We Spoke To 'Noise Artist' Romain Perrot

There is a house in Montpellier, south of France, where a constant hissing noise drills through the silence; it sounds like putting your head out of the window on the motorway and driving your car at 150 mph. Romain Perrot is the eccentric, 40-year-old French noise fetishist who lives in this house, with his wife and two kids. He laughs, “Sometimes my wife will say, ‘Oh, you stop your racket now!' As for my niece, she thinks it’s just utter…”

Moving swiftly on, an analogue distortion pedal and a white noise generator are amongst the electrics in Perrot's house, always plugged in and always making noise… something you CANNOT escape from. He explains; “noise is silence to me”, but a flip of a switch and the full carnage restarts. Though harsh noise experimentation is one of the most controversial and misunderstood areas of music, Romain Perrot is one of its most fervent advocates. But for his third project, RORO PERROT, and last opus, Tu Peles Des Paupieres (Your Eyelids Are Peeling), he dug himself even further below the genre, where music should not exist. Basically, an out of tune guitar and the singing skills of an injured Neanderthal.

Perrot himself has spent no less than the last 30 years in Paris contributing to this improvised noise music scene; via Radio Aligre FM, a pretty crazy fanzine and record store “La boutique Bimbo Tower”, as well as “L’oeuil du silence” an independent theatre company and, finally, “Les Instants Chavires”, a laboratory dedicated to experimental and noise music.

“Until 2006 I used to play a lot of free guitar noise in solo and in bands. Then, under the name VOMIR, I started doing this kind of static, monolithic noise for a genre called Harsh Wall Noise: instead of having a calm and appeasing drone, I had created some kind of brutal white noise. I'm not a musician, I have no formation and I don’t know how to play an instrument; I even refuse to learn the basics.”

Of this latest project, he describes the first recordings of RORO PERROT, in the French countryside of Lozere, as absolute bliss, because there was “no artifice; I just love the sound an acoustic guitar produces, the fact that you can pluck the strings; and express yourself. I've never learnt how to play and never will. In fact, I've reached such a level of nullity, such nonsense, that it becomes easier for me to assume its crudeness and brutality.”

Altogether, there is something quite fun about a middle-aged Frenchman going through live acoustic regression. Perrot cites influences ranging from the dizzyingly inaccessible, minimalist musician and avant-garde composer, La Monte Young, to getting knee-deep in the Seattle grunge scene of 1991, Sonic Youth playing a major role in his work as well as Swans and Glenn Branca. Essentially though, historical references aside, a bit of badly tuned guitar and bawling is Perrot's therapy.

"Have you gone too far?" I finally ask him.

…No answer.

OK, what do you think of artists like Lady Gaga and Nicky Minaj?

"The meat-dress has been at Beaubourg, Paris, since 1987. But I don’t know the other one."

Romain Perrot. Merci.