By Sean Flinn
| April 7, 2000
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| "I've got a Partridge Family shrine inside my house," says Boyd Rice, a.k.a. NON, godfather of industrial noise and kitsch-culture devotee. |
Buy Boyd Rice's music
Visit the NON
Web site
Visit this Boyd Rice fan site
LongLiveDeath
Visit Boyd Rice's label
Mute Records
|
"I got a
laptop computer about a week ago. Actually, someone gave it to
me," says Boyd Rice, who, under the moniker NON, has been terrorizing
the industrial-gothic underground for a quarter century. "But
I don't intend to go on the Internet, and I'm really doubtful
whether I'll even have e-mail," he theorizes. For an artist whose
work has perpetually forced the expansion of counterculture's
periphery, Rice's personal life and predilections steer remarkably
clear of the cutting edge. A notorious raconteur and prankster
who, while exerting an influence over protégés like Marilyn Manson,
has always longed for at least one moment in the sun, Rice is
torn between his growing desire to live a more "hermitlike life
of solitude" and his compulsion to communicate with and grow his
fan base.
"I'd like
to get more involved with my Web site," he explains via phone
from his home in Denver, Colo. "I was just talking with [the people
who run my site] at Brainwashed [a Webzine that also hosts official
sites for pioneering electronic artists like Rice, Coil, Meat
Beat Manifesto, Luke Vibert and Diamanda Galas], and it's always
been my desire to have more communication, have more news on things
that are going to be happening on it rather than just really bizarre
rumors."
His concerns
are well-founded. It's one thing for an artist to labor in obscurity
because the work he produces presents a pill too bitter to be
swallowed by the finicky maw of pop culture. It's quite another
to be forced out of the limelight by lack of attention to his
Web site.
To wit, the
"news" page on the official NON site. The most recent entry notes
the impending release of NON's latest album, Receive the Flame,
which has been on shelves since December 1999. The "older news"
section has remained static for the past year, despite Rice's
eventful completion of a European tour with goth luminaries Death
in June (with whose leader, Douglas P., Rice works on a number
of projects) and the Stockholm Film Festival premiere of Richard
Wolstonecraft's film Pearls Before Swine, in which Rice
plays the lead role. In short, the site possesses little beyond
a wealth of disinformation and outdated semi-facts.
This leaves Rice frustrated.
"It's like,
me remixing a Richard Stapleton album," he says of the validity
of the site's news. "Who even thought of that? In the past, I've
sent them obscure old albums for little contests, and they've
gotten rid of those, given them to people. I've done stuff like
that, but I've always wanted to be more involved. I just don't
necessarily [want to] be on the Internet. I'd get mail
from everybody. It seems like e-mail makes things a bit too
easy. People who would never have the patience to write a letter
and put a stamp on it and mail it to you, if they had your e-mail
address, you'd probably hear from them every other day."
A fine line
divides Rice's ambitions, but after 25 years of pushing people's
buttons, Rice has grown notorious for treading fine lines. His
music and performances have drawn strong reactions -- positive
and negative -- since he started his trademark practice of melding
raw noise into music back in the mid-'70s. "When I first started
doing it and nobody was doing noise music, the responses were
uniformly negative," he laughs.
It's easy
to hear why. NON's albums typically consist of viciously repetitive
drones culled from tape loops and samples of, among other things,
bubblegum girl-group music from the '50s and '60s. It's easy-listening
music taken to an uneasy extreme, sonic wallpaper that obliterates
natural ambience. Though technically apolitical, NON's aural assaults
are often interpreted by his detractors as unambiguously fascist,
bigoted and even demonic. And while Rice acknowledges that the
spoken-word rants that occasionally accompany his sound collages
do toy with fascist imagery and reflect his long association with
Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan, he is puzzled by the strong
and vocal opposition his work draws from some quarters.
"I think
mostly the people who impose some sort of negative meaning on
it get pissed off about it, but they don't actually come to the
concert to see what's happening. Because if they did, they'd have
a completely different idea of what's going on. They have no idea
what they're talking about. They formulated these opinions, and
I've said to these people, "Come in and look at this, and if there's
anything that you object to, fine. But you won't see anything."
And these people stand outside and protest, but they won't actually
come in and find out what they're protesting against."
|
Does this look like a swastika to you? The
Wolf's Angle, which Boyd Rice appropriated
as NON's logo.
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His frustration
is typified by the misinterpretation of the image he uses as NON's
logo, an ancient symbol known as a Wolf's Angle (pictured right),
which the unaware have associated with Nazism, even going so far
as to misinterpret it as a swastika
(a symbol that is believed to have originated in ancient Troy
or what is now Turkey, pre-dating its appropriation by the Nazis
by about 3,000 years).
"[The Wolf's
Angle] dates back to the oldest alphabet of runes," he explains.
"When the second alphabet of runes came around, that symbol wasn't
even a part of it. That symbol is ancient and has existed for
centuries and has always had the same meaning. And it was used
by some extremist group in Germany in the 1500s, then it was used
briefly by the Nazis at the end of World War II. The meaning I'm
attributing to it has more to do with hermetic gnosticism [a pagan
belief system dating back at least as far as 500 A.D., rooted
in the texts on the Egyptian god Thoth] than totalitarianism."
Controversy
has earned Rice reverence as a cult icon, but his musical efforts
have had a far greater impact, providing a sonic vocabulary to
industrial, experimental and ambient music. Few -- if any -- pop
and rock musicians were playing around with the composition of
music from non-musical sources when Rice released his first LP,
The Black Album in 1975. Today, mechanical clangs, tape
loop drones and field-recorded samples pepper the pop airwaves,
texturizing everything from Björk's hyper ballads to Nine Inch
Nails' dour soundscapes.
"Maybe a
year ago, I heard that media analysts had said that, in two or
three years, the huge form of music would be noise music or industrial
music -- that there would be this overlap of fans from heavy metal
getting into noise music, goth people getting into noise music,
and that it would be this huge thing where people like me would
sell a million copies of a CD," he notes. But he's quick to acknowledge
that, while it has overtly influenced several now-popular artists
and musical styles, NON won't sell a million records until "Hell
freezes over."
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: Mussolini's brain "belongs to everyone."
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