Awash in the noise – the trans femme noise performers of Naarm
"Ta-da! You have a bunch of autistic transsexuals in a room or discord server making the worst sounds imaginable."
Have you ever listened to music that completely devastates you? Have you ever been compelled by a sound or a song that completely envelops you, changes your perspective, and alters how you look at music and art? Good. Then you might get what it is like to be part of a “scene”, a place or community where a group of people create art that is intentionally cultivated for its directly niche appeal. Sometimes, that art reflects a shared reality, allowing the music to spawn a shared community.
Sometime during the middle of lockdown, this happened to me.
I was walking the abandoned peripheries of a now dead, quiet city. My Spotify algorithm decided, in all of the ebullient quirkiness , to direct my post-punk, gothic playlist into a new genre. The music it sent me felt like it was more than music—it was a vicious, emotive noise. It was the first form of music that I had listened to in over a year that seemed to have made any sense to me.
This artist was Uboa, a noise/metal artist that I had heard about only through ever-slight whispers and recommendations by other trans folk. I was transfixed. This strange, atonal, and evocative sound that she created in her LP The Origin of My Depression cut through me like flashes of lightning. It was harsh, even brutal. But in her music was a brutality that conjured such ananger, an entangled estrangement I felt about a world that seemed more and more hostile —both to my existence as a trans woman, and someone expected to navigate a world infused with the rampaging effects of an equally brutal and all encompassing pandemic. More than anything else, it seemed, this music was a comfort.
A Noise By Any other Name
Sometimes, a genre or a scene cannot be easily described until well after its heyday is over. Only in retrospect can you tell what a scene really meant to those who were a part of it, what it encompassed, and what it evoked. Sometimes a scene can be so specific, and so integral to the experiences of those that created it, that it can afford those risks for the sake of creating something completely unique, that calls forth specific experiences.
These experiences could be about a lot of things: alienation, sorrow, anger, self-determination, affirmation. All evoked by a sound united by harsh, clanging sensations, lingering soundscapes and brutal, metal and industrial sounds that constrict and liberate at the same time. A lot of artists, particularly in Naarm, use these sounds, these experiences, to evoke a very particular mood. By fracturing typical ideas of musicality, or by ignoring certain forms of musical ease like a recognisable beat or swooning instrumentals, they evoke something that reaches out to those listeners who are looking for something that is completely new.
What appealed to me, as a trans femme looking for music that evoked emotions that I would have thought impossible to suggest musically, was that many trans-femme performers were evoking those themes, creating a sound that encompasses so much of our experiences.
Naarm has produced a steady stream of artists that have used such elements to describe themes surrounding alienation, loss, and self-affirmation. There is what one might call a ‘scene’ but in reality they are just a loose collection of artists that work in similar mediums. I chatted to some, hoping to see if I could categorise the work, to make an argument for a unified idea of what transness, queerness, marginalisation brings as a potential soundscape. This sound might have a name, somewhere along the lines of noise, of ambient music, etc. The beauty of trying to quantify the vast reaches of music and sound is that there is always something that surprises you, that challenges your musical palette. Seeing trans performers embody these sounds is wonderful to behold, as they create music that dares to push those creative limits. But what is this scene? Why is it so important? Why am I writing an article about it? Well, first I have to figure out what this scene could even be called…
What appealed to me in this whole milieu of artists was the visibility of trans performers and other marginalised folk. Whatever you may call it, the scene as it has developed grew slowly from the industrial scene, slowly moving from house parties to the pubs of Fitzroy. Violet, who performs under the name ‘teeth dreams’ describes it as a scene that was built from a disparate group of performers who collectively have formulated themselves from the work of those who have been building their discographies since the early 2010’s:
“I think the "scene" (is "Naarmnoise" a decent name for it?) really came together around a gig a lot of us played back in 2022 . Xandra (UBOA ), November (Pathological Function ) and myself had been talking about wanting to gather a whole group of then-disparate artists we were friends with on one bill. We called it Noisevember, gathered eleven or twelve acts for the lineup…and packed a surprisingly large and diverse crowd of people into the front room of a sharehouse/diy venue down the road from where a lot of us were living at the time. I befriended a few of the punks who lived there and booked some more shows over the next six months, before their landlord got wind of what we were doing and shut down the operation. Rest in peace, Static 0pen - fuck landlords!”
Cool, great, we have a start. Naarmnoise works, that is a scene that we can name, right? Noise artists from Naarm. Done. Except, what kind of noise? Guitar pedals and screaming, right? Not quite. Many of the artists that could work under this moniker of Naarmnoise can fit various types of genres and musical styles:
“I think a lot of us are coming from different places along the industrial music spectrum but eventually converged on a few somewhat similar concepts,” says Violet.
“For instance, Blood of a Pomegranate is a neofolky martial industrial project, Caustic Grip makes Pretty Hate Machine-style EBM , Scumwitch/Romy Fox makes Posh Isolation-style modern death industrial. For my part, I make microtonal drone and musique concrete. You can see the lineage we're all part of, but are still fairly disparate in terms of the specific parts we're inspired by.”
For the unacquainted reader:
Neofolky martial industrial: A branch of industrial music that takes inspiration from political movements, with heavy reliance on ambience with dense orchestration.
EBM: Electronic Body Music, similar to Nine Inch Nails but with a more minimalistic dance atmosphere and structure.
Death industrial: experimental electronic music with an oppressive atmosphere and dark, undulating textures, a la Depeche Mode.
Microtonal Drone: A genre that experiments with tones and their structure.
Musique Concrete: Music that uses recordings of natural environments, everyday sounds, and voice.
Give me Your Worst Sounds
So here we are, with artists coming from various disciplines, musical influences, different sounds and instrumentation? Classification becomes a bit trickier now, but surely we can use a general ‘noise’ descriptor here?
Of course, asking these artists anything exact or definitive about what certain genres attract these performers risks oversimplifying the diversity of their sounds. As artists who exist outside of the mainstream, even placing one genre or sound to all of these artists risks reducing their abilities to ‘a trans sound’. By placing them all in one genre, it risks being reductive and transphobic. I used to think that there was something explicitly trans-feminine in this scene, a notion that performers such as Uboa know intimately:
“I’ve been asked this by interviewers, academics, radio hosts, etc. and I keep changing my responses because there isn’t a single answer. There’s the appeal of noise to trans people – its stimulating nature. Then there is historical connection of trans women to noise and electronic music, starting with Genesis P-Orridge and Wendy Carlos. Then you add the fact it can be quite cheap to make this style music on your laptop, and you can do it alone in your room (especially if the outside world is hostile). It’s also a transgressive genre, with modern noise and adjacent genres stemming from industrial music in the 70s and 80s, and trans people (especially women) obviously tend to be seen as inherently transgressive by society at large, so there is this element of embracing one’s outsider status (especially mixed with other minority intersections). Finally, a few trans people in the scene (mostly women and NB's, but more transmasculine people are getting into it which is wonderful to see) set a precedent for more trans people being in the scene – many noise shows here in Naarm are essentially trans-centred spaces. Ta-da! You have a bunch of autistic transsexuals in a room or discord server making the worst sounds imaginable.”
We are getting somewhere, but there is still not quite enough to describe Naarmnoise. Mara MacDonald (who definitely does not make the worst sounds imaginable), just released her album August and June referring to her own style as, contrastingly, a work of high lyricism and collaboration. She first started creating her work using coding, then slowly building toward a unique sound of her own:
“The way I started making music was with live-coding. I used a program called tidal-cycles, using a programming language called Haskell. It is marginal and a bit dorky. You would type say, bass drum x4 and in one loop it would play the bass drum four times, and then you could put a higher level order on that like every 2 fast four, so every second cycle it would speed up the whole cycle four times, and then you would layer logic like that until you can get very insane IDM sounding generative beats. That was where I started with music. It was a great place to start because people would freak the fuck out. I would project my laptop on a screen and people would be amazed because ‘the code controls the music’. It is the easiest shit in the world. It is just a really elaborate sampler. But it was great to start off with that because you could do it on your computer, and it made for a really interesting performance. I just used it on my university laptop and with no gear whatsoever.”
Although Mara’s methodology might have changed from her earlier coding days, her work still presents a sense of the distant in the familiar, through field recordings and gentle piano interludes. The development of her music, in the same way many of the artists in the scene have a similar journey, comes from those early years, when we are young and we find yourself searching through the internet to find that exact piece of music that ends up coursing through your veins and forms part of your musical DNA:
“For me and others in the scene that I think a lot of people share is just being very young, on the internet, and developing a voracious appetite for the most fucked up, weird music that you can find. When music is this infinite horizon that you can never see the end of, you find those artists that make you ask those questions: Why did they make this? How did they make this?”
Teeth Dreams makes her music with just as much focus on her ability to re-phrase the experiences of her life:
“Teeth Dreams…is basically my audio-collage dream journal. The lyrics and spoken word passages are usually lightly edited stream-of-consciousness scribblings written in hypnogogic snatches during interrupted nights of sleep. There aren't necessarily direct correlations between the imagery and events described in the music and things that have directly happened in my life, but there's undeniably a link. Conceptually, it's quite heavily indebted to David Wojnarowicz and his "tape journals", which largely consisted of him speaking into a dictaphone stream-of-consciousness style. As a chronic insomniac who has suffered from periods of quite severe derealisation, the haziness of applying a stream of consciousness approach to composition has always been fairly intuitive for me. Days have a tendency to drift together, events and faces blur and shift. It's an aesthetic I'm quite easily drawn into, so it seems fairly natural that it sits at the centre of this project.”
So, how does someone try to make that music into “naarmnoise”? Do these artists even use the same theorisation?
“The theoretical stuff often comes out intuitively. My first theoretical approach is actively prioritising affect, emotion. I don’t actively try to force philosophical concepts into my music as I think art is primarily an affective rather than conceptual discipline. Concepts are better left to theoretical texts, art’s function with concepts is rather 1) the creation of new concepts through aesthetic events - making works of art which retroactively inspire conceptual thinking and 2) to add affect to a concept to inspire praxis.”
Music of the Margins
So, Naarmnoise. Have we discovered something specific here? In all likelihood, probably not. But there is no doubt that this scene, genre, sound, is lead, primarily but certainly not exclusively, by trans-femme performers.
No doubt the perennial nature of the art has its appeal. Many people experience the difficulty of alienation and its effects. The need to develop an artform that expresses those sentiments is certainly something that ‘noise’ is very good at doing. It is ‘outsider music’ in the sense that one is often driven or pushed to create such a music on those margins of art, to express something in lieu of the accessibility of a space to create anything else. As a result, that existential state informs the music, and is integrally shaped by it. As Uboa says, this kind of music has its history, with its DNA embedded with a history of marginalisation that many trans people are very familiar with, as well as many others who have had their experiences ignored and whose voices have been silenced. This form of music is then enriched by the ingenuity of its creators and the dedication of its listeners. The performers I talked to all seemed to be aware of their placement as artists, and no doubt many are hyper-aware of how their outsider status influences the formation of their work.
Each of these artists have found their sound, played to audiences intrigued and enticed by this very specific daring of the self, in light of appeal to certain genres or expectations of musicianship. Many of these artists know themselves not just in how they differ from each other, but in how they create in dialogue with each other:
“There is a much wider world of music in both noise and ambience.” Says Mara. “I would consider them colleagues and peers in the same way that I would say the same thing with Uboa and Teeth Dreams. It is a totally vibrant thing across all of Naarm and not just localised to trans people…. To a certain extent we are all making internet music. Maybe all music is internet music. There are so many other things that are more localised than what we are doing.”
Maybe they are all just internet musicians, in just the same way people from all over the world will search for an Uboa, a Teeth Dreams, Blood of a Pomegranate, or a Mara Macdonald. There are far more artists out there that I will ever be able to interview or track because the amount of artists working adjacent to or alongside the work done by the above performers is so diverse, unique, and varied to cover in one article. For me, to see these artists perform, evoking their rage into walls of sound, distorting and reforming their sounds in evocative phrasing and discordant fracturing, is to see innovation done by artists that define themselves in dialogue with one another, developing unique musical approaches that establish a sound which will enliven and enrich Naarms musical environment for years to come. As a trans woman myself, listening to this music, seeing these performers live, witnessing the act of creation at, say, the Make it Up Club in Fitzroy, I see through the ongoing immensity of my own sense of being—something no other scene really offers me—and I find myself, awash in the noise.
Other performers who you should check out right now:
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Simone Anders is a queer writer living in Brunswick. They have written numerous articles for Melbourne publications as well as producing content for stage and radio.
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I really appreciate digging into this stuff :) I have complex feelings about it all, being I am increasingly an old trans music artist who was doing noise gigs back in 2008 and making hyperpop stuff in 2010/2011. It’s strange to think of years of feeling so disconnected and incorrect about how you were making music only to learn you were out of phase with your time and people. But, I suppose that’s basically transitioning in later life, in many ways, which I also did. Much to reflect on. Thanks for your piece :)