It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics – the place where melody, harmony and pulse all go to die – is an Edwardian invention. It first arrived in this country 110 years ago when futurists Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Russolo set up camp at the London Coliseum a month before the start of the first world war and, over ten consecutive nights, blasted the West End audience with their ‘noise-tuners’ or intonarumori, alongside diverse variety acts.

I say blasted but making a decent racket was the one thing these homemade instruments were incapable of doing. ‘It could have been drowned easily by a good tympanist,’ noted the Musical Times. The artist C.R.W. Nevinson – and Marinetti’s occasional co-conspirator – said ‘it was one of the funniest shows ever put on in London’. For all the efforts of Russolo’s ten squat, multicoloured boxes, with their massive cones jutting out of the front and drum skins, metal wires and motors inside, the sound was feeble.

Haino’s set cooked the air in my lungs and made my eyes feel like they were about to burst

Marinetti had primed the public for outrage. A few years earlier, he delivered a lecture – in French – in which he denounced ‘the worm-eaten traditions’ of England to a rapt, and packed, Wigmore Hall. The newspapers could not get enough of his insults: the Times felt it necessary to address futurism in a leader and Marinetti even got his byline in the Daily Mail. By the time Russolo’s ‘howlers’, ‘gurglers’, ‘hissers’ and ‘rustlers’ had arrived, avant-garde fatigue had perhaps set in. ‘Take the baby ’ome, can’t yer?’ heckled someone at the opening night. Sensing the public were about to start chucking stuff at the stage, the venue manager cut the performance short. The next night the Italians were forced to play some Elgar over the gramophone to placate the baying mob.

Today, noise music is a global phenomenon (one of the finest practitioners being the Kenyan-Ugandan duo Duma) and, in its ambient form at least, it is as popular as you can get (as many people have played the Spotify track ‘Deep Phase Noise 1’, which recreates the sound of being on a long-haul flight, as have streamed Beyoncé’s ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’).

Last year was meant to see a rare three-day UK visit of Japanoise pioneer Keiji Haino – I’d bought my tickets in 2022 – but Haino’s cat fell ill and he postponed. Last month at Cafe Oto, he finally showed up. What the uninitiated always want to know about noise music and the people who submit themselves to its punishing walls of sounds is: why? Why do this to yourself? And while you might ask the same question of those who enjoy tragedies or the films of Michael Haneke, it deserves an answer. And the answer is that the uniqueness of both the sensory experience, and how you receive that sensory experience, elicits a rush quite unlike any other.

The primary site of aesthetic reception, remember, is not the eardrum, but the skin, the internal organs and the skeleton. It’s why earplugs are not a cop out. At noise gigs, sound behaves more like a boiling liquid. Haino’s set cooked the air in my lungs, made my eyes feel like they were about to burst. People today spend a lot of time and effort creating ‘immersive’ and ‘embodied’
experiences when they should just book Haino. He produced sounds so loud I felt I was dissolving.

That’s not to say the sound, as sound, wasn’t startling. It was. At one point it felt like every cicada that’s ever existed, and that will ever exist, was perched by my earlobe. Elsewhere it seemed like we were swimming around the disfigured corpse of 1950s rock and roll that Haino was drowning in a vat of acid. But the stage on which much of the drama of the night was taking place was the body – now an ominous, distant earthquakey rumble felt in the stomach, now an electric surge to the brain as if I had overdosed on wasabi.

Haino himself, ironically, looked completely disembodied. With his waterfalls of grey hair, waif-like figure and face-swallowing, lab-technician shades that forced him to stumble around blindly startled by everything around him, including his own mike, Haino looked like a trainee ghost. Only half the night was injuriously deafening. The rest saw Haino strumming bittersweet harmonies on his heavily reverbed guitar while mewling sweetly in Japanese as if he were doing impressions of his sick cat.

To label Haino a noise artist is wrong. He’s an experimentalist, a troubadour, a wayfarer. His is a music that is in a state of constant becoming. Much experimental music today is the opposite: it knows exactly what it is at the start, parks itself comfortably on its little patch of sonic turf and cycles politely through its pre-prepared experimental signifiers without ever attempting a single actual experiment.

It’s why Chuquimamani-Condori’s set at Somerset House was so intoxicating. There was something at stake in offering up 45 minutes of music on a Saturday night – the headline act of a four-day festival called Assembly – in which there was no musical foreground, in which not one of the 200 heads in the audience could decide what part of this dense musical reality to bop to. Where exactly was the groove? No direction was being offered by the handsome, commanding presence of Chuquimamani-Condori, who was sporting a crisp white stetson and brandishing a matching white keytar. The gusts of synthy dust-clouds, glassy vaporwave, freaky radio sweepers and maze of Andean folk forms – tarqueadas, kullawadas, huaynos, siku panpipes galore – all loped about in the middle distance, piling up seductively, obscurely, very dream-like.

Back at Cafe Oto a capacity crowd engaged in an epic act of devotion on Good Friday. The solo cello of Charles Curtis was traversing 90 minutes of slow, sustained music – free of vibrato, full of just intonation – in one sitting, and no one moved a muscle. Who says attention spans are shrinking? It was the UK premiere of Terry Jennings’s Piece for Cello and Saxophone (1960), a most obscure work by one of the most obscure early minimalists. In this arrangement by La Monte Young (the megalomaniac composer who is incidentally wholly to blame for Jennings’s obscurity; he’s kept Jennings’s scores under lock and key – he’s weird like that – since his untimely death in 1981), a trio of pre-recorded cellists joined Curtis, providing a rich tanpura-like drone to Curtis’s glorious raga-like melodies.

It was a good reminder that in these earliest days, minimalism was not yet minimalism. It was still just a laboratory, Indian classical music, the blues, folk idioms, microtonality, even serialism, all jostling for position. Jennings’s work throbs with vinegary dissonances and melismas. Chills descend. Shadows encroach and settle. An Appalachian air tumbles in. Is that Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang? Minimalism was far from what we now know it to be. It was still in a state of becoming. And all the better for it.