NOISE 2: Z'EV vs. PITA, Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra and Devotchka's Conundrum at state51 Warehouse, London

Some bills announce themselves by genre and some by temperament. The second edition of NOISE, presented by [no.signal], belonged to the second kind. It gathered a veteran of industrial percussion, an Austrian electronic composer, an East London noise duo and an Italian-British project that treats rejected sound as raw material, and placed them in a single warehouse room in East London. The setting was the state51 warehouse at 8-10 Rhoda Street, off Brick Lane, E2 7EF. The date was 12 October 2006. Entry was £5 at the door, or £4 for those who booked in advance, with advance booking itself free.

A bill built on contrast

The evening's shape was clear from the running order. Doors opened at 7.30pm. Devotchka's Conundrum began at 8.00pm. Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra followed at 9.00pm. The headline pairing of Pita versus Z'EV took the stage at 10.00pm, and the doors closed at 11.00pm. Between acts, Sheikh Ahmed of failme/absorb provided a noisy DJ set, threading the programme together rather than treating the intervals as dead time.

What united the performers was not a single sound but an attitude toward sound itself: that noise, silence, texture and abjection could carry as much expressive weight as melody or rhythm. The evening was billed as a second edition of noise and post-industrial sounds, which is a useful frame. It signals a lineage rather than a scene, and a willingness to let very different practices share one room.

Z'EV vs. Pita

The headline duo brought together two figures whose work had developed along separate paths. Z'EV, described as a veteran American artist and a founding father of the industrial movement, performs with metallic sheets, pipes, gongs and found materials, exploring what the programme called the poetics of space through percussion. His list of collaborators includes Glenn Branca, KK.Null, Hafler Trio and Stephen O'Malley.

Pita, also known as Peter Rehberg, is an Austrian musician and author, and a co-director of Mego. His work deploys noise and spiked electronics to build sonic abstractions full of microscopic detail. Among his collaborators are Jim O'Rourke, Christian Fennesz, Russell Haswell, Sonic Youth and Mika Vainio.

As a pairing, the two were presented as a rich mix of non-linear post-gamelan drumming and the noise thrill of power electronics, an intensely modern exercise in sound-sweeping. The description is worth taking at face value: this was not a conventional band set but a meeting of two approaches to organised sound, one rooted in physical percussion and the other in electronic abstraction.

Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra

Formed in East London in 2001, Deflag Haemorrhage/Haien Kontra are Tim Goldie and Mattin, working with drums, voice, guitar, laptop and other equipment. The project is described as working with noise, silence and abjection, and as transgressing all notions of what a performance can be. Goldie's credited setup includes drums, voice, credit card, amplifier and stereotaxic; Mattin's includes GNU/Linux computer feedback, voice and guitar. Their presence on the bill placed a deliberately unstable, performance-oriented practice alongside the headline duo.

Devotchka's Conundrum

Opening the evening was Devotchka's Conundrum, a UK/Italian project concerned with refurbished sound, orchestrated noise and distorted vision. Their stated approach is that of curious people finding their own way around sound, interested in what others reject or cannot find a use for, and then giving it a new life, a new name and a different meaning. They mix analogue and digital equipment, electroacoustic techniques with electronics, circuit-bent objects and toys with vocals, and noise with visuals. Loud or quiet, clean or distorted, they claim no preconceptions, and ask that others bring none about them. In their world, sound and image work together or against each other, and hearing becomes a web for capturing the other senses.

An evening in a lineage

Read together, the four acts describe an evening organised around texture, extremity and the physical presence of sound in a room. The warehouse setting, the short running order and the modest door price all point to a deliberately accessible presentation of difficult work. NOISE 2 was not a survey of a genre so much as a gathering of practitioners who each treat sound as material to be shaped, broken and reassembled. For anyone who attended, the record is a simple one: four sets, one DJ, one room, and a bill that trusted its audience to follow the noise wherever it led.