Summary.
Rhythm And Noise, the brainchild of San Francisco-based electronic musician
Naut Humon (Mark Sprague),
played
noise and electronic music that fused Karlheinz Stockhausen's manipulations
of found sounds, Morton Subotnick's electronic fantasies,
Throbbing Gristle's industrial music and Foetus' infernal symphonies.
The most intense moments on Contents Under Notice (1984) and
Chasms Accord (1985) recall
Klaus Schulze's cosmic music applied to a black hole, while
slabs of expressionistic violence collide with factory cadences
and electronic dissonances.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Naut Humon (real name Mark Sprague) studied at CalArts in 1971, where he met Don Buchla.
Humon rose to prominence in the 1980s with the project Rhythm and Noise, one of the first electronic ensembles. Humons most important innovation was to use noise, duly manipulated electronically, to build atmospheric and environmental music. If the results are in line with the music of Brian Eno and Klaus Schulze, the premises are completely opposite: instead of using electronic instruments to play tonal music, Humon used electronic devices to dissolve noise. Perhaps the greatest influence on Humon was Stockhausens mighty "Hymnen," followed by Tod Dockstaders electronic suites, through the industrial music of the Throbbing Gristle and the cacophonic symphonies of Foetus.
Humon grew up in Seattle (he attended the same high school Hendrix had), and staged his first multimedia performance in 1969 in San Francisco. During the 1970s he frequented the circles of the California Institute of the Arts, where Morton Subotnick, Harold Budd, and Ingram Marshall were teaching. Rhythm And Noise was born when Humon met Rex Probe and Nick Fault, two other San Francisco experimenters. Initially, Rhythm And Noise devised in San Franciscos alternative venues a performance system based on computers, synthesizers, and video. Naut Humon was the groups mastermind and liked to describe himself as the "sound traffic controller." Two legendary albums, Contents Under Notice (Ralph, 1984) and Chasms Accord (Ralph, 1985), were the only vinyl testaments of those visionary sessions.
The project debuted with Monomenon, a symphony of noises that exploited the harshest dissonances and industrial sonorities for dramatic purposes, with an almost Wagnerian grandeur; a space poem by Klaus Schulze applied to the dark side of the universe, the soundtrack of a descent into the maelstrom of a black hole, a never-ending stream of anguish. The music of Rhythm And Noise presents itself as an impossible crucible of the boldest instances of the avant-garde.
The aphorisms of Contents Under Notice (the gothic suspense of Lull, the lyrical minimalism of Vex) fall within Brian Enos ambient current, but conceal a cosmic violence that far surpasses that of early Schulze and brushes against the most disturbing neurosis. Even more striking are the furious tribalisms of Verge and especially Vagues, galactic orgies in which all awareness of harmonic development is lost.
Chasms Accord, featuring Zev (metal percussion) and Diamanda Galas (vocal fragments), is a collection of short instrumental pieces of this kind, effectively serving as a summary of the state of the art across various avant-garde genres: electronic waves inspired by cosmic and ambient music (A Filament In Strata), spasmodically tense atmospheres like a black ritual for pipe organ and African polyrhythms (Delirium Tremens), expressionist violence collages that compress metallurgical cadences and savage electronic dissonances (Bent Metal Forest). The spoken-word pieces are more theatrical, resolved in a continuous accumulation of suspense, building climates of great psychic tension, of supernatural terror and anguish.
Paradoxically, the record finds its perfect balance in the tribalism of animalistic percussiveness of Andonandon, in the desolate funeral liturgy of Remembrance, in the gruesome symphonic psychodrama of Last Vestige, that is, in the most unbalanced pieces.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
The musical project had its headquarters in a warehouse called The Compound where Humon hosted industrial, electronic, and avantgarde musicians, a space that had the reputation of having the best recording equipment and sound system in town.
Humon spent the rest of the decade continuing his experiments on sound,
focusing on the concept of a virtual orchestra of disc jockeys (with himself
being the remixer of the mixers).
He founded Sound Traffic Control in 1991.
Then, in 1992, Humon and his future wife Mitzi Johnson started the Asphodel label to promote avantgarde music and met with Paul Miller, a Manhattan disc jockey better known as DJ Spooky. The label ended up incubating the "illbient" scene. Humon also organized "Recombinant", a futuristic multimedia spectacle.
In 2006 Naut Humon and Mitzi Johnson opened the Recombinant Media Labs, a performance and recording space for video and sound artists, basically a successor to the glorious Compound.
Naut Humon was the cofounder in 2016 of the Recombinant Festival in San Francisco.
In 2017 Humon organized a festival to celebrate Don Buchla, who had just died,
at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.
