Whitehouse
Erector

The Whitehouse was among the very first to create albums composed entirely of noise; where the latter, in the industrial community, was nothing but a norm (moving between chaotic percussive martial arts, electronic rapes, industrial sounds, chainsaws, metal sheets, and more), the now legendary creation of the mad William Bennett focuses primarily on white noise, coining a true oxymoron, a sort of minimal noise based fundamentally on long and static clusters of sounds, distorted just enough (we are indeed far from the insurmountable walls of the likes of Merzbow and Prurient) but pushed to very high frequencies, extreme, almost unbearable. More than on the intuitions of Russolo, it is inspired by the minimalism of Terry Riley, adding from time to time destructive vocal inserts, distorted and filtered beyond belief, more sighed than shouted, random vocal drones rather than screams, almost to emulate the white noise itself, implementing an approach that will hardly be repeated once more emphasis is placed on lyrics, messages, contents; noise here is at the center of everything. Power-Electronics is born. 

Several artists will more than adequately move in this latter context, just think of the late Atrax Morgue, who prefers the lyrical aspect to the electronic one, the Genocide Organ, or those who in the '90s will give birth to what is known as death-industrial (the Grey Wolves above all), but even today it is difficult to identify heirs that reach the sonic terrorism, as well as the poetics, that were the works labeled Whitehouse. William and company (the formation, except for the latter, will change several times) excel in the early days: albums like "Buchenwald" (by far their most extreme), the collaboration with Nurse With Wound ("The 150 Murderous Passions") or the more defined, conceptual, and less minimal "Great White Death", "Dedicated to Peter Kurten Sadist and Mass Slayer" remain to this day towering peaks of a very fertile period, and probably never too celebrated, for electronic experimentation, a period that leads us directly to the more dada areas of industrial music, areas in the wake of which the various Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Cabaret Voltaire appear to us as a noisier version of the Beatles.

"Erector" is a devastating album, immediate yet challenging, but above all, it is incredible to think how such relentless sonic genocide can be derived from such a 'minimal' source, generating in any case much more annoying noise than any form of chaos understood as such, or rather than the various industrial prophets (the relentless beaters à-la Test Dept specifically), reducing the very concept of chaos to pure abstraction. From the sick raga "Avisodomy" to the so absurdly harmonic dissonances of "Socratisation Day", passing through the vibrations of the title track and the free vocalisms of "Shitfun", there is no respite, a scarce half-hour that will challenge not so much your ears, but rather the tweeters of the system where it's allowed to play, frequencies beyond any limit that will trace the path for a handful of noisemakers dedicated to creating noise without making noise.

If it really took courage to bring to completion the monumental "Buchenwald" (tangible proof of what Bennett meant by "the most extreme music ever made"), it is a different story for "Erector", which sometimes takes on mantra-like and velvety tones, anticipating a bit the concepts of certain shoegaze. But do not expect rarefied guitars and dreamy psychedelism.

Only destruction.