (formerly of Strawberry Switchblade). Seasons in the Sun is an album of gothic kitsch and, as always, somewhat pretentious.