A User-Friendly Guide to Unlistenable Music, Vol. 2

To absolutely no one’s surprise, there has been no public demand for another user-friendly guide to unlistenable music. This has not stopped me. It has also not stopped me from obsessively playing Merzbow’s collaboration with Iggor Cavalera and Eraldo Bernocchi, or the past six months. This is not necessarily healthy behaviour, but it is consistent behaviour, and consistency is how unhealthy behaviour gradually becomes expertise.

I have always been cursed with the need to understand things, particularly things no reasonable person has asked me to understand. So since we last spoke, I have continued listening to music that sounds like industrial equipment developing a personality disorder, and I now feel compelled to tell you about it.

I’m also somewhat burned out on writing subjective histories of metal, which means this seemed like the perfect opportunity to return to music with no history, no commercial potential and, in certain cases, no obvious reason to exist.

Here is another selection of unlistenable music. Once again, I have remained mostly within the established classics, because every journey needs an accessible starting point—even a journey toward music that appears to actively resent the concept of accessibility. Listen whenever you’re ready. The music certainly isn’t waiting for you.

Stalaggh - Projekt Terror

Projekt Terrror is often described as the most evil, disturbing or terrifying album ever recorded. None of these things are true.

Stalaggh are (or were) an anonymous Dutch-Belgian noise collective whose entire reputation was constructed around internet lore. According to the group, the screams on their recordings came from psychiatric patients accessed through a member who worked at an institution. Whether this is entirely true, partially true or simply extreme-music marketing from an era when nobody could verify anything is difficult to know. The anonymity makes the story seem more plausible, but anonymity is also how stories become mythology. The important detail is that the screaming sounds convincing.

Not convincing in the sense that these people must necessarily be experiencing psychosis, because I have no idea how anyone could determine that by listening to a noise record. Convincing in the sense that the voices do not sound like metal vocalists performing distress. They sound emotionally uncontrolled, which is presumably why the album has survived while thousands of other anonymous noise projects disappeared into MediaFire links and abandoned message boards.

The result is neither evil nor particularly terrifying. It is grueling, exhausting and strangely emotional. It sounds like being employed in hell: clocking in every morning, processing the administrative paperwork of eternal damnation and slowly realizing that the souls of the dead have started following you home after your shift. I do not return to Projekt Terrror very often, but I understand why the internet keeps rediscovering it. The earnestness of the screaming gives the recording a gravity that its mythology desperately wants to exploit. Stalaggh succeeded in capturing something that feels genuinely miserable.

The problem is that the music underneath it is considerably less exciting than any random ninety-second noise passage on a Full of Hell record. It might be the sound of authentic human suffering. It is not necessarily the sound of an interesting album. Extreme suffering isn't sexy, folks.

Silencer - Death, Pierce Me

Another piece of strange internet lore.

I don’t think anyone sincerely believes that Nattramn amputated his hands and replaced them with pig hooves, although this has never stopped people from repeating the story. Perhaps he struggled with mental illness. Perhaps he was institutionalized. Perhaps the photographs of his arms wrapped in bloody bandages merely gave early black metal forums something to do before social media was invented. The line separating biography from promotional mythology has never been particularly visible here, which is exactly how Nattramn seemed to prefer it.

What we can establish is that he was a gifted depressive black metal vocalist with the most irritating voice I have ever heard.

Nattramn does not sound anguished in any conventional musical sense. He sounds like an elderly witch being crushed beneath farm equipment. His shrieks are thin, piercing and almost comically intolerable, particularly against music this solemn. The compositions are slow, depressive and frequently beautiful, creating an atmosphere of dignified spiritual collapse. Then Nattramn arrives sounding like someone has just stepped on Satan’s tail. The tension should destroy the album. Somehow, it makes the album work.

Death, Pierce Me feels wounded and toxic in the best possible way. The musicianship suggests contemplation and despair, while the vocals suggest that contemplation has failed and despair has started chewing through the furniture. It has the aura of outsider art despite being far too deliberate and musically accomplished to qualify as accidental expression. The album understands exactly what it is doing. It simply sounds like it shouldn’t.

The mythology has undoubtedly helped make Death, Pierce Me infamous, but the record does not depend entirely on folklore. Silencer released one album and disappeared, leaving behind the perfect amount of material for an underground legend: enough to prove they existed, but not enough to explain anything. Nattramn later recorded other music and published a book, but none of it displaced the image created by these six songs.

People remember the pig hooves because the story is ridiculous. They remember the voice because, unfortunately, it is unforgettable. Another record I don't revisit often.

Pharmakon - Contact

This may be the most unlistenable record on this list. It is also the one I enjoy the most, which probably says something unfortunate about how my brain processes pleasure.

Unlike Stalaggh or Silencer, Pharmakon does not arrive concealed behind decades of unverifiable internet mythology. Her identity is known. She gives interviews. She performs in public. There are no pig-hoof surgeries or mysterious psychiatric inmates required to make the music disturbing. Margaret Chardiet is simply a real person who deliberately chose to make Contact sound like this. That somehow makes it scarier.

Contact is Pharmakon at her most brutal: cold, punishing electronics beneath demented spoken-word passages, choking breaths and distorted screams. It sounds like the hidden emotional undertow beneath every sleek, precise techno record ever made. The machines maintain order, but something feral keeps trying to crawl through them.

There is a strange assumption that electronic music is inherently inhuman. Because the sounds are generated by machines, people imagine the music must be clinical, detached or somehow less emotionally authentic than someone sadly strumming an acoustic guitar. Pharmakon exposes how ridiculous this is. Machines are not inhuman. They are tools built by humans and humans can use any tool to express cruelty, panic and the sensation of being trapped inside your own nervous system.

The electronics on Contact do not merely accompany Chardiet’s voice. They behave like extensions of her body. They convulse, wheeze and grind against one another. Even the tracks without vocals feel physically agitated, as though the machinery has developed instincts and immediately chosen violence. There is a meanness embedded in these compositions that forces you to reconsider what electronic music can communicate. Contact is unpredictable, hostile and unmistakably alive.

Atrax Morgue

Marco Corbelli was not for this world, but he left us one of the most honest and vibrant audio depictions of death before taking his own life.

It is currently easier to locate enormous chunks of the Atrax Morgue discography than it is to find certain individual albums, so consider this a lifetime achievement award. Corbelli was absurdly prolific, releasing a stream of cassettes, CD-Rs and records through his own Slaughter Productions label and various corners of the international noise underground. Picking one definitive release feels contrary to the point. Atrax Morgue is less a collection of albums than one long investigation conducted in several locked rooms.

The music can change considerably from one recording to another, but the common denominator is an uncanny sensation of life force spilling away. Not being violently extracted. Not exploding from the body. Just leaking out gradually until whatever remains is technically alive but no longer participating.

Atrax Morgue is generally classified somewhere between death industrial and power electronics, but even those labels make the music sound more aggressive than it often is. Corbelli relied heavily on synthesizers, repetition, samples, static and distorted voices, yet he rarely seemed interested in overwhelming the listener through sheer volume. His music is frequently quiet, barren and almost embarrassingly simple. That simplicity gives it purity.

Other noise musicians want to pin you against the wall. Atrax Morgue sounds content to sit across the room and wait for you to understand that nothing is coming to help. Some recordings are so sparse and repetitive that you begin questioning whether you are listening to music or accidentally brainwashing yourself. A synthesizer throbs. A sample repeats. A voice appears from somewhere behind the machinery. Ten minutes later, your personality has been replaced by an empty hospital corridor.

Paradoxically, Atrax Morgue may be the most conventionally listenable artist included here. There are rhythms, recognizable atmospheres and long stretches where nothing actively attacks you. The obstacle is the obliterating depression coursing through everything. Even the more animated recordings feel emotionally deceased.

Michel Chion - Requiem

Michel Chion walked so every other musician on this list could run screaming into an abandoned factory.

Released in 1973, Requiem predates the industrial, power-electronics and harsh-noise traditions discussed above. It is also considerably nerdier than any of them. This is not the product of psychiatric mythology, depressive black metal folklore or one person’s private fixation with death. It is the work of a highly educated French composer sitting inside the studios of the Groupe de recherches musicales and discovering increasingly elaborate ways to make recorded sound behave incorrectly.

Listening to Chion’s musique concrète is like scanning a shortwave radio operated by someone who changes frequencies every time a recognizable pattern begins to form. You hear disembodied voices, religious chants, mechanical noises, electronic frequencies, stretches of near-silence and sudden fragments that seem to belong to entirely different recordings. It feels like eavesdropping on every station simultaneously while an unseen technician systematically removes anything resembling a song.

Requiem is structured around the Catholic Mass for the Dead, with different voices reciting liturgical texts across ten movements. There are passages from the Epistle and Gospel, along with the Lord’s Prayer, usually spoken in Latin or Greek and occasionally in French. This does not make the piece easier to follow, but it gives the chaos a spiritual architecture. It sounds like a funeral service being reconstructed by someone who has heard Christianity described but never personally witnessed it.

This is easily the most fractured recording on the list, although it may be the least aggressive. Some passages are barely audible. Others approach complete silence. Chion understands that unpredictability does not require constant punishment. Sometimes the most destabilizing sound is the one that disappears just as you begin understanding what it is.

You need at least a passing interest in musique concrète to enjoy Requiem. There are no riffs, beats or conventional emotional cues to reward your patience. It feels like a laboratory experiment because that is essentially what it was: an attempt to construct a major musical work from tape manipulation, found sounds, recorded voices and everything traditional composition had taught musicians to exclude.

That is what makes these early musique concrète composers so fascinating. They were not attempting to make ugly music. They were trying to determine whether ugliness, silence, interruption, malfunction and confusion could become compositional materials. They entered the studio with access to new technology and treated every previous limitation as a dare.

For better or worse, they made it work.