Nicolas Collins, Devil's Music (side A)

The back cover notes on 1985's Devil's Music explicitly describe the process used creating it.  "All the material is taken from FM and AM transmissions occurring at the time of the performance."  At one level, listening to the album can be easily tied to this process.  Some sounds reflect their origins, especially when they play for a recognizable duration.  In other ways, the process is irrelevant to the work here.  Long sections of the album, especially side A, are just too jarring and percussive and explosive to give any hint of their origin.  Collins clearly creates a new compositional vocabulary here, one that alternates appropriation, vaguely in the vein of John Oswald, with a more pure noise aesthetic as jarring as that of Merzbow.  The juxtaposition places Devil's Music outside of either tradition, both embracing and rejecting its historical context.  The simple, iconic cover image hints a bit at both elements — the street-sign-like image has some tie to the language of appropriation, while the jarring image inside grapples with the music's ugly harshness.