The Do-Re-Mi of noise: Merzbow's 'OM Electrique'.

As Fräulein Maria may have said to the von Trapp family kids, had she wanted to introduce them to Merzbow instead of to music more generally, “Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start: when you read you begin with ABC, when you listen to Merzbow you begin with OM Electrique”.

Not that OM Electrique is by any means the best or even the easiest piece of Merzbow to listen to, but it is the first thing Merzbow recorded, back in 1979, and you can always learn a lot from the beginnings of anything.

OM Electrique is Merzbow stripped bare: an austere, minimalist piece of music that nevertheless tells us a lot about his art and his greatness. It consists mostly of a long droning electronic bass note: vaguely, disturbingly, pulsating. After a while it is joined with short, urgent, but feeble spurts of electrical, metallic sound. These tap and beat away throughout – at first sporadically, and then more insistently, always seeking to find a rhythm and a life but never quite mustering enough energy of their own to rise above the dead, dry drone. At best, they are dragged along by it but, really, the rhythm is never entirely settled – beats are missed here and there, and its pace never stays in the one place. And it seems somehow smothered by the relentless drive of the drone.

About a third of the way into Part One, the bass drone is suddenly interrupted by a high, piercing siren, as if the music is trying to awaken you from itself. It shrieks at you, not enough to deafen you, but enough to make you uncomfortable. It seems to be trying to ward off the menace of the drone, or at least to warn you to steer clear of it – but its attempt is half-hearted, as if it has done this a million times before and always, as now, after only a few minutes, the drone returns, reasserts itself as master, and the metallic beat that takes you nowhere strikes up again.

The sounds build in momentum and yet, at the same time, remain static. It’s an incredibly disorienting feeling that is somehow brilliantly intensified when Part One fades out only to give way to the fuller onslaught of the same sounds, the same drone, the same dead dance of electronic beats, in Part Two.

The whole thing is a marvellous study in minimalist noise. There is no more than a handful of sounds in the almost 40 minutes of OM Electrique. But listen to the way Merzbow mixes and blends those sounds, changes their rhythms and their pulse, gets them to converse with one another, build on one another and then collapse again. The incessant drone that threads through everything, even when it’s not there: it’s all a magnificent demonstration of what noise can do, of what noise can be.

Merzbow gives the noise a kind of austere, severe life – a life with the blood drained out of it, an electric, robotic life the seems to be going everywhere and nowhere at once. It is like a meditation that has been feeding you disturbed subliminal messages throughout. It leaves you feeling strangely unsettled when it’s over, as if you have spent those 40 minutes hovering, teetering on the edge of stillness and motion.

Accepting the harsh austerity of OM Electrique is central to appreciating it as music. And, ultimately, this is central to understanding noise as music more generally too. Western music has trained us to listen for quick grabs of themes – melodies, and phrases of melodies, that can be captured and held and sung. But noise is much more about being immersed in the sound itself – like learning to admire a colour because of its colour, not because of the things it colours.

OM Electrique, if it was a piece of pictorial art, would be a mostly barren canvas of blacks and greys, with little speckles of cold, smudged silver throughout and, here and there, cracks of savage white. And, when you look at it, you would see a richness, an unsettling richness, in its stark, monochrome world. And blacks and greys and silvers and whites would never be quite the same again.

OM Electrique shows Merzbow’s genius in taking a word and turning it into a paragraph; his genius in shaping and moulding and crafting noise from its rawest elements into a picture: not one that tells you a story, but rather one that captures you, grabs you, in its own infinitely brief, infinitely long, moment.

The shattering star of the night - Magdalena Solis and 'Hesperia'.

The final part of the trilogy of my great musical discoveries from the last couple of weeks, which began with The Gruntled and then was followed by the Paul Kidney Experience, doesn't come at all from my local musical underground, but from Belgium, in the form of an amazing and daring musical project called Magdalena Solis, who last year shared a Belgian jam with some members of The Gruntled and so, one thing led to another, and now their music, too, is being celebrated on this blog. This, too, is music built through the sheer energy force of musicians who connect and improvise and create, music made from the dregs and dross of organic chaos.

On their new album, Hesperia, Magdalena Solis create a wonderful world of pagan grandeur through music that feels rooted in the spirituality of everyone and no one. Its droning, often pentatonic, tonality at times sounds like an echo from the Far East, like in the album's opening 'Wake up and start to dream'. Hesperia's sounds come to you on a thick, unrelenting, unforgiving wave of electronic sound - the sounds of dense guitars, a spectral harpsichord, an apocalyptic organ, electricity stirring and groaning underneath the Earth - the notes sliding and dancing around each other in a hypnotic heathen ritual. It is mysterious, seductive - something to be feared in the way gods expect to be feared.

The music of Hesperia has an incredible sense of place - places that are darkly spiritual, places where Magdalena Solis plunge into black, gloomy chasms and then build monoliths of music, casting huge grim shadows on you and in you, as if you are standing alone and alarmed at the end of the world.

This is music that towers over you. It leaves you feeling small and frightened and, by 'Lunar Sunrise', at the album's haunted end, where a chilling, child-like tune is hammered out on percussion borrowed from another world, like an alien nursery-rhyme, you find yourself left hanging and helpless in a space that is huge and empty and where the only light is cold and grey, a dying sun reflected by a dying moon.

Hesperia is released on the Dying for Bad Music label and you can check out the album on the label's website, or have a sneak preview of the album's penultimate Prophetic Dreams. This is not music to calm or reassure you - but rather to remind you who you really are.

The spectral disgruntled night of the Paul Kidney Experience

After discovering the sensationally original sounds of The Gruntled just a couple of weeks ago, it only took a hop, step and a jump from there to find myself immersed in the vastly different, but somehow strangely kindred, sound world of the Paul Kidney Experience. PKE's centrepiece is, of course Paul Kidney, The Gruntled's sometime vocalist. Both projects share the guitar of Richard Walsh and both use the incredible improvisation skills of all their members to build their own unique universes of sound, were music and noise mingle, where colours clash and blend, where light and dark caress each other and then beat each other to death.

But the music of PKE is very much its own thing, light years away from The Gruntled, despite their shared ingenuity, despite the bonds that tie them across the universes. In PKE, we find ourselves dragged into a freaky, creepy world, a world where you are scared not just by the things that go bump in the night, but also by the things that don't. It is music that can be very quiet or very loud. But it is never music that goes unnoticed, nor fails to let you know that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it is walking on your grave.

The music is built out of distorted guitars, the freaked-out violin of Nell Day, the insane, guttural, grunting vocals of Paul Kidney, a screeching sax, the unsettlingly soft tinkling of a piano, out of sounds and noise: music that swells and recedes, never really relaxing, just moving its threats and menace around you, sometimes staring you in the face, sometimes lurking around a corner, breathing just loud enough for you to know it's still there.

Its quiet, haunted noises might build and surge, until they become a crazed, manic death march, stomping onwards and downwards in the night into an orgy of ghouls, as they do in 'Dustberries', from the 2010 album Radio Transmissions. Or there might be the irritated, unsettled slumber with which 'Tardigrades', from the same album, opens, as if it was the post-coital slumber following the Dustberry decadence. But it, too, builds into its own frenzy, almost like an Arabian bacchanal with its drones and middle eastern tonality, yet still spooked by the growls and grumbles of an alien night.

It is the daring use of sound in this music - pushing instruments and voice beyond their normal limits, distorting them beyond their normal comfort zones - that helps create its freakish other-worldness. But it is its improvised, unbridled soul, dark, chaotic, and yet somehow controlled too - the way it grows out of itself rather than out of a page or a program - that's what makes this music so authentic, so believable.

And that's what makes you not want to be left alone with it, late at night, when the lights are out.

Necks and Swans float into the murk and mud of Melbourne

Mahler's Eighth Symphony demonstrated, arguably more than anything else in the history of music, that white comes in many shades. It's a massive, prolonged explosion of blinding light and yet, even when you're blinded by it, you can't help but notice its shifting hues, the ways that shadows, as much as dazzle, go to make up the glare. It's a work that can at first seem pretty overwhelming, too bombastic, just too much noise. But when you get to know it, when you delve into its density, you can see that its blaze is really a million billion different specks of white.

And what Mahler did a hundred years ago in Austria for white, the Sydney based Necks and the New York based Swans did last night in Melbourne for black.

The Necks are a drums, bass and piano trio - but the drums are decked with bells and bits of metal, and the bass is a cello/double bass hybrid, and the piano is hit by fists as well as fingers, and nothing these musicians do conforms to music's usual rules and genres. Their music is always organic - improvised from the tiniest thimble-full of notes and ideas, and growing, always growing, into things bigger than any sum or product of their parts.

But if you can imagine a dark lake where ash and smoke mingle, and where bits of molten rock, black and red, bubble and gurgle, where imperceptible simmers of quitely brushed drums and tinkling piano notes have the savage beat of a disgruntled bass plodding beneath them; if you can imagine stasis and motion fused together so that stillness moves to chaos without you noticing that either of them started or finished; if you can imagine music tremoring beneath you, weaving around you, seducing you and smothering you with its single 40 minute arc of darkness, at first hypnotically fine and sensual and then, before you realise what has happened, impenetrably dense: if you can imagine all of that, then you might have a sense of what The Necks created when they opened proceedings at Melbourne's Forum Theatre last night.

But if you can then imagine that hermetic rock, and you, being pounded to dust by a black fist of unspeakably horrible beauty, of unrelenting manic force, pounding and pounding with titanic moodiness, as if every god and demon of history is collectively pissed off: if you can imagine that, then you might also have a sense of what Swans did when it was their turn on The Forum Theatre stage.

Michael Gira - the creator and centrepiece of Swans - once noted that swans are majestic and beautiful creatures, but with very ugly temperaments; and when you listen to his band, with its droning, pounding, guitars; its pummelling drums, knocking at you from inside the doors of hell; with the mad smorgasbord of unimaginable instruments that Thor Harris plays and the worn drone of Gira's voice, then you see those fierce, splendid birds writ large.

It was a night of loud, very loud music - a night where everything was in a minor key, where chords and discords hammered and hammered into you, and smashed the concrete of your brain. But this was music that grows out of the bowels of humanity - music that has its roots in murk and mud. So, despite its dark grace, it can never pretend to tread lightly.

But that is not to say that this music is monochromatic. Like Mahler's white, Swans' black has many shades. But they're all dark and so, even when Thor swings his hammer into his tubular bells, the shaft of light that streams into the music hits you like an axe. It never comforts you. It never brings you relief.

It was a wonderful thing - as wonderful as it was unexpected - that Michael Gira reformed Swans after some 13 years without them. And to be able to see this phenomenal band on stage, to almost be able to feel the old, regurgitated, black acid of Michael Gira's spit land upon my skin when he sang, was something that I never imagined I would come to experience.

But maybe in a world where we want to be able to so quickly and easily decide who is right and wrong, who is good and bad, it is timely for us to be reminded that ugliness and beauty are never black and white.

The old new feeling of being undisgruntled

It has been the lack of time, rather than the lack of great music, that has kept me away from this blog so much over the past weeks - but sometimes, even when there's no time, music appears that is so interesting and compelling, so original and creative, that you just have to make the time to write about it.

It's probably not an altogether good thing that we live in times when we are generally much more familiar with the notion of being disgruntled than being gruntled but, believe it or not, "gruntled" really is a word, and when you listen to the music of Melbourne-based quintet-plus-occasional-extras, The Gruntled, you wonder why so little is known of this very peculiar concept of being satisfied, content and pleased.

I first heard The Gruntled a few weeks ago on an amazing radio program of new music called The Ear of the Behearer, on Melbourne's perennially sensation community radio station, 3PBS FM, and it was one of those "wow, what is that?" moments, where you begin to at first feel a little intrigued, a little curious about the empty, droning, minimalist sounds you are hearing, drawn into them, even before they have taken you anywhere, just like the Earth must have felt when it was little more than inert rock and gas.

But then it builds, imperceptibly steady, beats and sounds from worlds past and worlds yet to come, bagpipes, a shawm, a hurdy gurdy, mingling with guitar and drums, rising from nothing into everything. That's when you sense the real magnitude of this music.

The Gruntled's music builds in massive swells of sound - improvised and yet remarkably formed and structured in a way that only happens when musicians are intimately connected with one another, taking their cues, it seems, as much from each other's souls as from each other's instruments. Its unique combination of new and traditional instruments; its weaving together of age-old drones and futuristic noise; its iron-clad grip, with one hand on the innermost soul of your innermost gut, the other on some remote, godforsaken nothingness; makes this music something that seems to span all the conventional notions of time and space.

The Gruntled's music is still very much on the fringes. The only way I could get my hand on more was by contacting the band directly and buying some of their absurdly cheap CDRs. Perhaps it's inevitable that music like this stays on the fringes because, after all, that's exactly the territory it explores so deeply, so thoroughly. But if being on the fringes means that it's not heard, then that can never be a good thing - because somehow, as you will see when you listen to the music of The Gruntled, the fringes is really where ultimately we all belong.

And ultimately that's a good thing; a satisfying, contenting, pleasing thing. A gruntled thing.

Noise plugged and unplugged - Metal Machine Music

No one was ready for Metal Machine Music when Lou Reed released it in 1975 and, within three weeks, it was withdrawn from sale and had reportedly become the most returned album in recorded history. This from the artist who had already won over much of the world's musical underbelly, and even a good deal of its mainstream, with his work with The Velvet Underground as well as as a solo artist with albums like his 1972 hit Transformer. But you only have to listen a little more closely to the sometimes deceptive ease of much of his music of those years, with their unsettled tonalities, their shifting beats and rythms, to know that here was a rebellious, a restless, artist: the sort who would just have to keep branching into new territory, even if it meant taking himself to places where the record-buying public feared to tread.

And it was in the deepest, most inaccessible bit of that territory where Lou Reed rested one electric guitar against one amplifier, and another against another, and let the feedback loops mingle and transform one another, and scuplted them into a massive 64 minute monolith of electric rock called Metal Machine Music.

There has been a lot of myth about Metal Machine Music - some of it perpetuated by Lou Reed himself: that the music was never meant to be taken seriously, that Reed produced it only in defiance of his recording contract, that the complex list of specifications on the album's liner notes actually mean something.

There is, nonetheless, an undeniable sense of defiance in this music - music which even today, even after Merzbow and John Cage, sounds staggering in the sheer intensity of its distortion, its noise, its screeching, droning, wailing electronics, where melodies are buried deep in the mass of discord, where rhythms are beaten and smudged in a tsunami of vibration.

At first, it is hard to make any sense of it. But turn the volume up a notch or ten, allow the music to envelop you, and you will find yourself in its grip. It is, more than anything, physical music - uncompromising, unrelenting in its assault on you, built not in the four beats of a bar but in shapes bigger than Uluru. It is music that makes sense of Lou Reed's unabashedly arrogant claim on the liner notes: "My week beats your year".

If Metal Machine Music was a daring thing to do with some guitars and amplifiers in 1975, it was every bit as daring a thing to do with a violin, viola, cello, double bass, accordian, trumpet, sax and tuba - supported by prepared piano and percussion - in 2002. But that's exactly what the avant-garde German ensemble 'zeitkratzer' (time scraper) did: they played Metal Machine Music.

Creating an acoustic version of something as electronic as this makes the Kronos Quartet cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze' seem positively lame. It's a stunning achievement and, thankfully, one that was recorded live both for CD and for DVD so you can see, as well as hear, the ferocious vigour with which these artists attack the music - almost, it seems, about to saw their strings to shreds, or blast the reeds out of their saxophones.

zeitkratzer's version of Metal Machine Music is not, despite what is sometimes reported, a note-for-note transcription although, for the most part, it sounds very much like it. There are the droning open fifths, the clashing tonalities of oddly tuned strings, replicating Lou Reed's own idiosyncratic guitar tunings; there's the pulsating rhythms of reverberating electricity, all created through acoustic instruments that could have been used half an hour ago for Mozart or Haydn.

But zeitkratzer explain that they played, rather than transcribed, Lou Reed's music. Here, as there, is the sense of improvisation: of music built out of the same bare bones, and around the same metal framework, but left to germinate, to grow its own skin, in just the same way that Lou Reed did almost thirty years earlier. The result is a near identical twin, but one which, even though it has come from the same egg, has had its own history and developed its own personality.

zeitkratzer at first intended their version to follow the same four parts as Lou Reed's original - but it was Reed himself who intervened here and insisted that four parts would be too much, and to reduce it to three. And so, about two thirds of the way into Part 3, zeitkratzer jump into Part 4, just before Reed himself strolls casually onto the stage, picks up his guitar and plays a phenomenal solo cadenza, with new feedback, new loops of sound until, at last, the ensemble crashes in again, playing over and over again the final locked groove with which the original vinyl version of Metal Machine Music would, if you let it and if your player could hold the distance, take you into eternity.

The fact that Metal Machine Music can be played on violins and tubas does not make it more "musical", but it does show us that the lines we sometimes draw between different syles of music, and between music and noise, are not quite as clear, nor as meaningful, as we sometimes make them out to be.

Plugged or unplugged, Metal Machine Music is a staggering piece of amplified intensity - rock at its most pure, its most dense, monolithic, the black-white noise of a million different colours merging and exploding, somewhere at the beginning of time.

When you find yourself in times of trouble - Pissed Jeans

Everyone has their own way of dealing with stress and hardship. You can drink, you can pray, you can sit quietly and meditate. Or you can listen to music like Pissed Jeans and their wild, no holds barred 2009 album, King of Jeans - which, to slightly plagiarise Simon from Melbourne's Polyester Records, is music that just doesn't give a fuck.

The music here is rooted very much in the grimy mud of hardcore punk, with its screeching aggressive vocals, its frenetic guitars and drums, its barbed wire glazed wall of sound. King of Jeans is music that lives and snarls in the not-nice suburbs, where the struggles are not about the existential angst of the disaffected middle classes, but the daily grind of living, where everything is drudgery, where nothing means anything, and where the only thing you can do with life that makes any sense is tell it to get fucked. It's music that is able to be ugly without for one moment craving beauty.

Nowhere is the grind more savage, more hateful and hostile, than in 'Spent', a song that drags itself along to dirge-like, twisted, dissonant guitars, through a day of frustrated nothingness - sleeping, but waking up tired; drinking cold water that doesn't satisfy; earning extra money but having nothing to spend it on; getting the car fixed, but now it just makes a different noise that it's not meant to make; and everything is in "a different shade of grey".

It might sound like pretty bleak stuff and, a one level, it is. But good music always manages to give a different hue to things and, here, Pissed Jeans, by the sheer force and ferocity of their grunge, transform those shades of grey from drabness to defiance. It is music that might indeed be revolted, repulsed, by life, sickened by it, but, in its sickness, rather than curling up in the corner feeling sorry for itself, it throws up all over you instead.

The songs on King of Jeans are sometimes so fast that you feel they are hammering you in the gut, sometimes so slow that you feel they are holding your intestines in their fist, twisting them. But when you listen to it, you don't want to hide for shelter - you want to be like it. You, too want to be able to say, as in the album's opener, 'False Jesii Part 2', "I could tell a joke and make the whole room laugh, but I don't bother/I could show up with the coldest six-pack, but I don't bother/No to everything".

You, like Pissed Jeans, want to be able to just not give a fuck.