Vomir

[FR]

Vomir is the harsh noise wall (HNW) project of French artist Romain Perrot. Perrot embraces noise as a non-violent form of anarchy and as an opportunity for both complete isolation and complete immersion. He spent thirty years in Paris before settling in Montpelier. 

Much of his time in the French capital was devoted to the improvised noise music scene, which revolved in part around the recently-closed record store Bimbo Tower (owned by musician and DJ Franq de Quengo, who also still runs the weekly radio show Songs of Praise), and to developing an anarchist philosophy and methodology—he has cited the bookshop Un Regard moderne and authors Jean-Luc Hennig, Pascal Doury, and Bruno Richard as seminal counter-cultural influences. As a musician, he began to experiment with “free guitar noise” around 1996 both solo and in bands, but, unsatisfied with his results, he started to use electronic noise generators instead. His musical career might be understood as a continuous search for noise defined by unwavering stasis rather than by contour and variation. With Vomir, which started in 2006, he began to access more confrontational, obstinate sonic statements via experimentation with volume, texture, and form. Ever since, VOMIR has been characterized by its static slabs of white noise. In Perrot’s words, "a noise wall exists when the static noise is full, continuous and consistent from start to finish without alteration or fluctuations...the harsh noise wall is militantly pure in its non-representation...without any development, any ideas, any dynamics, any change. No entertainment and no remorse." Via contact with Harsh Noise Wall pioneers The Rita, he released his first HNW release and split-CDR with Paranoid Time, Adoration Of The Faceless Woman, in 2006.

Perrot’s own Noise Wall manifesto, posted on the website of his record label, Decimation Sociale, is a testament to the political earnestness behind the Vomir project: "The individual no longer has any alternative but to completely reject contemporary life as promoted and preached. The only free behaviour that remains resides in noise, withdrawal and a refusal to capitulate to manipulation, socialisation and entertainment." Despite the solemnity of Perrot’s nihilism, his work is equally marked by absurdism. He has become known for performing with a plastic bag over his head — a gesture intended to facilitate immersion into sound that has come to take on a slapstick, comedic quality. His other projects are also testaments to his eccentrism: the newest, FALOT, "mixes dissonant guitar, static noise, distorted vocals and a drum machine"; Romprai Etron is "vomit-core: harsh noise and bawling, basically"; Roro Perrot is "shit folk" (The Quietus).

In the words of his latest album title, "here goes nothing."

Agitation

Berghain, Tue 31.01.2017, 22:00

Thomas Ankersmit, Gum Takes Tooth, Vomir, Pharmakon